These are the lessons I've personally learned since becoming a mindful drinker ( side note: it is so, so important to say that abstaining for good might be the right – and necessary, or only – choice for some people this is just what I’ve found works best for me at the moment). I’m happier and (bar the odd slip up - one being at Halloween, which also taught me a lot) I’m in control. It’s been more than eight months since I started drinking again, but it feels completely different – because my attitude towards alcohol is completely different. The next day I wrestled with some weird feelings: had I let myself down with that one glass of pinot? Had I just done undone fifteen months of hard work for nothing? But then I thought further into it and realised no, that sober stint had taught me so much there was no way it could be called a waste of time. I relished it – just the one – getting a small buzz, but for once knowing I could leave it at that. When I did start drinking again, it came with little fanfare: I was eating a delicious dinner with my boyfriend and fancied a glass of red to finish.
I quit drinking series#
I ended up completely abstaining from booze for over a year (a large chunk of which was during a series of national lockdowns, when many ramped up their alcohol intake instead). It very quickly became addictively easy and enjoyable to maintain my teetotal state. All things that at one time or another would've been chalked up as a 'funny story', slowly started becoming a lot less hilarious the older I got, and after realising I’d really never do those things sober.Īt first, I was unsure I could make it to 90 days without alcohol, but the actual experience was life-changing. Over the past decade I’ve lost phones, thrown up in plant pots and slept with people I shouldn’t have (and let’s not even discuss the drunk texts.
"Things that once would've been a 'funny story' become a lot less hilarious the older I got"
Or maybe I’d always been a hot mess but it had never been picked up on by them, because we all were (no shade, love you guys)? In total, I was sober for fifteen months – and this is what I learned along the way.Īt 27, after a solid 13 years of drinking pretty much every week without fail (such is the culture we’re born into in Britain, right? My teenage friends and I would regularly sneak alcohol from our parents’ to drink in fields from the age of thirteen), I was definitely a problematic binge drinker.īizarrely, my university friends labelled me as ‘the one who always kept it together on a night out’, but the older I got, the less accurate that title felt. I decided on three months off the booze (one didn’t seem enough) and ended up embarking on a journey that changed my relationship with alcohol forever. I’d text my friends and most of the time the answer was, ‘Nothing! You’re paranoid!’ But, as I sat shivering in the shower that one particularly bleak morning, picking the glass out (apparently I’d fallen out of a taxi), I made a vow to stop drinking. The pattern back then went like this: hit the booze hard and then wake up hating myself (to such an extent that I’d cry and physically pick at my skin), terrified of what I might have said or done the night before. There were gaping holes in my memory that my hungover brain began to fill with a host of worst-case scenarios, a rush of anxiety that was starting to become all-too familiar. I knew I’d spent the night downing shots and requesting Sophie Ellis-Bextor in a south London gay bar with my friends. Where did it come from? I couldn’t remember. It was a small piece of glass wedged into my shoulder that did it.