cjfloodauthor-blog

[cjfloodauthor-blog]

We Need to Talk About Alcoholism

Is it time to stop gaslighting yourself and stage your own intervention?

I’m trying to stop drinking, but alcohol won’t let me.

It recommends itself using my inner voice, the advice of my friends and family, billboards, the radio, books, TV.

One drink won’t hurt!

You can just have a couple.

YOLO! ; )

It doesn’t care how desperately I want to change my life or be able to trust myself or fill my time with other things.

Alcohol is like a charismatic bad boyfriend with a PhD in Neuro-Linguistic Programming who has taken over my mind, fooled my friends and family, and refuses to let me go.

You’ll never meet anyone who makes you feel the way I do.

I’d just turned thirty and my drinking had been out of control since I could remember, but recently I’d started to care. It used to be exciting, social, lost weekends and wild weekday nights; adventures and dancing and climbing scaffolding to look at the city stars. Now it was the same every time. Quiet nights in. Just me and a bottle of wine, sometimes a boyfriend, always the Internet.

I loved it, but I wasn’t in love. We wanted different things, but I didn’t know how to live sober.

“You don’t still stay up all night drinking, do you?” a friend asked, when I explained that I wouldn’t be able to make it out for dinner — although we hadn’t seen each other since we graduated, and she’d just travelled five hours to visit me — because I was still too hungover to be vertical.

“No!” I lied, instinctively. “It just got out of hand last night.”

She looked perplexed and I wished she’d leave. Because I loved her, but what do you do with non-drinkers? I tried my best not to know any, but this one slipped under the radar. Drinkers are wonderful because they don’t need entertaining. No plan required. You lead them to the pub and voila!

Her words echoed in my head long after she’d gone.

“You don’t still stay up all night drinking, do you?”

Was I not supposed to stay up drinking, then? Was it somehow ungainly and shameful and wrong?

The words hit a target I wasn’t aware resided within me. That sad, confused look! That was the reason I didn’t spend time with non-drinkers. Too judgey. So what if I was thirty and living the same life as when as I was twenty. I was a writer. (If only there were a key that adds a fanfare along with the italics.) So what if I lived in a shared house, with no food in the cupboards, still ‘borrowing’ money off Mum and Dad. That’s what writers did!

“But you’re a fun drunk!” a different friend told me, a year or so later, as I shared my longing for an alternate life in which I drank green juice and practiced yoga and went to the theatre; a life entirely incompatible with my current relationships, habits and behaviours.

I was thirty-two now, and there had been so many failed attempts at weeks or months of sobriety that even I couldn’t take myself seriously.

It was Friday night and this friend had agreed to accompany me to the cinema, because I was trying to avoid the pub, which meant trying to gain control of my life — though she didn’t know that, of course — and so, naturally, after the film, she suggested we go to see everyone, which meant pints in the pub, since that was where everyone was on a Friday night. lnstantly, I forgot my agreement.

We went to join the gang, just for one, or okay, if more than one, we had to stop drinking at midnight. We couldn’t stick to our drinking rules for the duration of making them, but we didn’t notice that. We made a pact to leave the bar at midnight, no matter what.

“Anyway, you don’t need to worry,” she said, conspiratorially en route to the Volunteer Tavern. “Because I’ve solved the problem of getting too drunk.”

“Really? How?”

“The trick is to drink halves.”

I nodded encouragingly, the soft part of my throat twerking at the mention of beer, and we walked from the cold, lamplit street into the warm, yeasty pub to wait for the bar man’s eye contact.

Youngish people sat at wooden tables, playing board games and laughing, checking their phones and swigging frothy pints.

“Two halves of Amstel, please,” I said, and the barman picked up two tiny thimbles of glass, leftover from what I could only assume was some kind of teddy bear’s picnic.

“Sorry, I mean a pint and a half!” I panic-shouted before I could stop myself.

The cold amber liquid ran up the glass, and I swallowed, reflexively, took a swig as soon as the barman handed the drinks to me.

“Drinking halves is daft,” I told my friend as we made our way to where our group sat, drinking pints and smoking in the beer garden. “You’ve drunk the whole thing by the time you get to your table and have to go straight back to the bar. A pint saves you a trip. And sometimes five pee too!”

She shrugged, not really listening, and I felt my last dregs of self-respect drain out the bottoms of my filthy Converse. Who was I saying this stuff for? Even I didn’t listen to me.

The lager was cold and fizzy and as it touched my tongue, I remembered that I didn’t like the taste. Strange since I’d been compelled, only seconds earlier, to buy a larger serving.

Still, I needn’t worry about that now. I needn’t worry about anything: I was drinking and all was well. I forgot my silly dream of sobriety, forgot my broader feelings of dissatisfaction, and my friend and I talked and laughed and shed secrets in our usual breathless, hurtling way. And then it was midnight and she finished her final half and hugged me goodbye — she had writing to do in the morning; a deal’s a deal! — put on her coat and headed home. I watched her walk out, then headed back to the bar to order another.

“Last night was wonderful,” she text the next morning. “Seeing you was so nourishing.”

It is beginning to dawn on me that my current network can’t provide the support I need to give up alcohol. They can’t solve this problem that lies within me because they don’t understand it.

I read books about abstinence (Blackout, Drinking: A Love Story, Lit) and pore over posts on websites (Hip Sobriety, Soberistas) about the same, and I feel so inspired, so excited and determined, until the next time, out of nowhere, a pint sounds like a good idea, and I decide to ‘just have one’ and wake with a hangover yet again. I make the same promise to myself: tonight I won’t drink, no matter what, and then I break it. Over and over and over.

Until I am so tired.

In my circles, alcohol is like water, life isn’t possible without it, and if that is wrong we didn’t want to be right. Popular culture agrees — drinking is fun! — as long as you drink responsibly, which is so easy and intuitive that only the party-pooping government offer any guidelines.

Booze solves your problems: loneliness, boredom, crap TV, aging, ugliness, death. It provides sex and adventure, increases beauty — not just yours, but everyone’s! — the world itself’s. It turns up the colours, adds a coat of hyper gloss to the matte finish of planet E.

Why would anyone give it up?

If I could only stop thinking it was a problem then the problem would vanish. Poof!

So why can’t I stop thinking it’s a problem?

Because I’m an alcoholic?

Three years sober, I’m still ambivalent.

The label is out-of-date, but since I started using it my life is strikingly on track.

Am I a ‘high-functioning alcoholic’? No. No one is. Too much of an oxymoron.

Three years sober, I regularly self-identify as an ‘alcoholic’ but when I do, it is acts as shorthand for this:

‘I have an infuriating brain-twist regarding alcohol which means I cannot remember its negative qualities at the same time as I have excellent, technicolour recall of its positive qualities; and because I hear your stories that describe the same twist, I would love your help in holding a realistic perspective on this substance which made my life painful and narrow, and yet which I often long for with a fervent and inexplicable thirst’.

Is the outdated label starting to make sense?

There is almost no evidence of how my drinking was destructive outside of my own psyche. Which is not the same as saying there is no evidence that my drinking was destructive.

My story has so little drama, and yet, weirdly, that’s why I’m compelled to share it. How many people keep drinking because they aren’t ‘bad enough’ to identify with the 12 steppers? How many keep drinking because their friends smile and tell them that they don’t have a problem?

Women, we need to stop gaslighting ourselves and learn from our experience.

There are so many tools and support networks who want to help: AA, Smart Recovery, Soberistas, Hip Sobriety, This Naked Mind, Recovery Elevator being just a few I’ve used along the way.

Most of the evidence of my drink problem came from the way my life changed after I quit. I wonder how your life would change if you did?

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