Seven weeks and my overriding feeling is not one of achievement but one of loss. Why is that?My head says well done but my heart says at what a cost. Our minds can play funny games with us and mine is currently playing the ,”Your drinking wasn’t that bad Jim, lighten up and enjoy yourself,” game. Very seductive. Very appealing. Very half true!
In some ways this “thing”, this going sober, would be much easier if my drinking had been truly out of control and I was waking up trembling in the morning craving my first litre of super strength lager. But it was never like that. The drinking wasn’t ruining my life but it was nibbling at the edges and being a person of some excesses, when I drank, I drank with gusto. I nowfind myself remembering the many ocassions I did drink moderately (usually because it would have looked unseemly to do otherwise) but conveniently repressing days when I’d inexplicably reach for yet another drink, spending a day alone getting into a drunken stupor and then feeling shit about myself for around 3 days. I conveniently forget the hangovers that stopped me doing my Saturday morning runs or led me to spend a day eating fatty foods to soak up the booze. Well I’ve just reminded myself . Yes, of course there were good, sensible, rational reasons for stopping. Health, sleep, energy, but boy can good intentions be boring.
This is the thing, despite my ego and superego (apologies to Freud) acting like some sensible parents, my instinctual, childish ID says, “Fuck off you boring killjoys, being human is about experience, we are all going to die anyway, let’s at least have some good times before the inevitable annialation!” Naughty ID! A bit of a drama queen but I get his point. I do miss much about drinking. I know the facts. I know the science but stopping drinking is more than feeding yourself the sobriety propaganda. That gives you some reason and motivation. It helps. But I have to recognise a
nd grieve for what I have lost as crazy as that may sound. Drink gave me some release. It was a drug I chose to take because I liked its effects. It also gave me companionship and an identity. I was bloody good at drinking so it gave me a strange kind of warped kudos and standing. Of course there were negatives and side effects but those were understood to be part of the deal. You pays yer price.
So what am I saying? God knows. I’m suggesting I suppose that like many things, going sober is not as black and white (for me and I can obviously only talk about me with any certainty) as I thought it would be. It’s clearly a process. There are real pluses and I’m grateful for those otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this. But I have to acknowledge the downsides and probably the biggest of these is the loss of identity, ritual, and shared activity that drinking gave me.
An example of this is when I eventually go to Spain to visit relatives. I need to visit but I put if off. Why? Because I know that something will be missing. They live in Valencia and a typical day will involve late breakfast, a trip to the centre, beers, chat, meeting friends and tapas. Not much beer or wine but steady, small amounts. A light, sweet feeling of mild intoxication and then a restaurant where good food matched with fine wines is the order of the day. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, or I say to myself, spending a day like that with a non alcoholic beer or soft drink is not going to be the same. That experience is now dead to me, it’s something that happened in another life. It was good and it has gone.
Seven weeks. I have done well and I have no intention of giving up my giving up, but I must also grieve and reorganise my identity. I need to find new ways of getting the comfort and buzz, that not just alcohol, but it’s associated rituals and hinterland gave me. Maybe it’s the grieving rather than a physical dependency that makes many return to booze. Maybe knowing that that is what is going on and giving myself time will help. There was much that was good about my drinking days. Acknowledge the loss, feel the loss, grieve for it and move on. Better days await.
Apologies if this is a depressing post but these reflections have been swirling around and it helps to write them down.
Jim x
Life Beyond Booze 