SUNDAY 8TH JANUARY 2023
I’ve never done Dry January before – mainly due to the fact that, in my opinion, a true Dry January would mean stopping drinking at midnight on Hogmanay. Never an option. And even if I’d allowed myself to count from when I woke up on New Year’s Day, that didn’t seem do-able either because there would still be so much booze left in the house. In fact, a couple of years ago, I declared it a new tradition that de-Christmassing the house on 2nd January should be accompanied by having one last bottle of festive fizz. Not this year though – dry from the get go!
MY WHY
So, what’s worse than the 3 am wake up when your memory is hazy and you’re embarrassed about what you’ve said or done the night before? The 3 am wake up when the latter part of the evening is a complete blank, that’s what. Not only do you not remember getting home, you don’t remember how you got there. I used to joke that, after certain nights out, I could only figure out how I’d gotten home by how much money I had in my purse. If I had a lot, I must’ve managed to get a bus, if I didn’t, I must’ve gotten a taxi. If my fingers smelled of vinegar, I must’ve gotten chips on the way home. It seemed amusing at the time – now I look back on it with horror. From when I first started drinking as a student, memory lapses were part and parcel of a night out and it actually seemed odd to me that some people didn’t experience that. Many years later, I remember my sister being upset once about not remembering part of the night before and I said, “welcome to my world”. She said she didn’t like my world – neither did I, but I just accepted that that was the way things were with me. Most of the time it didn’t bother me but there were a handful of instances that upset me. Once it took me 2 days to summon up the courage to ask a colleague to clarify what had happened at the end of a particularly boozy work night out. I resolved that, if the worst that I was imagining had happened, I would have to stop drinking. Thankfully, it hadn’t and I think I might actually have cried tears of relief. And then carried on drinking. It wasn’t until 2020, when I read Sarah Hepola’s “Blackout” that I understood what was actually happening here. Apparently, when the alcohol in the blood reaches a certain level, the hippocampus, the part of the brain that forms memories, shuts down. WHAT?! Alcohol actually causes a part of your brain to shut down – what a terrifying though! I applaud Sarah for speaking out and sharing her most painful “memories” of blacking out. It caused me to go back over some of my own and it really upset me to think that I was walking around, doing stuff and part of my brain had shut down. It made me wonder about the people I’d been with in such instances – did they know that they were interacting with someone who was so drunk that part of their brain had shut down? Apparently not – apparently you just walk and talk and do what you do and anyone else would be oblivious to the fact that part of your brain has shut down. Am I being repetitive here? Shall I say it one more time? Alcohol causes part of your brain to shut down!
Theme Tune: Demons by Imagine Dragons