My name is Jayne and I am not an alcoholic.
That knowledge has held me back for years. Like what I imagine is probably most people, I always thought that there were 3 types of people when it came to alcohol:
- Alcoholics / serious hardened drinkers
- Tee-totallers (be it for health reasons, religious reasons or some other, more unfathomable reasons)
- Normal drinkers, i.e. everyone else
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it was that I started questioning my own drinking – maybe it will become clear over the course of this year – but the best way I can describe it is that I felt I had an uncomfortable relationship with alcohol. I clearly wasn’t an alcoholic so I wasn’t going to take myself off to AA to be laughed out of the room and anyway, stopping drinking altogether was never really a consideration because I thought that only true alcoholics had to go that far.
I’ve done many periods of abstinence over the years – usually coinciding with a health kick or a desire to lose weight – and I’ve never been a daily drinker (except over the holidays!) so I didn’t consider myself to have a problem as such. So why did drinking / not drinking consume my thoughts so much? Why did I feel increasingly uneasy and guilty about drinking? Why couldn’t I just enjoy a drink when the occasion arose then forget all about it until the next time an occasion arose when I could enjoy it again – all guilt-free? Why could I not just drink like a “normal drinker”? I felt very alone with all these concerns because no-one around me seemed to share them.
When the Covid pandemic hit, like most of the world’s drinkers, I over-indulged. I felt I needed alcohol to cope with all the stress and uncertainty and being cooped up in the house with 2 young children, both struggling themselves to adjust to the situation, not to mention the dreaded home-schooling. There I know I was definitely not alone! But 2 months in, shortly before my 50th birthday, I knew I couldn’t carry on like that. I felt stressed, anxious, fat and just miserable. I decided that, once my 50th and my husband’s 50th (10 days after mine) were out of the way, I would stop drinking. Initially it was to be for 100 days (I like a nice round number!) and I would do it like I had always done before – with sheer willpower and determination, inevitably feeling deprived the whole time. Then something wonderful happened……
I shared my plan via What’s App with a lady I had fairly recently got to know, albeit not very well, because I knew she had done an extended alcohol-free period a couple of years before. She suggested I read This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. In need of some motivation, I ordered it from Amazon along with the 30 day Alcohol Experiment and I can honestly say that that book has changed my life. My 100 days alcohol-free got extended to 150 days and, instead of a period of deprivation, it became a voyage of discovery. Not only did I learn to look at alcohol in a completely different way, it opened up the whole sobersphere and I was amazed and overjoyed to discover that there is a whole sober movement out there. People just like me are questioning their drinking, deciding that they are better off without it and raving about the way their lives have changed for the better now that alcohol is no longer a part of it. Who knew? Certainly not me!
Stopping drinking altogether was never my goal and it still isn’t but, a couple of months in, I was able to say, in all honesty, that, if I had to choose between complete sobriety and returning the way I felt and drank before, complete sobriety would win hands down and that still holds true for me now.
After my 150 days, I returned to drinking but more mindfully this time and with more frequent extended periods of abstinence. I kept in touch with the sobersphere via podcasts and quit lit and I guess I would then describe myself as “sober curious”.
I have now decided to take this to the next level and experience a full year alcohol-free. Given that this decision has essentially been over 2 years in the making and, knowing that there is a whole sober community out there for support, I don’t doubt that I can do it. It’s still daunting though!
There are a few of reasons why I have decided to record my journey in a blog.
- When out walking my dog, listening to sober podcasts, I kept finding myself telling my own story in my head and missing out on what was being said in the actual podcast. I came to the conclusion that I really need to get my thoughts about alcohol and my history with it out of my head for once and for all so that I can move on and alcohol can become “small and insignificant” in my life. I hope that putting all these thoughts down in black and white will allow me to do that.
- I knew I could just journal and leave it at that but, as my planned Day 1 grew closer and I started to dwell on the fact that a full year is so much longer than I have ever abstained for before, my confidence started to waiver. I have shared my plan with my family and a few friends so I already have some level of accountability but, at the end of the day, I know that if I were to capitulate somewhere down the line, they would all just pat me on the back and tell me that I’d done really well to abstain as long as I had. I need a different level of accountability so that’s why I’ve decided to put this out into cyberspace. Supposing no-one else ever reads it, I’ll know it’s out there and I’ll know that, if it doesn’t run for a full year, I will have let myself down badly. I’ll also know that there is a possibility that some stranger will know that I’ve failed too.
- I’m all about listening to what the Universe has to tell me at the moment so, when the name for this blog popped into my head without me searching for it and before I’d even committed to doing it, I knew that I had to go ahead with it. The song Sunday Morning Coming Down is basically about feeling shit the morning after the night before. My dad was a big Johnny Cash fan and that was one of the songs that we played at his funeral this year so it has been in my thoughts a lot lately. I’ve spent far too many Sunday mornings coming down (albeit from alcohol, rather than weed as the song suggests but same/same – it’s all drugs) so, for the next year, rather than coming down, I’ll be coming up – celebrating each alcohol-free week with a hangover-free Sunday. I think my dad would appreciate the irony – at the very least he’d be pleased about being partially responsible for me doing something that is going to have a positive impact on my health.
Theme Song: Sunday Morning Coming Down by Johnny Cash