Saying no to Jim, Jack and Johnny
It’s a Dry January, and I’m not talking about the weather. A public health campaign in the United Kingdom since about 2014, Dry January has since spread via the usual information arteries to the rest of the world (there’s even an app).
Just like Dry July and Sober October, only without the cutesy rhyming hook, it asks folks weakened by the Christmas-New Year blowout to consider trading in the Jack Daniel’s for a BPAfree water bottle, the pub for a gym and those cotton-mouthed, bleary-eyed mornings, for vim, vigour and great skin.
And like the giant lady-shaped wowzer I am, I too bring you the joyous message of sobriety. Do you believe in sparkling water with a slice of lime? Because it believes in you.
Jokes aside, not everyone needs to quit drinking. There’s a movement to monitor and cut back how much and how often you drink, another to #DrinkMindfully, another that just sees a break in your normal patterns of ‘‘havin’ it large’’ as a good way to reset your relationship with Jim, Jack and Johnny.
But some folks, like me, may find they have to quit because they’ve drunk it all already.
I mean it too: I drank all of it. A whole life’s allocation of booze between the ages of 15 – when I guzzled my first bottle of Bernadino Asti Spumante (‘‘Spewmanti’’ we called it, because we were classy birds) with my best mate and passed out on her sister’s bathroom floor, head in the toilet, and 33 – when I failed miserably to check myself before I – you know how this goes – rickity-wrecked myself.
Iwas– Iam – an aggressive, obnoxious drunk, prone to lashing out. So I don’t drink.
I’d like to say I woke up one day and realised that there was more to life than eating cold tins of beans and not leaving the flat for a week because you spent every last penny on a night out you can’t really remember. But it was grubbier than that, I kept drinking until I couldn’t any more.
One slightly chilly Sunday in October, I woke up in my own bed, which was a nice surprise, with my tongue, dry as kipper and with about the same flavour, flopping around in my mouth, my eyes feeling like I’d bathed them in sand and ground glass. A fairly typical Sunday, all told.
I didn’t have the full hangover yet, that would come a little later when I’d finally made my way downstairs to sit on the couch and stare into space trying to figure out where the creeping sense of doom was coming from.
I’d lost my purse. I had a cut on my arm and my knees were grazed as if I’d fallen over more than once. I felt dirty and had the booze sweats. My ankle was swollen.
But the worst part, the part that really freaked me out, was the gaping black hole in my memories where the night before should have been.
I had had a black-out once or twice (OK, I don’t know how many times) before. It’s a singularly bizarre experience being told you said and did things you have absolutely no memory of, and that don’t sound like the sorts of things you’d ever do or say. This time seemed far worse. I was frightened.
Later that day I went to my first AA meeting. I haven’t touched a drop, nor regretted or missed it, since.
With hindsight, I realise I’d been heading that way for a while. I’d try to imagine what my life would be like if I stopped drinking ‘‘for a laugh’’, because by that point being sober was a novelty, but I couldn’t. Talking to strangers, or feeling uninhibited or even comfortable around people socially without being at least tipsy was a mystery to me. I’d been drinking so long, I didn’t know how to do any of that people stuff any more.
Writing in the Guardian last week, Ruby Warrington called this sensation Foma – fear of missing alcohol.
‘‘Fear of being left out. Fear of life becoming boring. Fear of being judged. Fear (whisper it) that I might have a problem with alcohol,’’ she wrote, warning prospective teetotallers they were ‘‘going to freak out’’ at first. But then life would demand to be lived, and you’d finally be able to meet that demand with a clear head.
And what’s more, you won’t be the mindnumbing bore you were when you were constantly blasted.
Warrington’s catalogue of things she was able to do sober is humbling. She ran a sober festival in Ibiza. I managed sober karaoke and felt like I’d won 10 Grammys. For me, the glory was in the things most folks take for granted.
After I quit, the first time I made a decision with a perfectly clear head was – and I know this sounds hyperbolic, but it’s true – bloody magic. It was the first time I knew it was 100 per cent what I wanted to do, not drunken idiocy, or hung-over paranoia and anxiety speaking. I was my whole self.
These days AA is just one of many ways to address issues with drink – a doctor can advise you on the options. But I really needed it that day. I needed that calm, orderly, non-judgmental space – the exact opposite of the inebriated life I was living.
That’s what Dry January can be too, according to a friend of mine who’s recently got sober. (Well done, Sweetheart.)
‘‘[Dry January] gives people spaces to socialise and have a good time, where the focus is not on getting hammered,’’ he says.
‘‘Adults go to Disneyland, they go to amusement parks sober, and run around like absolute [idiots]. You don’t need alcohol or drugs to do that if you give yourself permission.’’
Foma is just the booze talking. Give yourself permission to ignore the hell out of it.