The Letter I Wish I'd Taken Seriously

A doctor warned me I drank too much. I laughed. Fourteen years later, I finally understand what that letter was trying to give me.

The Letter

In 2011 I got a letter from my doctor saying I’d been screened as drinking too much.

At the time, I thought it was funny.

I was 28, and living at my dad’s in Derby after splitting up with the insta-boyfriend I’d moved in with (far too quickly) after finally managing to leave the ‘love of my life’. I use quotation marks here because this great love of mine had been making me miserable for years. More on that, later.

28 and just beginning to seriously worry about the way my life wasn’t coming together, still hopeful I was going to turn it round.

A sense of doom was courting me. My local friends were all married with mortgages. Most of them had a couple of kids.

I was lonely, but I didn’t understand how to be friends with mothers. I was used to meeting in pubs, and they were rarely able to do that. So, I drank with whoever was available. Went on dates when I wanted friendship. Drank with single men I’d gone to school with.

I knew my biological clock was ticking, in theory - how could I not when people pointed it out so often? - but I didn’t feel it. Other people’s babies left me cold. They were beautiful and miraculous, sure, but the way life revolved around them, how you suddenly saw loads more of your parents… I didn’t want the lifestyle that came with it.

Mind you, I didn’t really want to be binge drinking in the village pub on random Tuesday nights, either, so I felt at an impasse.

I’d almost finished a novel - the first one that ‘had legs’ after abandoning dozens - and landed a literary agent, which allowed me, after a drink to believe I was on the precipice of greatness. A woman who had resisted the call of motherhood, the lure of home comforts in order to pursue her dreams. I just hadn’t quite reached them yet.

“We’re trailblazers,” I remember saying to a friend, around this time. “There’s not many of us still, this path is untrodden...”

Yes, it was just bad luck, I told myself, my loneliness. My doomed great love. It wasn’t my fault that the hilarious, talented man I’d been wild about had turned out to be a Jekyll and Hyde problem drinker unwilling to work on himself.

With hindsight, all the signs were there from the three-month mark. A few of my friends mentioned that he seemed a little… off. Christ, even one of his ex-girlfriends sidled up to me in a bar and warned me I should be careful with him. One of the women in his own friendship group refused to talk to him because he was a bully.

And yet, I loved him. And he loved me.

🖤 🖤 🖤

Looking back, this person’s actions made it clear he wasn’t interested in the conventional loving heterosexual partnerships our friends shared - staying out until the early hours without texting, flirting with other women while I sat beside him, steering clear of events where I could have done with his suppport - but he also said he loved me more than anything, that he wanted to be with me forever, so somehow, I let it slide.

Red flag after red flag… He started a fight with a good male friend of mine, tried to kiss my best friend, tried to kiss my good friend’s new girlfriend… the repeated humiliations were almost too much to bear, but somehow I continued to forgive him. To believe he was it. My great love.

His misdemeanors only happened when he was drinking, and so they didn’t really count, right?

And each time I reported his latest crime, he was deeply remorseful. Mortified. Ashamed. And I would take pity on him. Comfort him. Promise to help him become a better man. Ah, the exquisite agony of doomed love!

At a deep level I must have understood how fucked this was, that I couldn’t trust him the way I needed to in order to build a real and meaningful life, but I’d never been in love before. Not like this. Because when things were good, we laughed so hard people envied us, and he had taught me so much, about art and music and film and nature.

I still wasn’t used to men like him - educated, handsome, sophisticated (when sober) - paying me attention. And I was out of my depth. Drunk a lot of the time myself. Increasingly separate from my family. My mum had moved to Spain and my brother was away travelling. My dad was always at home, but he had his own routines, and we never talked about anything real.

My uni friends had all moved away and over time I’d joined this person’s friendship group. I’d come to love his family. He had become everything to me.

And so I kept forgiving him for his drunken mistakes - it really didn’t feel like a choice. He needed me and I needed him - and this, our ‘great love’ went on for five years.

🖤 🖤 🖤

I share all this as context. The background of my life, into which this letter arrived.

I finally managed to leave my ‘One True Love’ via the well-known and despicable method of ‘The Overlap’. Falling madly in love with the first cute man that made a play for me.

Inevitably, I was too fucked up after my torturous years with ‘The One’ to make it work with this wonderful person, and so my rebound insta-love/escape hatch fell apart, slowly and painfully. I have never been a quick learner. And I must acknowledge that I was a terrible girlfriend myself at this time. Selfish, self-centred, narcissistic. Critical, unhappy and unfulfilled.

And so after moving in temporarily with a beautiful life-saving friend (bless her, supporting me to the last as I rampaged around causing drama) I went home in a blaze of glory — i.e. a bewildered shame cloud — to lick my wounds at my dad’s.

And soon after, received the screening letter from the doctor.

It’s funny being almost alcoholic. There are so many signs that your drinking is a problem (like all the problems related to your drinking, and your, well, you know, drinking problem).

But somehow none of these signs get through. Or not consistently.

At the time I thought my alcohol consumption was more manageable, because I blacked out less, but in hindsight I can see that it was just more constant. It had become daily by then.

“The letter from the doctor didn’t warn me. Neither did my uncle’s alcoholism. Nor my dad’s love of beer.”

Now I see my disregarding of that letter as evidence of the power of denial and how normalised problem drinking is in our culture. And how convincing our own lies can be. And I wish things could have been different. That I could have seen it for what it was: an invitation to change.

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Life at Dad’s

[The rest of this essay gets more personal — about my dad, what I lost and gained in sobriety, and what that letter really meant. It’s for paid subscribers.]