What Adele’s Relationship with Booze Reveals About Our Drinking
Adele hit the news this week because she’s giving up alcohol. Is it strange that this is newsworthy? Perhaps. Does this say more about our obsession with celebrities or alcohol? I’m not sure.
Reading the story I was struck by:
a) how even millionaire hitmakers find 21st Century life hard enough that they drink too much to cope.
b) how normalized excessive drinking is in our culture that someone temporarily quitting counts as a story.
And c) how we all quit drinking for exactly the same reasons.
Hangxiety. The amount creeping up. Blue Mondays.
So why, then, does it still feel controversial to get sober? And why is it assumed Adele will return to booze after a break? Why is drinking the default in our culture when it makes us feel like shit?
The article is written in The Daily Mail, which is the most racist, misogynist, misanthropic, ableist, poor people hating ‘newspaper’ the UK has (and we have some stiff competition). And it takes the chummy kind of tone it loves to use whether secretly fat-shaming women or vilifying vulnerable refugees.
We are invited to relate to super-rich and talented Adele who sometimes drinks a touch too much (smiley face.) Because, in the UK at least, is there anything more normal than a little over-indulgence?
Like all of us who quit booze permanently, Adele cuts back on drinking because she wants to fulfill her potential. She’s tired of hangxiety. Sick of being hungover every Monday. Nervous about how she was hitting the bottle earlier and earlier.
The unquestioned assumption of the article is that Adele will begin drinking again. That she will return to the normal state of drinking too much. That nobody is worried.
It’s the same narrative we’re used to from the tabloids. That red wine is good for our health and heavy drinking is nothing to worry about. That the vast majority of boozehounds can cut back whenever they want to.
This binary notion of problem drinkers versus ‘healthy' drinkers is problematic because the fact is that drinking problems exist on a spectrum. Adele’s need to quit to thrive could easily be a warning sign of a serious issue.
Who’s to say she can stop any time she likes?
As a sober person, I hear the alarm louder than I’d like to. In my experience, most people who have to take a break from drinking aren’t healthy drinkers. They would be better off quitting because alcohol has a serious hold over them, only they don’t realize it.
Maybe they are managing their drinking, but for how long? Anyone quitting for health reasons has entered the realm of worrying about their consumption. They can not in good faith call their drinking healthy.
Those of us who admit we have a problem can find ourselves left to carry the burden of our culture’s habit of problem drinking by ourselves. Rather than being upheld as heroes, we might be seen as damaged or controlling for resisting the lure of alcohol. People resent or judge or suspect us for succeeding where so many fail.
Articles like this one reveal the scale of our drink problem. The way that people must opt-out of this habit, rather than opt-in. To drink is to live.
In spite of the problems booze is causing for Adele, of course, she will drink again. As soon as she is able. Because, duh.
I don’t miss the days of swearing wine only to start again a few days later. It’s a relief to have resolved my issue with alcohol. Five and a half years sober I feel lucky that I got the chance to reconsider my lifestyle.
But I still struggle to get my head straight about the issue of alcohol.
Sometimes it seems to me that those of us who learn to live without the false embrace of booze are the lucky ones. Other times I think I must be the one missing out since so many of my peers are still in its thrall. In spite of numerous negative consequences.
Do I see alcohol issues everywhere because of my experience? Or is the nation horribly indulgent of problem drinking? Are the majority of people confused about the nature of addiction? Or have I been misled by my hard-line abstinent buddies?
Will Adele one day confess the true scale of her problem? Will she admit defeat and commit to that better version of herself and become sober? Or will she continue heavy drinking throughout her whole life, quitting only when she scares herself or has a challenge ahead?
I don’t have the answers, but one thing I know for sure. It isn’t only we who admit we have a problem with drinking that alcohol hurts.
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Chelsey Flood is the author of Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE University. She writes about freedom, addiction, nature and love at Beautiful Hangover, autism and self-compassion at Polite Robot, and is also working on a non-fiction book about getting sober, and a new YA novel.