by Lotta Dann
I’m a bit surprised, actually, at my growing attraction to flavoured green teas. I’m guzzling them daily like some sort of crazy hippy. My big mugs of milky instant coffee are a thing of the past and I’m now starting and finishing every day with a mug of green tea instead. It’s really easy to drink and makes me feel good.
No alcohol, herbal tea, good sleep, still exercising—you see why I’m pissed off about not looking any different?
Right by the store is a church hall and I’m fairly certain it’s used for AA meetings. I stare at it whenever I drive by and wonder what it would be like to walk into a meeting. The thought freaks me out to be honest; I get nerves in my tummy imagining it. I know that’s stupid. I know everyone who goes there would be super-lovely towards me if I showed up, but I just can’t imagine doing it. Maybe I’m thinking my drinking wasn’t bad enough? Nah, I know they wouldn’t judge me on ‘how bad’ I was. Maybe I’m thinking I don’t want strangers climbing into my life? Maybe I’m just chicken-shit? I look up the meeting times online but I never go.
It is stupid, though, because I’m longing for face-to-face contact with other ex-boozers. I would love to be able to look someone in the eye who knows exactly what I’m going through, who can relate to what I’m experiencing. My friends and family are being really kind about my not-drinking, but they can’t relate no matter how much they try. I’m pretty sure they don’t realise the extent of what I’m going through in trying to live without alcohol: the internal struggles I have at social functions or when I feel some shitty emotion (or frankly on any random weekday at 5 p.m.).
I’m now openly telling people about my big life change. After my slow start at letting out the news (telling another family member or friend every few days), and my strange self-outing at my 40th birthday, I’m comfortable now to say the words more freely. If it feels natural I’ll come out with, ‘I’m not drinking alcohol anymore’, and usually follow up with the blunt truth, ‘I’ve stopped because I can’t control it’. I get a few raised eyebrows and shocked reactions but laying it out so boldly works well to distill any misconceptions most of the time (I think it does, anyway). I’m owning the news, it’s my story and I’ll tell it how I want to. I can’t stop anyone gossiping behind my back, but at least I can front-foot it with the truth. For some strange reason I’m not embarrassed by the truth. Alcohol is bloody addictive, for goodness sake; I’m not ashamed that I got addicted to something that is addictive!
Telling everyone in my ‘real’ life about my blog would, of course, be one easy way for me to reveal more about what I’m going through. I do have a bunch of lovely friends around me in my neighbourhood and lots of friends and family that I’m in regular contact with around the country, but I can’t bring myself to tell them about my blog yet. I’m not nervous about what they’ll think of it (I’m sure they’ll all be interested, impressed and supportive) but I’m nervous about what impact it’ll have on the vibe of my online life. I can’t bear the thought of my blog losing any of its awesomeness. What if telling people prevents me from being so raw and honest online? What if I lost my precious outlet? What if I retreat back into my head and go back to drinking? I don’t want to risk the blog losing its power. It’s my main tool and I need it too much.
I’m telling friends that I’m reading sober blogs but I never let on that I’m writing one myself. Mrs D Is Going Without is just too unbelievably important and precious to me. It’s my special, safe, private place where I can vent, ponder and explore my feelings freely and openly. None of my blog readers know who I really am, they only know me as Mrs D and that anonymity is incredibly comforting and powerful.
Also, without AA or any face-to-face contact with other former boozers, my online community is vitally important. They know what I’m going through. They’re my amazing, wonderful, wise, warm, faceless support group. And there’s no-holds-barred on what we discuss.
Comment from ‘Sunny’
Why won’t you go to AA? Step 1—Admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable. Good luck to you doing it by yourself, but my experience was that I could not do it on willpower alone. By myself I was powerless. I had to go to meetings. I love my meetings and I love the people I have met there. After I went to my first meeting the compulsion left me immediately.
Comment from ‘Anonymous’
AA works for some, not for all. I believe I’m in power—I don’t like the idea of giving up the power to anyone else. The decisions and choices I make always ultimately come back to me . . . There’s nothing wrong with reaching out for support and camaraderie but I will never let anyone else be in charge of my sobriety—that’s for me to do.
Comment from ‘Anonymous’
I am also a non-AA person. It has nothing to do with willpower for me. Instead, it comes from needing to understand myself and what ‘I’ need to keep sober, not what someone else feels I should have or be doing. I do this by reading from a lot of different sources (AA, Women For Sobriety, blogs, books). I really feel I’m getting to choose what works best for me from all these sources and it has been working. I am not ‘white-knuckling’ it, but my eyes are also open that there will be obstacles down the road that will try to veer me off-course. Blogs like yours help remind me there are others that feel the same way.
My eyes are wide open, too. I might not be reading AA literature, following the Twelve Steps or attending meetings, but I am soaking up information wherever else I can. The journalist and the academic in me just wants to research like crazy. It’s that busy brain of mine that needs constant stimulation. I can’t help myself, I’m like a huge sponge when it comes to all matters recovery related. I am still working on my Master’s thesis part-time (now in the data-gathering stage, carrying out interviews and transcribing them), but it often feels like I’m also doing a completely separate thesis all about sobriety.
If I go to the library website and plug in search terms like ‘alcohol’ or ‘sober’ I get directed to books like The Thinking Person’s Guide to Sobriety by Bert Pluymen; Still Waters: Sobriety, Atonement, and Unfolding Enlightenment by William Alexander; John R’s Big Book Unplugged: A Young Person’s Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous. I get them and I read them and sometimes they help and sometimes they annoy. Usually there’s a little nugget of something I gain from each one.
I’ve also grabbed random books like Unhooked: How to Quit Anything by Dr Frederick Woolverton and Susan Shapiro; From Chocolate to Morphine by Andrew Weil; and iWant: My Journey From Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life by Jane Velez-Mitchell.
The two books I’m most enjoying are Jason Vale’s Kick the Drink . . . Easily and Allen Carr’s The Easy Way To Stop Drinking. Both of them are really positively influencing my thinking.
I can’t get enough of memoirs written by former boozers and addicts. Already I’ve read books by Augusten Burroughs, Sacha Scobilic, Rob Lowe, Mackenzie Phillips, Steven Tyler, Tom Sykes, Caroline Knapp, Clarissa Dickson-Wright and Jane Lynch.
In addition to all this reading I will often climb into bed with the laptop and watch endless clips on YouTube of former addicts and addiction specialists, and clips of TV programmes like Intervention and Celebrity Rehab.
And on top of all this I am, of course, reading and commenting on heaps of other sober blogs.
I’m so immersed in the world of alcohol addiction, I’m adopting the lingo. Words like sobriety, recovery and journey are tripping off my tongue (and onto my keyboard) with gay abandon. I am familiar with how pink clouds and relapses usually play out. I know that AA is a fellowship for drinkers and Al-Anon is a fellowship for drinkers’ friends and family. I know that NA stands for Narcotics Anonymous. I know that a ‘normie’ is someone who can drink normally; that is, have one beer and leave it at that or walk away from a restaurant table with wine still in their glass (shock!). I know that a ‘dry drunk’ is someone who is considered to be ‘white-knuckling’ their way through the days, not exploring the reaso
ns why they drank, just trying like hell not to do it anymore. My online buddies all seem to be jealous of normies and scathing of dry drunks and I get where they’re coming from.
I am not a dry drunk. I am exploring. I am researching. I am navel-gazing. I am fully ‘going there’ trying to properly analyse my drinking. Why did I booze and how can I now best not-booze? This is key for me: I am determined that I will not face the rest of my life feeling miserable about not-drinking. It is as equal a determination as never returning to being a boozer. I don’t want to miserably booze, and I don’t want to miserably not-booze. I want to be happy and sober. It must be possible to do that. Is it possible to do that?
There’s a passage in one of the books I’m reading that really jumps out at me so I type it up into my blog. It’s from the book From Chocolate To Morphine: Everything you need to know about mind-altering drugs and the authors, Winifred Rosen and Andrew Weil, MD, write:
We think that addiction is a basic human problem whose roots go very deep. Most of us have at some point been wounded, no matter what kind of family we grew up in or what kind of society we live in. We long for a sense of completeness and wholeness and whatever satisfaction we gain from drugs, food, sex, money, and other ‘sources’ of pleasure really comes from inside of us. That is, we project our power onto external substances and activities, allowing them to make us feel better temporarily. This is a very strange sort of magic. We give away our power in exchange for a transient sense of wholeness, then suffer because the object of our craving seems to control us. Addiction can be cured only when we consciously experience this process, reclaim our power, and recognise that our wounds must be healed from within.
I like this passage. I feel like it’s telling me that what I’m trying to do can be done. It’s telling me that I have the power within myself to feel content and whole. It’s telling me that shit happens to everyone; some of us reach for substances to make us feel better but the substances don’t work. They might work temporarily but they don’t properly work (and they can bite you on the bum if you get addicted). So this is what I need to do. The substance has gone; now I have to reclaim the power to manage my feelings myself.
17
Reclaim the power to manage feelings myself. Easier said than bloody done.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 76)
I hate to say this and be all boring and low and flat and introspective but this weekend has felt really colourless and frankly quite hard work. I just keep thinking that I am the most boring person in the world and everyone else is having way more fun than me and they’re going to always have a better life because they can relax with a drink or two or even get a bit naughty and have 4 or 5 and I’m just going to be a boring sober uptight person. I just feel pissed off, that it’s not fair and no one is making me do this. In fact no one ever told me I had to stop drinking, it was only me telling myself. And now this weekend I’ve been telling myself that it’s a really kill-joy idea.
Okay, fuck. This is miserably not-boozing and I cannot do this for the next 40 years.
Comment from ‘Nate’
There’s heaps out there about this feeling you are living—it is a curious mix of loss, mourning and jealousy. There ain’t much we can do about it, I’ve spent hours trying to rationalise a way that I could drink and be normal and the fact is that I just can’t. Drink, that is. So just remember drinking as that friend you used to know. And stay strong so we can all be proud of each other!
I do feel that I’m moving in the right direction. Reading and watching everything that I am and slowly adding to the number of days since I last drank is all having some effect. I now know for certain that I do not like to be overly emotional and that drinking helped me to avoid that. It’s good to have that basic knowledge about myself. But I’ve still got a lot to learn. Starting with, how to just be around at home without my beloved wine.
Why did I do so much drinking at home? I used to say quite a lot that I was ‘bored’, and that drinking wine helped with the ‘boredom that comes from being at home with kids all the time’. In a twisted way I thought wine was a clever solution to stop me from getting bored at home ‘like all housewives do’. But now I’m wondering if there was more to it than that.
Once again a TV guru helps me, although this time it’s not Oprah but the rather slick addiction-specialist Dr Drew. I’m watching Celebrity Rehab one afternoon when one of the addicts on the show, in a counselling session, tells Dr Drew that he uses drugs ‘cos I’m bored all the time’. Dr Drew quickly interjects with, ‘You know boredom is just another word for depression, don’t you?’
My mind does that freak-out thing again and goes deathly quiet. I pause the telly. Really? People who say they use drugs or drink to escape boredom are actually depressed? I used to say all the time that I drank because I was bored.
I have to think about this.
Okay, I’m not depressed, I know that. I’ve had brief black periods in my life and I know what it’s like to have that awful feeling that there is nothing worth living for. I don’t have that now. I am not depressed. But Dr Drew gets me thinking, on top of the thinking the book From Chocolate to Morphine was already getting me to do.
Maybe boredom is the ‘basic human problem’ that the book spoke of, this longing we have ‘for a sense of completeness and wholeness’? Maybe the empty space that I’ve been calling boredom and filling with wine is actually a normal symptom of the human condition and I just have to live with it? Maybe I have to learn how to just ‘be’ in the empty space and feel okay? Or is the empty space I’ve been calling boredom actually the sign there’s a problem with me; particularly, that I’ve a hole to fill inside me? Dr Drew seems to be implying that it is, so therefore do I need to work on fixing that hole so I can feel whole? Do I even have an empty space? Or am I just normal? Am I actually depressed? Or do I just need to find the power within?
Aaarrrgghhh! For someone who doesn’t like navel-gazing this is far too much navel-gazing! All I know for certain is that, where there used to be a fucking shitload of wine, now there’s none and it’s going to take a hell of a lot of adjusting to that fact.
One thing I am noticing is that this introspection (which I have always scathingly referred to as navel-gazing) is having shock horror a positive impact on me. I’m getting a little calmer and slower in my thinking. These are such ginormous questions that I’m asking—about all of life and all of human kind, actually—and I know there aren’t going to be any quick solutions. So mentally I’m slowing down and settling a little. Figuring out what’s going on inside me is something I can take my time with. There’s no big hurry. All I have to do is concentrate on not-drinking and keep heading for the ultimate goal—which is pure unadulterated sober nirvana, of course! One thing I am now certain of is that my heavy drinking was sucking up heaps of my time and energy and stopping me from figuring myself (and life) out.
Of course, in addition to all of this deep thinking I’m still continuing with the mundane stuff of everyday life: cooking meals and filling lunch boxes and cleaning the bathroom and driving to the gym and organising thesis interviews and buying groceries and folding yet another load of washing and watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians and chatting with teachers and shopkeepers and neighbours and turning Bruno Mars up loud and ‘Should we have roast chicken for dinner tonight?’ and ‘How did you manage to lose your shoes?’ and ‘That was a great interview this morning, honey’ and through all of this I discover that sometimes all I need is for some time to pass and things smooth out by themselves.
Mrs D Is Going Without (Day 82)
Feeling much better, have got through my ‘hard done by’ phase and have quietly settled back into ‘this is just the way it has to be’ mode. Drove to a trendy bar during the week to interview someone for my thesis and actually imagined myself buying a shiny glass of chardonnay and sipping it and the thought wasn’t at all nice. I so, so, so, don’t want to drink.
Being in the bar
for my thesis interview was interesting. My interviewee and I sat in a quiet corner inside so I could record our conversation on a dictaphone, and right outside our window in the courtyard was a large group of people drinking and laughing together. Alcohol seemed crucial to the scene. It made me feel a little sad but also pissed off. Why should alcohol have all the power to make that scene fun? I left the bar hyper-aware of the hard mental work I still need to do. I’ve got to shift my thinking so that I don’t feel miserable every time other people are drinking. This is different to the figuring-out-what-to-do-with-the-uncomfortable-empty-space I (maybe) need to do. This is about the how-to-not-be-a-miserable-non-boozer-around-others goal that I have.
I go back to my books. Jason Vale’s Kick the Drink . . . Easily and Allen Carr’s The Easy Way To Stop Drinking are the key books for this. I keep renewing them at the library so I can read them nice and slowly. Both Vale and Carr are really getting inside my brain. They both espouse the sort of attitude that I really, really, really want to have; that living without alcohol is not about living a life feeling deprived and miserable, but about living feeling happy and free. I have to believe this, or I will be a miserable non-boozer forevermore.
Both of these dudes firmly believe we’ve all been brainwashed since birth into believing a whole bunch of things about alcohol that are just not true. Allen Carr summarises it like this:
From the moment we are born, our young brains are bombarded daily with information telling us that alcohol quenches our thirst, tastes good, makes us happy, steadies our nerves, gives us confidence and courage, removes our inhibitions, relieves boredom and stress, eases pain, helps us to relax, and releases the imagination. At the same time it is an absolute essential for successful social interaction.
Well, yeah, that is what I’ve always believed. Until the stuff bloody turned on me. Or was it against me from the start? I didn’t used to think it was, I always thought alcohol made things better, more fun, more bearable, etc. That is until recently when clearly it didn’t. So, did it ever? Hmmm, now these guys have got me wondering. Jason Vale puts it pretty bluntly: