I did dry February as well as January – and waved goodbye to hangxiety
Iwoke on 16 February at noon. I immediately realised that the day was not favouring me and returned to bed, finally emerging like some evolutionary mistake at about 4.30pm. I creaked downstairs to deal with my phone’s chirpy pings: messages from my equally hungover bandmates who were deciding to brave the pub.
No! Absolutely not! Not today, Satan! This was officially my second hangover of the year, and I was not about to borrow from the future to pay for the present. Sure, there would have been a time when I would have dragged my sorry ass into some comfy clothes, then a taxi, and spent my Saturday
night trying to forget that I had a hangover in the first place – but no more. Instead, it was straight to the sofa with a massive pot of tea and seemingly endless episodes of a series that I’m sure someone put a lot of work into, but that I can’t really remember. Then it was “Shall we order a Thai?”, and a snooze.
Look, I’m not teetotal. I don’t want to be. Neither am I the compulsive inebriate most suspect me to be. I can have a glass of wine without finishing the bottle. I am a woman in her 30s with responsibilities, trying to grasp control of her life in a world that is both distracted by – and neurotic about – its modern virtues, which are themselves extensive and difficult and often wholly narcissistic. There is no guidebook for this – or rather, there are about 300 new guidebooks published every week by effortlessly beautiful people with effortlessly simple existences who say that if you drink coconut oil with coffee and never listen to the news, you’ll start farting out rose petals and space dust.
I just don’t want to deal with the hangxiety any more: the creeping panic, the shame, the guilt. I already renounced Catholicism. A recent study at Rutgers and Yale Universities claimed that binge and heavy drinking could even change us on a genetic level, leading to increased cravings for more booze. I like my genes as they are, thank you.
The first hangover of the year was New Year’s Day. I had risen to similar feelings of palpitating horror and vowed then and there that I would quit smoking and do dry January. Once I got past the first weekend, it was fine. I was arranging to do outdoorsy stuff all the time. I went falconeering and joined the National Trust, which is cheaper than a
month’s worth of booze. I started getting up early and going for a wander in the woods by my house – “forest bathing”, or Shinrin-yoku as it is known in health and wellbeing speak (and, of course, Japanese).
And ultimately, I knew that if I had a drink, I would end up smoking, and I don’t want to smoke. This year’s extradry January was great for me. Everyone was quitting drinking, so all my most formidable hurdles to kicking the fags were down. I had such a successful dry Jan that I carried on into dry Feb. I just did it all, all at once, like a superhero adult-boss-queen, who is living her best life, living, laughing and loving.
So why was everyone getting so annoyed with me? Was I, as my husband interpreted, constantly fishing for compliments while slyly pouring scorn on other people’s unhealthy choices? Absolutely. But I was doing really well at abstaining. More than that, my capacity for all things was enhanced. No, not enhanced – restored. While others were actively taking the piss and encouraging me to drink, I was getting shit done. I was finding it easier to reach out to people. I regained the confidence to be open and really connect with my fellow humans.
I don’t want my genes ordering me to drink up. I want board game nights and cinema excursions and a trip to a country house … Am I becoming boring? Maybe, but if feeling this fabulously bloody brilliant is boring, then long reign tedium. That being said, if Wales win the grand slam, I’ll be too busy popping corks to remember that actually Sobriety was a girl I knew from Hay-on-Wye.