SUNDAY 3RD JULY 2022
My first full alcohol-free week. Not only has it been one of my busiest weeks at work, with a big event coming up at the weekend and my colleague off sick so I’m pretty much going it alone, but it has been the last week of the school year. There is always stuff going on the last week of the summer term but this year it has been busier than usual with Leavers activities as my son saw out his last days at primary school. Needless to say, emotions have been running high! Normally, I would see the busy, emotional days as justification for a glass of wine or a G&T of an evening but I was glad that wasn’t an option because I wasn’t throwing hangovers into the tired, emotional mix. To be honest, despite fleeting thoughts of a chilled glass of white wine, more out of habit than anything else, I haven’t been tempted or missed it. I have, however, been tetchy and felt quite low in a way that I’d normally feel after a weekend of drinking. I’m hoping that my mood will improve as the busyness of work eases off and the kids settle into holiday mode because I hate that low-level depression that I have been blaming on alcohol and the thought of it not being attributable to alcohol is more than I can bear to consider right now.
MY WHY
Because, in the immortal words of The Stranglers, “Something Better Change”. I really can’t go on like this. Surely my life has to amount to more than just putting one foot in front of the other every day. It seems like all I do is work, look after my children and keep house. The worst part is, I feel like I’m failing spectacularly in all 3 of those areas. Every day, by the time I’ve done what absolutely has to be done, I’ve no energy left for anything else. So, instead of consoling myself with wine, which is pretty much what I seem to have been doing for the last God knows how long, I’ve decided to take what I now believe to be the logical first step on the road to sorting out my life – I’m taking alcohol out of the equation altogether.
For years now, I’ve been wishing that there were just more hours in a day, which is kind of pointless – there will never be more hours in a day, the laws of the Universe won’t allow it. However, it has slowly dawned on me that I can (hopefully!) create more useful hours in a week by doing away with all those hours that alcohol consumption ruins and turning them into productive hours. My days of suffering debilitating hangovers that take me out for a whole day are thankfully long behind me but they’ve been replaced by a general feeling of lethargy, apathy, irritability and anxiety that is just not conducive to getting shit done the day after I’ve had what now seems to be any amount of alcohol. That’s not to mention the hours lost on the drinking occasion itself. I used to think I deserved a couple of cold beers to keep me going while I was tackling the never-ending housework but recently I’ve noticed that, once my first drink is poured, I pretty much down tools for the day. Hours and hours every week, wasted due to alcohol. No wonder I feel like I can barely keep my head above water with the things I need to do, let alone carry them out to the best of my ability and then, heaven forbid, have any time or energy left over to do anything useful that might actually take my life beyond this feeling of just having to put one foot in front of the other.
Theme Song: Something Better Change by The Stranglers