SUNDAY 21ST AUGUST 2022
It took almost 8 weeks but eventually it came on Monday – the overwhelming desire to just get drunk. I had a few notions like that during my last big purge so I was on the look out for it and to be honest, I’m surprised it took that long. Frustrations with work and family were such that the thought of sitting down with a bottle of red wine (or any alcohol really) and just letting it all fade into the background, just for a few hours, seemed so attractive. Of course I didn’t give in to it – there was never any question that I would – but it did leave me wondering….. Could there be a place for indulging that feeling in the future? Could I allow myself to drink in those instances? I would be under no illusions – the drinking wouldn’t solve the issues that had driven me to it and I would know that dealing with them again the following day would be that much harder with the alcohol in my system. Even writing this now, I know that the horror of the aftermath would far out-weight the benefits of the indulgence so it seems silly to even consider it but I remember that feeling of temporary relief and I remember how welcome it could be.
MY WHY
In total contradiction to what I’ve just said above, one of my reasons for not drinking is that I just don’t want to numb out anymore. Pretty much all of my adult life, I have blocked out uncomfortable feelings by drinking alcohol and/or smoking. In fact, if I consider smoking too, it goes back further to my early teenage years when smoking swiftly moved from being something I did to try to fit in and look cool to a crutch I used whenever I felt bored or socially awkward, which I guess was quite a lot of the time. It is only now that I’m starting to realise how damaging that type of behaviour is in terms of emotional development. I had never thought of either smoking or drinking as a crutch until I read Allen Carr’s ‘The Easy Way To Control Alcohol’ way back in 2007. I bought the book in the hope that it would teach me how to moderate effectively so I was hugely disappointed when the conclusion was that the easy way to control alcohol is just not to drink it at all. I wasn’t ready for that back then and, having now read so much more on the subject, I would say that his method didn’t work for me because, whereas it successfully downplayed all the supposed benefits of drinking, in my opinion, he didn’t make enough of the benefits of not drinking, if that makes sense. Still, I guess he did sow the seeds of doubt in my mind – it’s just a shame it took over a decade for them to start to take hold. Between my last extended alcohol-free period and this one, I remember pondering how that feeling of numbing out would be a great loss to me should I ever decide to go alcohol-free again and wishing I could come up with a non-alcoholic way to replicate it. I did buy some CBD infused drinks earlier this year in the hope that they might do the trick but they didn’t. 2 out of 3 of them tasted nice and I guess they did provide that feeling of treating myself with an “adult” drink but I wouldn’t be inclined to buy any more. However, since embarking on my current journey, I’ve realised that, last Monday excepted, that desire to numb out seems to have left me, which is quite a revelation. There is sense of freedom in knowing that minor irritations, like the frustrations of parenthood, pass – sometimes so much more quickly – when you just ride them out and don’t exacerbate them by numbing them out one day only to have them hit you harder the next. Likewise, dealing with bigger emotions, like missing dad, feels more honest and tears feel more cathartic when they don’t bubble up over a bottle of wine.
Theme Tune: Feel by Robbie Williams