Category: Drinking

Life without alcohol: five years sober

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It’s funny to think it’s been half a decade since I last drank alcohol. The time seems to have gone so quickly.

There are still tiny things I miss. Being able to go into a bar and look glamorous holding a glass with a stem, rather than a tumbler. (I replicate this at home with alcohol-free fizz in champagne flutes, but options are limited in bars.) Spending silly money on fancy luxury champagne because it’s a special occasion. That kind of thing.

But that’s not what I usually did, of course. What I usually did was get a cheap crate of Strongbow and drink it straight from the can. The crate would be empty by the end of the day. It was the opposite of glamorous.

My life is immeasurably better without alcohol. It can be more challenging without that escape button to press, but it is better. I am fitter, healthier, more mindful. I make better decisions. I am calmer.

I never want to go back.

Life without alcohol: four years sober

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I don’t have much to report this year – just another year of quiet and peaceful sobriety. I have settled into it now and don’t feel I need as much support as I used to, though I still appreciate reading the occasional memoir by sober public figures.

There are still occasionally moments that remind me I can’t be complacent about it, and honestly that’s a good reminder to have. But on the whole I am comfortable and happy and I don’t want to go back to drinking. Life is nice without it.

Life without alcohol: three years sober

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Three years in, I have settled into sobriety a lot more. I no longer read books about it or do much frequenting of the support communities I used to follow online. It’s been a long time since I had nightmares about accidental drinking. I know what all my go-to booze alternatives are on the rare occasion I find myself in drinking establishments, and in celebratory circumstances (I had a lot of Nosecco and similar over Christmas but I usually prefer to stick to Fanta Zero in the evenings).

I have learnt to handle stress without drinking, although there have been times recently where I feel my mental health is being impacted by the lack of an ‘off switch’ and I am still trying to work out what the replacement ‘off switch’ could be. I am mostly able to look at alcohol and think ‘I don’t have that’ (similarly to not eating meat), rather than ‘I wish I could…’. On the whole, I do not think I am at high risk of drinking again, though of course I know I can’t be complacent about it.

Importantly, I don’t want to drink again. I am, thankfully, starting to forget what it felt like to be in a near-constant state of cumulative hangover, but I know my life is much better now. There’s no reason to go back.

(No picture today. I have run out of ‘thoughtful scenery pictures to illustrate blog posts about sobriety’.)

Life without alcohol: two years sober

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They say the second year of sobriety is a lot more stable than the first. I found this to be true in 2020, even though the world outside was anything but stable.

Christmas coffee mug

I’ve mentioned this a lot, but I cannot reiterate enough how essential my sobriety turned out to be during the pandemic and how lucky I feel that I quit when I did. If I’d still been drinking, I would have seen lockdown as an excuse for what would basically have been a year-long housebound bender. The ‘joke’ memes about day drinking to cope with the situation have been everywhere on social media since last March, and I know I would have taken that attitude as encouragement and come to believe that I ‘needed’ alcohol in order to get through the pandemic. However, I’d been sober for a year when it all kicked off, and I’m grateful to be able to say that I stayed sober in 2020 and I’m still sober now.

I’ve not read as much quit lit this last year (in fact, I’m not sure I’ve read any), largely because I have settled into my sober routine and know the tips and strategies that are working for me. In terms of support, a particular Facebook group and a sobriety thread on a favourite forum have continued to be incredibly helpful.

It’s been a long time since I tried any new booze alternatives, as all of my liquid intake has taken place in my own home this last year and so I just stick to my usual favourites. There are still a few from a long time ago that I haven’t yet logged, however, so I will do a few posts about those in the next few months.

I’m a little apprehensive about the return to normality that we all expect and hope to happen later this year. Lack of socialising has, in many ways, made staying sober a lot easier for me as I’m not spending time around alcohol, other than the quiet couple of beers that Geth has on a weekend night. However, I do feel stable and resolved, so I just need to be careful when things start to open up again.

In general, I feel a lot more positive about today’s soberversary than I did a year ago. I remember it feeling like a bit of an anticlimax, whereas today I just feel sort of quiet and happy about it.

I hope that this time next year, my sense of peace will have continued to grow.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Abba – ‘Thank You For The Music’
Ollie Wride – ‘Back To Life’
Eddi Reader – ‘Auld Lang Syne’
The Beatles – ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’
Traditional – ‘The Twelve Days Of Christmas’
Cast of The Muppet Christmas Carol – ‘Scrooge’

Life without alcohol: one year sober

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It’s been a whole year tonight since I had my last drink.

Jesmond Dene in the winter

It’s been such a strange, strange year. It feels like ten days and ten years at the same time. Most days have been difficult in some way. Some have been easy – too easy – and have blindsided me a bit and made me complacent.

I’ve achieved a lot of stuff in my first year of sobriety, though a lot of that was out of sheer manic panic. Some things in my life have become a lot clearer, and others still need a bit of thinking about. I’ve got a plan for the next year ahead, but only a vague one.

I’ve tried a lot of support groups and podcasts and quit lit and meetings and all sorts. Some have been helpful and feel like the right thing for me; others I’m still a bit unsure about. I’m keeping an open mind about everything, though, because this process seems to have so many phases that change all the time.

I’ve also tried a lot of alcohol-free drinks. Some didn’t work for me, but I did find a lot of new favourites that I would never have looked twice at before I quit drinking.

I expected to feel ecstatic at hitting this milestone, but my first sober Christmas period has been a bit rough mentally and so I’m feeling pretty drained at the moment. Still, I remember how nervous I was feeling a year ago, and how impossible sobriety seemed at the time. Things are so much better now. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I (sort of) know where I’m going.

The only thing that has remained constant and strong over the last year is the fact that I never want to drink again. Not ever. Most days I want *a* drink, but I don’t want *to* drink. I want the sweet taste of cider and the ability to forget things for a few hours, but I don’t want to get drunk and out of control, I don’t want to feel suicidal when I’m in a state where I might actually do something about that, and I don’t want to wake up hungover and panicked and full of regret. The two lists go hand-in-hand, and that – so far – has provided me with enough willpower not to pick up.

I won’t be doing monthly sobriety updates anymore, as things have stabilised a bit, but I will keep reviewing booze alternatives and will do another update a year from today. Life is a lot more peaceful than it used to be, and I’m hopeful that things will continue to improve in that respect.

Life without alcohol: ten months sober

Dee 4 Comments

I’m more than 300 days sober now (304 to be precise), which is very nearly the bulk of a year. So far it’s been one of the strangest years of my life, but I won’t go into that until the year is properly over.

Hallowe'en lantern

Ten months in, I’m sort of newly realising that I’m still actually fairly early on in my journey, and there are still things that are tripping me up, and things that I’m encountering sober for the first time. I haven’t done a music festival this year, and I don’t think I’ll be ready to do one next year either. I still don’t feel fully comfortable in pubs and clubs, and in fact I’m going to them less and less frequently.

I won’t be playing the ‘election drinking game’ this December. This was something that I did for every general election for years and years – I made huge jugs of cocktail with crappy old alcohol from the back of the cupboard to ‘use it up’, and then put food colouring in the jugs to match the political party colours. The game was very simple – ‘sip for a hold, glug for a gain’ – so when Labour held a seat in Newcastle, you’d take a sip of the red cocktail, and when the SNP gained a seat in Scotland, you’d take a big glug of the yellow cocktail (2015 required a LOT of yellow cocktail). Geth and I would be sick for days afterwards, but it was a tradition. I didn’t do it in 2017 because it was too soon after the 2015 election, but this is the first general election for which it’s no longer an option, and strangely, I feel a bit bereft as a result.

(I’ve also realised, in my wiser sober state, that following politics is not actually good for my mental health at the moment, and while I’ll obviously be voting, I will be getting an early night on election day instead of watching the results.)

I’ve also not navigated the Christmas period sober yet. While I will have had nearly a year to prepare for it, I’m still feeling quite a bit of trepidation about the whole thing. I’m already a bit sad that I won’t ever again have mulled wine, or Christmas cake made with whisky, or Christmas pudding with brandy poured over it for the flambé effect. I am, however, excited about doing the extra parkruns over the Christmas period, and Geth has promised to have a quiet Hogmanay with me so that we can do the New Year’s Day double parkrun.

I had a fairly ridiculous moment at the A-ha gig in Leeds on Saturday night when I went to the bar to get drinks for myself and Geth. Because of avoiding bars for the most part over the last few months, as well as the fact that it’s usually Geth who buys the drinks, I hadn’t actually been in a situation since I got sober where I was carrying a pint of beer for someone else. When I was still drinking, if I was collecting a pint for Geth, I would always take a big sip of it before carrying it back to the table so that I wouldn’t spill it while carrying it (the extra beer would be lost either way, so it wasn’t like I was stealing his beer – just preventing the excess from dripping all over my hand and the floor!). It wasn’t until I had the beer in my hand on Saturday night that I realised that was no longer an option.

Cue an extremely slow walk back into the main arena in an attempt not to spill the beer (which was ultimately unsuccessful as there was a door in my way), and then a further realisation that I couldn’t even lick my own hand clean, and…it just all felt a bit ludicrous, really. Maybe I should start carrying protective plastic gloves.

I’ve not reviewed any booze alternatives this month as I’ve been a bit too busy for non-diary blogging most days. I will try and do some over this next month, though, as I’ve got a bit of a backlog.

Mental health improvement plans are still quietly trucking along in the background. Hopefully next month I’ll have a bit more of an update on that.

Life without alcohol: nine months sober

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Three-quarters of a year sober today. For most of my life, that would have seemed utterly impossible.

Autumn trees

Every month, it becomes marginally easier, and marginally more normal. I still think about drinking a lot, and every time I plan a night out, my first instinctive thought is that I will be drinking, before I remember that I don’t anymore. It’s just one of the many ways in which I haven’t managed to detach my brain from drinking culture yet – for instance, I still automatically assume that I’ll have to wait a while before I set off if I’m planning to drive in the morning (despite the fact that I only properly got back into driving this year, after I got sober!) and when I’m offered a booze alternative like Nosecco or even ginger beer earlier in the day, my first instinct is that it’s a bit too early to start yet – when in actual fact, it would be perfectly fine to drink Nosecco all day long, as I would still be stone cold sober at midnight!

Drink is also showing up in my dreams a lot, usually in tandem with the strange reappearance of my recurring nightmares about my late cat, José, which have started happening a lot again after a few years of respite. As I expected, they usually take the form of ‘oops I forgot I was sober and had a drink’, similar to the ones I have about vegetarianism. Thankfully I’ve not recently dreamt about actually being drunk, which I always found to be a horrible dream even when I was still drinking.

I’ve reviewed one booze alternative this month:

I’ve got a slight backlog of booze alternatives to review, but hopefully I’ll catch up before the end of the year.

It’s been a very busy month and I’ve not really been looking after myself mental health-wise. I’ve already set a few things in place to make sure this is less of a problem throughout October.

Life without alcohol: eight months sober

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I didn’t do a seven-month update because things were so busy last month. I think that shows that sobriety is starting to feel more normal to me and I’m not as obsessed with counting the days as I was at the start of the year.

Sky and trees

I suppose my main preoccupation on the subject over the last couple of months has been the double-headed discomfort that (1) drinking is so normalised in society – while I do make use of various sober support groups, I find that in my ‘real life’, I’m the only one who doesn’t drink – and (2) problematic habits around drinking are not taken seriously and seen as a bit of a laugh by a lot of people who still drink. I obviously used to have this attitude too – it’s the way I grew up, because it’s the way we all grow up – and now that I’ve been detached from it for a few months, I find it quite scary how insidious the whole thing is. Whether it’s my Slimming World group endlessly joking about how really we should be called an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or a favourite podcast of mine doing a special episode where the participants are drunk, I find that at the moment I’m just really uncomfortable with alcohol use being treated in such a lighthearted way. Maybe I’ll never be comfortable with it again. I don’t know.

I also ran into a lot of difficulty on the synthwave night out last week. Being stone cold sober when other people there were really, really drunk (too drunk even to stand up or hold a conversation in some cases) was really quite unnerving and a bit upsetting. I didn’t feel comfortable at all – I had been looking forward to enjoying the music, but I found that it wasn’t really a space where I could do that.

I’ve started to encounter things that make me sad and nostalgic about drinking itself. It’s taken longer than expected, but it is occasionally happening now. This week, I’ve been playing pirate video games – pirates are one of my favourite themes, to the extent that the novel I’m querying at the moment (and have been working on since 2011) is set on a pirate island – and of course they’re all full of rum and drinking games, and I’ve just been feeling sad about the fact that I can’t identify with all of that anymore. Maybe I should watch a few recovering alcoholic cop shows for good measure. Bergerac was always a favourite.

Two minutes is my current limit when standing in the alcohol aisle at the supermarket before I have to get out of there. I discovered this today when Geth and I were hunting for Nosecco in Sainsbury’s. Still, it’s an improvement on early sobriety, when I couldn’t go near the place.

I’ve reviewed a grand total of one booze alternative over the last two months:

This is mainly because I’ve been a bit too busy for non-diary blogging lately, but also partly because, as I mentioned in my last update, I know what I like now.

I’ve also been a bit too busy to keep up with my recovery support as much as I would like, but I have been working on it here and there. It needs to be more of a priority over the next month.

Life without alcohol update: six months sober

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Half a year without a drop of alcohol today. I couldn’t have imagined that this time last year.

Flowers and gravel

On the whole, the trend over the last six months is that things have gradually become easier. But it’s not a straight trajectory by any means – I’ve found the last fortnight to be really difficult with the nice weather, because every time I’m outside, I find myself walking past beer gardens and people having drinks at barbecues. Summer, in my younger days, was always just one long, hazy, booze-soaked non-memory. It was the season of all-day drinking at weddings and on holidays. It was the best season for cider, and the only season when it was acceptable to sit on the grass in the park and crack open that first can at 11am. It was the season of a hundred outdoor music gigs and festivals of which I have absolutely no memory of the bands but could still find my way to the bar tent in my sleep. Without alcohol, I have to admit that I am finding summer a bit anxiety-inducing.

This is one of the reasons that I am giving music festivals a miss this year for the first time in adulthood. I’ll be ready to give them a go again next year – there’s an ’80s/industrial long weekender in Belgium and a synthwave festival in London that I’d really love to try – but it’d just be a bit too much this summer.

I’ve not been trying as many booze alternatives over the last couple of months, because I feel like I’ve found the favourites that work for me (Sainsbury’s Fiery Ginger Beer is my go-to on evenings in the house, because it’s calorie-free, while Fentimans Rose Lemonade is nice for a treat when I’m out, and for a proper celebratory-feeling drink I like Nosecco), but I’ve still got a few to review from earlier in the year.

Booze alternatives I’ve reviewed over the last month:

I’ve been listening to sobriety podcasts again over the last month, and they’ve been really helpful – I’ve also been finding online and offline support groups to be an important anchor. It’s hard when I’m so busy, but I really am trying to make time for things that are more therapeutic at the moment.

Life without alcohol: five months sober

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Time has really flown over the last few weeks. It’s strange to think I’ve managed another month of sobriety already.

Daisies

I think my mindset has shifted a little this month. When I’m at the bar ordering a ginger beer instead of a cider, I’m no longer looking at the cider tap and feeling that desperate pang for something I can’t have, with my brain railing against the unfairness of it all. Instead, it’s been replaced by a calmer, more logical thought – a thought that goes along the lines of ‘yes, I really want that cider, but it would be a very bad idea for me to have it because of the way my brain works’ – and in some ways I’m becoming more able to detach from the emotional side of it.

If I think about the taste of alcohol, I still feel very upset. So I don’t think about it. This is becoming easier than it was.

Social situations are still difficult. I realised this past weekend that something like boardgaming is fine, even if everyone else is drinking alcohol – the focus is not the drinking, it’s the gaming, so I can forget that other people are drinking and I’m not. Just hanging around in the pub or club for hours is a different matter. It’s an issue that I think I will struggle with for a long time and that I think about a lot – I even covered it in one of the poems I performed last time I was at poetry night. I just find these situations to be very intense. First of all, everyone else is getting drunk, and it turns out that I don’t have the patience to deal with drunk people when I’m stone cold sober. Watching other people’s mental faculties failing in front of my eyes is alarming, distressing, and frustrating, and I find it very upsetting and unpleasant to be around. It’s a horrible reminder of what I was like when I was drinking, and at the moment I just can’t reconcile it with the celebratory thing it’s supposed to be. Secondly, I’ve found in the last few months that being around drinkers as they get louder and louder and less cognisant of the way that conversation is supposed to work is bringing up problems related to my underlying mental health issues. This is something that I think I need outside help for, and so I will be looking into that in the near future.

I was discussing my sobriety via text with my brother recently, and one of the things I said to him was that it’s been very strange getting to grips with not having the available mental crutch of ‘getting drunk’ anymore. Every so often it just hits me that it’s no longer an option for me, and the realisation leaves me feeling quite stunned. It’s partly because I’ve spent 2019 so far doing a lot of things that have been out of my comfort zone – getting back into pitching my books to agents, performing my poetry in public, performing with my ukulele class, getting back into driving, buying my car – and every single time I am scared and nervous because I’m about to do one of those things, my automatic thought is still ‘I need a few drinks to make this thing less scary’. And I can’t have those few drinks, and that is something that I just can’t get used to yet. There’s still a long way to go.

Booze alternatives I’ve reviewed over the last month:

Because I’ve been very busy this last month, I’ve not spent as much time utilising the online and offline resources (books, podcasts, talks, etc.) that have been helpful for me so far in recovery. I need to prioritise those a bit more over the next month while things are quieter, because I don’t want to take my eye off the ball – I’ve noticed a few insidious ‘just the one, no one will know’ type thoughts creeping in, and I need to be a bit more proactive in looking after myself.