Sobriety? I’ll drink to that

The shame, the embarrassment, the revulsion at what I’d become. It took 30 years to realise that alcohol was the friend stomping all over my life.

For three decades I’d loved that sweet surrender to another plane – but the payback was becoming too extreme.

Thirty years ago it had me in its clutch. My friend and frenemy, enabler and tormentor, stealer of dignity and sleep. The end result, most often, was the sodden and sour wee hours then a next day of non-functioning and a night after that and it all felt like a collision of wrongness yet on I drank, and on; we all did.

Alcohol whipped me into completing deadlines while jarring my writing with an exhilarating recklessness, for I hated being too clenched and cautious with whatever was on the page. It loosened me into sleeping with the man I didn’t really want to sleep with because I knew the experience would be un-tender and may well hurt.

Alcohol propelled me to the party I didn’t want to be at, talking to people who terrified me and often this involved the latest love obsession who clotted me with awkwardness at his mere thought. Alcohol got me through myriad family functions with all the relatives from opposing divorce factions and their endless pricks of questions, “Have you got a boyfriend yet?” “When are we going to get grandchildren?” “Are you happy, Love?” Alcohol had me babbling excruciating snippets to people in authority; public figures, established writers, bosses, parents.

For three decades my frenemy unlocked me; made me louder and brighter and looser and more confident, until it didn’t. My nadir was vomiting in the back of a taxi in a great, unstoppable wallop of vodka mixed with self-hatred and I didn’t have the extra $20 required for soiling that poor driver’s property, so humiliatingly, so had to wake my mother and her boyfriend at 3am or thereabouts to ask for extra cash. The shame, the embarrassment, the revulsion at what I’d become.

I never drank like that again, yet it’s taken 30 years to extricate myself completely from the social companion who never had my best interests at heart. Recently I stopped drinking entirely; the alcohol was poisoning me. I finally hauled my recovery days back, and can now pinpoint the exact moment when a dinner out becomes shriller and shoutier and it’s time to leave – knowing nothing will be missed.

For three decades I’d loved that sweet surrender to another plane – but the payback was becoming too extreme. I had kids and work and deadlines and it was all being pushed to the periphery by a hangover lasting longer and longer as the years progressed; I couldn’t bounce back the way I used to. And now it’s as if my tastebuds have closed over in that department; the booze tastes ugly, sour, yet once I wrote novels fuelled by it.

The biggest hurdles as a teetotal (and what a vile word that is, alongside clunge and phlegm and flaps) were the social occasions where abstension felt smug, pathetic, weird. So you’re the driver, eh? Sick? Boring? Deranged? I’d take the glass thrust upon me and never sip, which felt so much easier than declaring wowserism in this fair land. Yet I’ve grown in abstention confidence and now the naughty party drink of choice is Coca-Cola – often looked upon, with horror, as something worse than the grog.

It took me 30 years to realise that drinking was the friend stomping all over my life. And more and more partygoers around me aren’t drinking either; abstaining no longer feels like a crime. Many younger people are consuming far less than my middle-aged generation, if at all; it’s like they’re just not as interested in the oldies’ embarrassing crutch. Dr James Nicholls, from Alcohol Research UK, says young people’s drinking has been declining for a decade. Worldwide. In another 30 years it may, perhaps, be considered along the scandalous lines cigarettes are now – as an unhealthy social blight that turns you into someone else, someone lesser. Who knows.