When I had been sober for three years, I wrote about the process of leaving alcohol behind, the drudgery of my final years of drinking, and the white-knuckle ride of early sobriety (you can read it here).
This was how I felt, three years in:
“I have grown up more in these years than I did throughout my twenties. When I remember those old boozy feelings – the paralysis, the struggle to get through life – I feel a little sad that I put up with that for so long. As long as I never hit rock bottom, I could kid myself that I was doing just fine. But alcohol kept me in a small room where the same things happened day in, day out.
A life without alcohol is one in the open. Walls became doors.”
On the 15th of June, I will have been sober for ten years. There are only two downsides to being sober. One is that you’re in a Venn diagram that has a hefty overlap with the wellness community, those sanctimonious, chakra-obsessed arseholes. The second is that people enjoying a nice glass of wine might assume you are judging them (this is probably because when I’m relaxed and happy my face falls into a look of despair and judgement. I have resting Old Testament face, unfortunately). I’m really not judging, I’m just envious of people that can have one drink without flicking a switch in their brain that sends them spiralling into a night of drunken mayhem. I would love to have that approach to booze – upright and enjoying life – but I am missing that ability.
This blog post isn’t really for the civilised drinkers, anyway. I’m writing this as an offering to anyone out there who is freshly sober and wondering how long they can cling by their fingertips to the cliff edge; to anyone who wonders if they drink too much, and whose hangovers are becoming big, hectic, tortuous ordeals; to anyone out there who is just thinking of trying something different, as a way of making this life a little less difficult. The TLDR version is that giving up alcohol is the best thing I’ve ever done. However, this is a blog, and I love a good list, so here is the TL version: ten things I have learned in the last ten years.
Not drinking is the easy bit
When I gave up drinking I employed a sort of double-think: I was giving up alcohol forever, so it was simply no longer an option; and I was only going to worry about the present moment, and just not drink today. Unlike moderation, which involves all manner of convoluted negotiations with the self, abstinence is easy, because it’s straightforward. One path has gone forever and you must therefore find another way. In ten years, there were a couple of moments in which real life just felt like so much, and I was beset by a longing to throw a few vodkas back and let reality slide away. These feelings hit when I was looking after my newborn baby during the strictest Covid lockdown. I hadn’t slept for days and was going slightly insane, and was also so very smelly, so upsettingly unwashed. But I did not have a drink. I noticed the craving one evening, a hovering question mark, and then I lay down, and with my baby sleeping on top of me, his little head tucked into my neck, I turned on Modern Family and ate a sharing bag of M&Ms. All I needed was distraction and sugar, and for life to feel a little less heavy, for a while.
You just work out what you need. It’s never actually alcohol.
The guilt, the shame
So not drinking is easy, it’s a given. What’s not quite so straightforward is forgiveness, for oneself. Not just for imperilling your health, oh no, there’s so much more to feel bad about. For wasting so much time, for saying and doing such terrible things, offending and annoying people left right and centre. Forgiveness for letting your early potential wither and fade – oof, that’s a tough one. There is a lot to process, and it takes years. I’m still assailed daily by crushingly embarrassing memories; not sure that will ever subside, but a silver lining is that some of these epic misdemeanours are starting to seem quite funny (23rd birthday, searching for one lost shoe in the middle of a roundabout at 2am, a classic).
It took until the grand old age of 39 to see that most people do not have everything figured out in their twenties, and the fact that I drank that decade away is regrettable, but not uniquely evil. A ‘level complete’ moment of sobriety is when you realise that constant self-flagellation is a little self-indulgent and unnecessary. These tortuous memories only really serve to ensure you don’t behave like that again, so you take the lesson, make apologies where you can, and then try to let that shit go.
On a lighter note, one notorious part of recovery, much discussed in sober forums and circles, is that you will continue to wake up after a night of socialising with a slowly percolating dread about what you said and did the night before, for years after you stop drinking. There is perhaps no relief as exquisite as the feeling when that dread evaporates.
Letting go of the ego
If alcoholism is the disease of ‘terminal uniqueness’, then sobriety is a slow hike up the hill to see that the world is a very big place, your place in it is perfectly suitable and very small, and you’re really not special. Another tiny speck in the universe, just doing your little tasks. The ego takes a battering anyway when you become a parent, and find yourself no longer at the centre of your own life. As I get older I’ve found a sort of sanctuary in our utter insignificance: it works in perfect harmony with the idea that, to some people (notably my son) I am in fact very important, as a provider of cuddles, love and oaty bars. It feels like the right kind of special. This is not the grandiose delusions of the belligerent drunk, but the ordinary, everyday contentment of being a human who loves and is loved.
Living the right life
Ok, I was a little disingenuous in the introduction – I have strayed into that overlap in the Venn diagram with the wellness people. The only way I can put it is that you start behaving honestly in one part of life, and then you find yourself examining all the other aspects of your life that could do with a bit of a spring clean. Ten years in, I have become that person: sober, overly fascinated with plant based whole foods, strict about getting a good night’s sleep, committed to daily yoga. Piece by piece, you assemble a way of living that prioritizes care and respect for your body, your mind, and the world that is your home. I’ve even gone so far off the deep end as to start saying things like it’s all connected.
I lapse, I go to Italy on holiday and eat lobster risotto and real carbonara (I mean it’s Italy, you must), and then I get right back on that wellness train. I may even indulge in a little meditation now and then. I know, it’s horrific.
Luck favours the prepared
There’s a saying I really love: You don’t get what you deserve in life, you get what you get. We’re all forced to deal with bad luck. Dealing with good luck is another matter. It’s surprisingly easy to fumble it.
Seneca (and Edna from the Incredibles) declared that luck favours the prepared. In my case, luck has favoured the sober. I met my now husband when we worked together – it was my last (only?) good drunken decision to hit on the hot Italian guy from the Edinburgh office at the work Christmas party. Things worked out beautifully, but that’s only because I got sober shortly after that first chaotic meeting. At 29 years old, in the last dregs of my drinking years, I was not good for anyone. I think there was a tiny part of me that intuitively sensed I had absolutely lucked out when I met him, and that I had better get my act together.
I’m lucky to live in a sunny town by the sea. I’m lucky to have a job that I like. I’m very lucky that we have our son, a healthy happy little boy who has made my life complete. This is not meant to sound boastful – the point is that none of this would have happened if I’d continued to drink. I let a lot of good things slip through my fingers in my twenties; it was all falling sand. Now I take care.
Finding ways to indulge
When I was drinking I hated the word ‘indulgence’ (the same cute, fake vibe as ‘self care’) and I felt really guilty about treating myself – I didn’t deserve it, and more pointedly, I wasted all my money on booze anyway. These days I’m in a position to confirm that the best chocolate maker in the country is Audreys (established 1948) and I’ll admit I order a box of their chocolates on a semi regular basis, just to eat in front of the telly. Most of life, the news, the state of the world, is abjectly hideous. Respect the good stuff, no matter how small. It’s the little details that will keep you going.
Freedom
When can you start drinking at the Sunday BBQ? When will the prosecco come out on Christmas day? Is there any way to get to that party without having to drive? These are the dreary questions that clog up the good times when you can’t handle your drink. I never realised how much of my life I wasted trying to figure out a way to drink alcohol at every single social event/trip to the cinema/Tuesday evening after work. When you’re sober, all that noise has gone. You can leave the party whenever you want and drive home, and then you can get up early the next day and have an espresso (così rafinato!) (so refined). Reader, it feels bloody brilliant. In my old life, a Saturday hangover would wreck the whole weekend. Now there’s time for everything.
Sunday mornings
… are now my favourite part of the week.
You’ve got a lot of time to fill
When I was drinking I used to tell people I was writing a book. It was going to be the most intricately constructed, devastatingly profound and beautifully written novel the world had ever witnessed. Ofcourse it was! It didn’t exist. It could be anything and everything. When I got sober, I started to think I might actually have to write that book, since I’d been banging on about it for so long. This year I finished the final.finalcopy.draft7.finalwithedits.doc(2) of this novel. Whether it will ever be published is another matter; what I do know is that the very humbling, often tedious work of actually getting it finished (and realising it will never be that majestic cathedral of prose you imagined) has taken many sober years of hard work. That’s the truth of creativity when you’re sober: no more castles in the sky, but you might actually get something finished.
Things flourish
What does it feel like ten years in? I had expected, as I collected more years of sobriety, to settle into a calm sea, with perhaps less excitement than my old life, but certainly a lot less pain. In fact, long term sobriety is not a flat surface, it’s not a straight and narrow road. It’s a garden in bloom and in motion, replete with detail, a place that is safe and ever changing. Yes, this blog post has included all the metaphors.
I’m aware that what I’ve written probably sounds smug and irritatingly positive (a la Motherland: where is her secret sadness?). Ofcourse life has thrown curveballs. I do my daily yoga because my lower back hurts all the time (I feel old as shit some days). I have a rotation of painkillers, and truly I haven’t felt well rested since 2020. But that’s not what this blog post is about – I’m writing this for the people who have just quit drinking or are just about to. I want you to know that it’s really quite excellent over on this side.
It has been the greatest gift of my life, to have woken up at the age of twenty-nine, and begun living a life that is honest and straightforward, peaceful and worthwhile. It’s not reckless or wild, it’s not glamorous… but it’s a lot more fun.
Amy Jardine 
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