SUNDAY 28TH AUGUST 2022
Another busy week and, whereas family life has felt relatively settled, tension at work has been at an all-time high and I feel emotionally drained by it all. The desire to just forget about it all over some wine has been there a little but mainly I’ve been counting my blessings that I’m not dealing with all of that whilst also dealing with hangovers.
MY WHY
Last Sunday my husband had an all-day golf thing on and arrived home in the evening incredibly drunk. That wasn’t a problem – he doesn’t do it often and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him that bad in all our years together. It did, however, remind me of one of my many reasons for not drinking: I don’t want to look drunk. The first memory I have of someone commenting on my having been drunk in a way that bothered me was when I ran in to a friend of a friend a few weeks after a wedding we’d both been at back in 1998. It annoyed me that he saw fit to comment on my drunkenness when I seem to remember that all of us were pretty smashed, and it stung. It hasn’t happened very often over the years – probably because most of the people I would drink with were too polite and/or such pissheads themselves that it would have been a bit of a pot and kettle scenario – but the older I get, the more paranoid I’ve become about the likelihood of someone commenting on the fact that I have been obviously drunk. I cringe now when I think of the drunken states I’ve gotten into over the years and, whereas I can pass off the antics of my student days affectionately and my carefree single days (which went on a bit longer for me than most) indulgently, I definitely don’t want to be seen to be staggering around drunk like a middle aged lush. I’m not judging anyone else here – I’m happy to see people having a good time – this is just about me. It may well be that my paranoia has blown the whole thing out of proportion and that I do carry myself better now that I’m not indulging to the same extent as I used to, but why take the risk? I was a guest at an all-day wedding earlier this year and one of the motivating factors in me deciding to drive was the fact that I just didn’t want to end up staggering around a swanky hotel looking drunk, which I knew I inevitably would. Other people were drinking all day and, for the most part, they didn’t look particularly drunk, which sort of compounded my fear that, had I been drinking, I would’ve been the one standing out and not in a good way. (I’m starting to see a theme here: alcohol consumption can lead to paranoia, just like other drugs – I’ve read such things so I guess it must hold true for me.) One day, not long before I stopped drinking, my husband made some totally benign comment about me having been pissed the night before by way of explanation for something I had said or done. I can’t remember the details of what it was and I know that there was no malice or judgement in his comment, but I remember it stung all the same. So really, if I am unable to take a comment like that from the one person in the world that I know would never judge me, why put myself in that position? It really is a no-brainer, isn’t it? If I don’t want to appear drunk, I just shouldn’t drink. End of.
Theme Tune: Stupid Girl by Garbage