Seven Lessons for Seven Years of Not Drinking
Reflecting on the most life-enhancing things I learned along the way
Seven years ago, today, I woke up sober and decided to try another AA meeting. I’d had yet another pointlessly drunken weekend - nothing hugely dramatic - just the same old boring-ass shite. Arguing with my boyfriend, drinking when I’d promised not to, letting myself down with my embarrassing and needy behaviour.
And like many times before, I decided to do something about it. Only this time, I actually did. I can’t remember what I did on the Monday, but on Tuesday, I went along to the women’s meeting in St Werbergh - the hippy district of Bristol, and I felt a huge wave of inspiration and positivity and relief.
I didn’t tell anyone from my real life what I was doing. I told my boyfriend I was going to visit a friend. And I sat in the circle of lovely, friendly women, and I listened to people share their stories of how booze had ruined their lives or made them ill or stolen their potential.
I’d been reading memoirs about women getting sober for a year or so, maybe longer, and I always loved the last act, when they found a community to help them begin to gain control of their lives.
If only I was a real alcoholic, I thought wistfully as I read those wonderful books. Then I could get sober too!
Sitting in that women’s AA meeting, I understood that this community was here for me, too. That if I couldn’t quit drinking, then I was welcome to stick around and use the tools. Unlike my first ever meeting, in which I was shocked to find myself crying, I found that I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt so excited that these people might be able to actually help me do this thing that I had been trying and failing to do for months.
I still didn’t believe I was an alcoholic, not a proper one. But I finally understood that there was another option, a different way to live, and this was how I accessed it.
When I scan my 2016 notebooks I am shocked by how unhappy and neurotic I was back then. There were so many parts of my life I was disappointed about, and I carried a lot of shame about myself and my choices. All of the different iterations of me felt cringe-worthy and I was entirely lacking self-compassion, let alone self-love.
It is easy to forget this as I move further from that version of myself.
Back then, my notebook was my primary confidant. I had begun therapy the winter before, though I struggled to make sense of it. And I talked with friends, of course, shared as much as I could, but I was used to keeping a lot back. I worried about people thinking me weak and pathetic, and I didn’t want to worry anyone or put them off. I was especially cagey about my relationship, which worried me endlessly. It was something I desperately wanted to work, and yet, something that at the same time, I was certain was doomed, irrevocably.
Drinking didn’t help me to untangle my unhappy feelings. But it did offer me a brief escape from them, and it soothed them, too. Naturally, as a result, I relied on it, often.
As I went along to AA all those years ago, I never really believed I was getting sober. I thought it was more of an experiment. Something I would try for a while, that I could write about. Along the way, I learned so much about my drinking and the nature of addiction and what I wanted for myself, that I found there was no going back to booze. At least, not for the seven years since then.
To celebrate this milestone, I’ve decided on the seven most important lessons from my years without alcohol.
1. How to set and uphold boundaries
In the months before (and into) my sobriety, I read a lot about how to set boundaries and maintain them, but the instructions didn’t make sense to me. I was so used to having my boundaries ignored and trampled on, that I had lost faith in my ability to have them. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that I believed or intuited from my experience that I wasn’t entitled to them. I was too weak to uphold them, thus, I didn’t deserve them.
Life is painful when you are operating from a belief like this. It meant I had limited autonomy, and felt beholden to anybody with a stronger personality than me. Which, to be honest, felt like everyone. It made me want to avoid people and it made me feel scared and out of control, like positive change just wasn’t possible.
I began to experiment with setting and uphold boundaries. For instance, telling my boyfriend that he could not drink alcohol in the house. That if he wanted to drink, he would need to find other people to do that with. And accepting the increase in conflict that went along with this. Sticking with my boundary, no matter how challenging that was.
2. How to tell the truth TO MYSELF
I have mostly been a very honest person. There have been relatively few truly deceitful moments in my life, beyond the normal lying to parents of a freedom-seeking teen, maybe. What I didn’t realise, until I began the process of living without alcohol, was how proficient I was at lying to myself.
In the first year of not drinking, I spent a lot of time learning about and trying to understand denial. In AA, they have a fun and enlightening acronym for this.
Don’t
Even
kNow
I
Am
Lying
(If only ‘know’ was spelt with an N it would be PERFECT. But, alas.)
I was a master at self-deception. One of my strategies for getting around having my boundaries trampled on all the time was to say I didn’t mind. Or to justify the trampler’s behaviour.
Another way was never to admit what I wanted in the first place. That way, it didn’t matter if I didn’t get it.
This strategy caused me a lot of pain. It was terrible for my self-esteem and it prevented me from building a life that I loved, because it prevented me from trying for (or sometimes even knowing about) the things I most wanted.
3. How to understand and use my own power
My pathway to sobriety was via AA, and so I undertook the twelve steps. (What can I say? Everyone was doing it!) This was a strange, painful and fascinating process, during which I took inventory of my life so far, with the support of a mentor (sponsor). What was working, and what was not?
Through this exercise, I became aware of certain patterns that were holding me back. My habit of choosing problem-drinking boyfriends, for example, was a biggy. And of not sticking up for myself or admitting how I really felt.
‘Giving up your power’, my sponsor called it, and as we talked over my life inventory, I began to get a better understanding of what my power was, and how I could use it. One of the basic but life-changing notions was that I chose my friends/partners. And I chose how I allowed them to treat me.
Considering this habit of ‘giving up my power’ to my life, and talking about its consequences helped me to begin to change this unhelpful habit. I worked towards owning my power instead, and my life began to improve exponentially.
4. Understanding what I control and what I don’t
Over the first year of not drinking, I had to work hard to understand what was in my jurisdiction and what was not. I could control the behaviour I accepted from other people (my heavy-drinking boyfriend, for example) and how I responded to it, but I could not control what he did. This was a game-changer.
After years of trying to get him to drink less and be more reliable, I focused on doing these things myself. And it changed everything.
5. The power and beauty of acceptance
In the first year of sobriety, the serenity prayer was like a mantra to me, and I used it to work out where I had control and where I didn’t.
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Gradually, it sank in that I could neither change nor accept my heavy-drinking boyfriend’s lifestyle. And so I had to find the courage to leave him.
As my heart recovered from the disappointment and regret and guilt of ending an important relationship, I recognised that I had never truly accepted this person in the first place. My love had been conditional, focusing only on the parts of him I admired, and I had wasted months of my life trying to force him to be a different sort of person. I promised that in future I wouldn’t fall into this pattern. That I would try to choose and love someone for who they actually were, the whole package, not just the shiniest most impressive bits.
And when love came along again (it wasn’t too long, I admit) I worked hard to live in reality. Not drinking really helps with this, I find. Another name I have for alcohol is denial juice. I committed to paying attention to who this new person really was and getting to know them before committing.
6. Feelings are a guidance system
One of my earliest and most disturbing discoveries in sobriety was how out of touch with myself and my own feelings I was. This had come up in therapy, and sobriety (plus continuing therapy) highlighted it further.
My sponsor talked about how I needed to learn to read my ‘internal barometer’, and I tried to understand what she was talking about. I was so riddled with anxiety, shame and regret most of the time that I couldn’t decipher anything else.
Unsurprisingly, alcohol doesn’t help with this. After the initial relief of those wonderful first glasses, it starts to numb our senses and cognition. Afterwards, it heightens anxiety. Naturally, a lifetime of heavy drinking had not gifted me a deep connection with myself.
It took a long time to make progress with this. I felt numb for a good while. Many of my sober peers were crying a lot in those early days, whereas I wasn’t. In therapy, my counselor pointed this out, and I felt faulty and confused. I felt depressed about the years I’d wasted, and like a total loser for having to quit this thing that everyone I knew loved, and that somehow nobody had even noticed I struggled with. But it was all cognitive, rather than bodily. Crying was still a foreign thing. And it took a while for my emotions to return or maybe for me to begin to decipher and articulate them.
Five years after I got sober I was diagnosed as autistic, which likely had played a part in my difficulty with interpreting and articulating my feelings. And also why I had felt a little behind my sober peers in terms of their recovery. Using tools from the autistic community really helped and I began to improve my emotional literacy.
I learned what my sponsor meant by my ‘internal barometer’. That my feelings were a kind of navigation system, telling me which way to go, and what actions to take next.
I was so used to a lifetime of suppressing my desires and hiding my motivations (denial) that I had lost, or maybe never really gained, the ability to use this system.
I printed out a feelings wheel and practiced noticing and trying to make sense of the sensations in my body. Of considering what was going through my mind and putting it all together in order to work out how I felt.
I felt like a weirdo at first, and like I’d never get the hang of untangling it all, but slowly I made progress. And I also better understood why I had found it so hard. Feelings are messy and complicated. They bleed into each other and overlap, and it can take a while to interpret what on earth is going on in there.
In fact, my dear friend Nathan Filer made a fascinating podcast about this, Why Do I Feel?, which I recommend, whether you struggle with this or not.
7. Sobriety didn’t solve all my problems
Okay, this one was disappointing. In the first months, as I gained clarity and perspective and faith, I was sure I was about to become Truly Exceptional. But there was a lot to untangle, and the more I picked at the knots, the more of them there seemed to be. Low self-esteem, shame, difficulties with communication. There were so many self-defeating habits and beliefs, and they refused to disappear just because I had stopped drinking.
I had to discover who I was and what I loved, and what I wanted from my relationships and life. Sometimes it was too much, and I had to go to bed for days at a time because I just felt overwhelmed with it all.
Plus, lots of the things that had led me to get sober - my habit of losing things, my inability to organise myself, my forgetfulness, my struggle to meet deadlines, my inability to be punctual, my flakiness, my changeable mood and rocky mental health, for example - these all continued long into my sobriety. They are still a work in progress today.
Over time, I learned I was neurodiverse. ADHD and autism were diagnosed. I’m pretty sure dyslexia and dyspraxia might be present too. This explained/explains my ongoing challenges with executive functioning, social anxiety and exhausting rumination.
But now I understand why certain things are difficult, my deficits no longer do the same damage to my self-esteem. And I’m beginning to actually get some help with some of them. Better late than never, right?
So there you have it. Seven of the most crucial things I learned during the transition from heavy drinking to sobriety. Wherever you are in your abstinence/moderation/self-discovery journey, I am rooting for you! Progress not perfection, babies.
Chelsey x
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Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a literary memoir about getting sober and then finding out she’s autistic - Beautiful Hangover: how a late autism diagnosis helped me make peace with a drunken past, and a new YA novel.
Thank you for writing this all down. This is a great resource. I’ll be thinking on this for a bit