THE DECISION TO STAY
For Kerri ní Dochartaigh, alcohol became a way to escape reality. But when she eliminated it, the world came crashing back, with surprising consequences
One writer looks back on her relationship with alcohol, and the moment she decided to leave it all behind
I’D NEVER BEEN A DRINKER. I spent my teens and early twenties too afraid of alcohol to consider touching a drop. Drink, and the violence and sorrow it carries in its wake, had torn apart the lives of too many people I hold dear. Then, at age 28, my past reared its ugly head. Memories and anxiety overwhelmed my day-to-day life. Coming from a broken-up family, in a broken-up city, had left fractures on my insides that ran too deep to properly locate. I had begun to think of life as a place – like the countless geographical spaces I’d been forced to run from – that I might be better off leaving. The first night I started to drink, in a flat overlooking the meadows in Edinburgh, I was a year into a teaching job, at a point in my life that looked (from the outside) like it might start to get easier. I had, in fact, simply reached spilling point. Something about getting to the end of the first decade of adulthood, one that was proving to be no easier than my childhood, hit me hard. It was my 28th birthday party, and – out of nowhere – I left my friends, went to Co-op, and bought as many bottles of red wine as I could carry. I don’t know how much I drank, but I know that I got myself into a state in which I couldn’t remember who I was that night.
My relationship with alcohol became a wild creature then: unruly and horrifying. It came upon me like a hunting, haunting bird that night. I don’t know why or how. What I do know is that I cared so little about myself that I had given in. I’d given every part of myself to something that I’d spent a lifetime begging myself to stay as far away from as I could. I drank almost every day after that. I rarely socialised, mostly drinking alone, as a way to drown out thoughts and memories that, if allowed to surface properly, I was sure would kill me, stone dead and ghost-riddled. Time hurtled onwards and, seven years after that foggy Scottish winter’s night, I found myself living with a kind, loving partner, in a rented terraced house in Derry. That winter, the one before the one I stopped drinking, it snowed in my hometown like it had not done since I was a girl. Snow danced from grey skies, sometimes tinged with salmon-pink hues, for whole days, and through the planet-bright nights. We watched it swirl above the River Foyle: that body of water that has known so much trauma but remains unchanged. My home was a stone’s throw from the one in which I’d woken up, aged 11, surrounded by thick black smoke from
“I convinced myself that it was NO BIG DEAL, I could stop if I wanted to”
the homemade petrol bomb that a group of lads had thrown through my bedroom window in a sectarian attack. It was not the first home I’d had to leave due to danger, and it wasn’t the last. We were bullied out of the next council housing estate less than a year later. Growing up neither Catholic nor Protestant during the Troubles, in a city witnessing violence the likes of which never quite seemed real, resulted in repeated terror raining down on my everyday life. Violence and fear became the norm; far from normal though these things may be. This new house was in a part of my hometown I’d sworn I’d never live in again. The place, in fact, in which I’d experienced much of the pain that led me into alcohol’s tight grip. Odd though it seems, I wonder if I somehow orchestrated that situation. I told people it was the garden and the quietness of the street that had sold it, that had made me go back on my word – change my mind about something so vast – when it was really about things that had happened decades before. Things I needed to really look at, to process, to let go of. By the time that white, folkloric winter arrived, I’d already spent years trying to stop drinking. Even trying to accept that I was abusing myself over and over was more difficult than I could find words for. I knew in that winter of snow and echoey ghosts – as I still know now – that I drank as a form of self-harm; the ultimate way to punish myself for the bad things I believed were my fault. For the sense of shame and guilt I’d been dragging with me for decades; too embarrassed to ask for help to finally unload it all. As I continued to drink every day, starting earlier and earlier as time went on, I convinced myself that it was no big deal, I could stop if I wanted to. (Of course I could…) I repeatedly lied to myself: I didn’t have an issue with alcohol; I was nowhere near the point of ‘addiction’. But, in the early light of morning, I could do nothing but see the real truth of it all. It was my crutch and my own self-punishment, all in one. If I stood any chance of dealing with the past, of healing from trauma still buried deep down, I needed to stop. It snowed, that year, almost every day for weeks. February and March – that crux point where winter gives up its crown to jealously allowing spring to tiptoe in – were cloaked in glistening, ethereal white. I was drawn to that snow in ways I’d never been drawn to anything before; not even to alcohol. It felt like a time outside of time; a place I could enter into, then step out of, changed, like the land. When the snow began to leave, my partner and I walked along a fiercely wild Donegal beach, and I found the remains of a whooper swan, not-quite-white against the storm-blackened sand. I’m not sure what it was about that experience that felt such a turning point. All I know is that it was. Then, on a fairly nondescript day in autumn 2018 – as a wedge of swans flew above me and below a whispered crescent moon – standing not in any sacred or special place but in a Derry alleyway behind my house, cluttered with a broken pram and bin bags, I decided that, before the new year, I was going to stop. I decided that I was going to stop, and that I would do everything within my power to never ever start again. I knew then I was on the same path of self-destruction and dependency as so many people close to me. I was sick of acting, of putting on a fake smile; I was tired of pretending I hadn’t lived the life I had. I wanted to look at the things I’d gone through. I wanted to hold them close, to give them the room they needed – to give me the room I needed – to heal. But healing does not always follow straight lines. Sometimes it happens in ways that might never quite be fully understood, in places that you cannot really pin to any map. It did not happen overnight; the minute I got home from the alleyway I poured myself a drink, and did so for many more weeks to come. But a soft seed had been planted somewhere dark and deep, and seeds will germinate, if they are going to, in their own time. I finally gave up drinking alcohol, completely and utterly, deeply and fully, on 24 November 2018. It was a freezing Saturday in Manchester; a full, golden frost-moon shining down on red northern bricks, and I’d spent the morning lying on a surgical bed, having a canary inked on my left arm. The bird was inspired by my late grandfather, a man I so wished I could still turn to for guidance, who kept wild canaries that he had rescued. As a child, he’d tell me how the birds built their nests, how they didn’t need to place their trust in the branch, nor the tree; the only trust they needed was in their own self. I needed to remember that bird, to be able to see her every day; I needed a visual reminder that I was enough. That I was a thing worth saving. During that time I finally stopped drinking, there was a light to the days that there had never really been before, so much light – light like a flock of white birds in a winter sky. I wanted to wait as it bled out from those unbearably tender skies. I wanted to see what that light looked like sober; no veil between me and the world, in all its heart-breaking, exquisite wonder. I knew then, scared – but grateful to my core – that I was no longer leaving. I knew I had decided to stay. I knew then, as that light-filled, hauntingly beautiful winter unfurled; that I was, in fact, only just arriving.
Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh is out now