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This Sober Girl

giving up alcohol, first for one year, later…well, let's find out.

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Day 2: waking up Not Hungover

andiegetssober Apr 8, 2018
hungover-owl

Hungover Owls, I feel ya.

It’s Day 2 and holy crap, can anyone really not drink for a year? What do they…actually DO?

 

No, wait. Let’s try that again, this time without the ghosts of negative thoughts a-gathering.

 

It’s Day 2! I woke up to a NoMo chip on my phone – a great sobriety tracking app which pops up cheerily and declares “woohoo! Yesterday you did not drink!” – and it wasn’t quite as much of a thrill as that time I woke up to find that Lin Manuel Miranda had liked one of my tweets, but it was extremely pleasing all the same. I could hear my partner B. in the kitchen, talking to the cat as though she’s a human. He brought me tea, the sun was shining, and I was Regular Morning Tired.

 

In other words, I was Not Hungover.

 

Today I am going to contemplate the different kingdoms of Regular Morning Tired and Hungover. Or, if you will, the Starks and the Targaryens, the Hufflepuff and Slytherin, the Good Janet and Bad Janet of morningtimes. If you’re here, I imagine you might have experienced them both, because you might well have experienced the “well hell yes let’s open another bottle/head on to the next bar/go on to this lovely whisky I’ve got” night before which leads directly to the “uuuuurgghhhh sweet baby jesus why” morning after.

 

Regular Morning Tired is bleary and soft. It lies on you heavily for a while, but it can be coaxed off with a friendly cup of tea and some light conversation. It makes your limbs heavy, but you can shake or shower it off, and enjoy the feeling of slowly coming up. You surface through Regular Morning Tired, break the water, draw breath and emerge as yourself, into a daylight that might be a little bright but which is ultimately welcoming. By the time you’ve turned on the radio or checked the news, got dressed, hopped in the car or strolled to the tube stop, Regular Morning Tired decides that it has things to do and heads off in its own direction, whistling to itself, and you barely notice it slipping away into the distance.

 

Hungover is different. It’s scaly and clingy. It squats on your chest like Gollum, and growls if you try to get away from it, and it follows you closely into the bathroom, or the kitchen, and breathes hotly down your neck. It has a sour smell, and it won’t be fooled by strong coffee or by a cool shower: it can be quietened down by greasy carbs, just a little, but it’s not gone, just lurking. You can feel it licking its lips wetly as you ride the bus or walk to class, as you pound a bottle of water in the office bathroom and it makes your stomach lurch, and you stand just a little further away from everyone than usual, just in case they can see its red eyes, its puffy cheeks, its dull, grey skin. At lunchtime, it’s still in your bones. Everything feels leaden and dragging. By late afternoon, Hungover might have decided to climb off you, but it’s still next to you, still stalking you with its seedy shuffle and its quiet, malicious muttering, because Hungover is fascinated with your faults, which it lists relentlessly just within earshot: lazy, ill-disciplined, no self-control, missing the gym again, are we, weak, immature, embarrassing, stupid. Hungover follows you home, maybe three or four paces behind you now, maybe quieter, and then quite suddenly, as evening falls, you hear the door bang behind it. “God,” you say, “I finally feel better.”

 

But Hungover knows where you live. Hungover will be back.

When I was younger, I had what I thought was an amazing resilience to hangovers (and which I now realise was just a state called “being in your early twenties and being basically bullet-proof, you lucky, young, perfect-skinned fool” rather than some sort of special gift for shrugging off a skinfull). I bounced back. Now, I genuinely believe that Hungover knows the exact date of your thirtieth birthday and turns up like a very unwelcome guest, bearing two beautifully wrapped gifts: Gift 1, several bottles of the much more expensive booze that you can now appreciate and afford and Gift 2, the complete inability to drink them without consequences.

 

Because I didn’t drink every day, I often spent time with Regular Morning Tired. I learned to really appreciate its gentle ways, but I always went crawling back to Hungover eventually. And we do have a strange, shared cultural response to Hungover, don’t we? We celebrate it. We trade war stories about it, we slap each other’s backs in jocular commiseration and use terms like “absolute lad” and “legend”, we make hit movies about it, and we use the “horrific morning after” as a hilarious trope on sit-coms. Regular Morning Tired, by comparison, can seem a bit…well…dull. After all, no one ever pitched “a group of friends have a nice dinner, enjoy each other’s company, go to bed at a sensible time and wake up a bit sleepy but basically fine WITH HILLARIOUS CONSEQUENCES!” to a room-full of gleeful studio execs.

 

When I told a few friends about my plans for a full year off the booze, and floated the idea of it all getting a bit much, what with the lurking figure of Hungover getting ever worse and all, one of them looked at me with real exasperation and said, “then why on earth don’t you just drink a bit LESS?”

 

I don’t know why.

 

Why don’t I just drink less? When I know full well that Hungover knows where I live, and is just outside and knocking at my door?

 

But you see, in folk tales and mythology, from Vampires to Trojan Horses, there’s often a common theme uniting the things that are really going to hurt you. They rely on you to do it to yourself. You always have to invite them in.

 

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Day 1

andiegetssober Apr 7, 2018

I drink too much so I’m not going to do that anymore.

 

*hysterical laughter, wiping away tears, god I slay me*

 

It’s…not quite that easy, is it? I mean, that sounds simple. Logical. Sensible. The sort of thing that a person with common sense would shake their head at, slowly, and say “well, OBVIOUSLY, yes. Quite. Spot on. That seems like the thing to do.”

 

I feel like many of us people who drink too much spend an awful lot of time with that sentence playing around in our brains. We side-eye ourselves and tut in exasperation, because that seems so damn easy and reasonable, and we were TOTALLY going to have a quiet weekend and keep a lid on it like the sensible people this time, weren’t we?  And so, for goodness sake, why, again, yet-a-bloody-gain, are we here crawling out of a stale bed with our eyes bleary, our blood-sugar somewhere in our boots, our heads thick and woolly, our thoughts sluggish, and our hangover food of choice lurking guiltily on a greasy plate nearby?

 

And there’s more. And worse. Oh god, why are we beginning The Calculations again? You know The Calculations. They go something like this: right, last night. Any major errors? Any “accidentally do serious damage to a friendship/really upset a loved one/have a pointless-and-yet-somehow-in-the-moment-vital-and-cataclysmic row with a partner/wooops-there-go-my-bloomers and hello where am I and who is THIS lying next to me now” majors? Any minor errors? Phones lost, wallets left in cabs, coats and hats abandoned, a friend who got fed up with some drunken and overbearing or overemoting nonsense we inflicted on them (again)? After the diagnostic check comes the fixing: the grovelling whatsapp message, the shame-faced apology, the prodding of the unidentified drunken bruise and the stopping of the bank-card. Have we done enough? Have we fixed it? Can we get brunch? I really need brunch.

 

(Did you think The Calculations were over? They are not over.)

 

Can I suggest a drink with brunch?

 

I mean, I was pretty steaming last night.

 

Will they think I have some sort of…problem?

 

How do I phrase this?

 

I mean, everyone has a drink with brunch.

 

Everyone knows a hair of the dog is ok.

 

How can I persuade them to get a drink with brunch?

 

Is anyone else going to…oh thank god, yes please, a Bloody Mary. Strong as you can make it without losing your job, Dave. Cheers.

 

(With the first long, deep slug of your Bloody Mary, as the vodka hits your tattered and twitchy system…now, NOW The Calculations are over. And you think, quietly at first, wow, thank god I only drink at the weekend. Well, mostly at the weekend. If things were like this every day, I’d have some sort of…problem. I mean – another slug of sweet, hairy-dog-vodka – imagine if I had some sort of…problem! And then you think, much more noisily, right then, lads: now we’re drinking, which bar are we going on to after brunch?)

 

There is a small logo at the bottom of gambling websites and advertisements in the UK (where I now live) that says: “When the fun stops, stop.” It’s a good logo. When it comes to drinking alcohol, I am one of an increasing number of people in the UK and around the world who have been looking around at the fun slowly stopping. Many of us are, like me, in our thirties, in good jobs, with good friends and partners and with no dramatic Ernest Hemmingway/Zelda Fitzgerald/Oliver Reed/Amy Winehouse-esque (pick your preferred drunk of reference) crash-and-burn scenario going on.

 

But we don’t have an off-switch. We drink too much. And it’s been a slow realisation but it’s just not working very well any more.

 

So, where was I? Ah, yes. Hello. This is my blog. My name is Andie. It’s my Day 1. I am not going to drink alcohol for the next 365 days, at least.

 

Because I drink too much so I’m not going to do that anymore.

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365 days of leaving alcohol behind

andiegetssober Apr 6, 2018

Welcome to my year of learning how to live alcohol-free in a world awash with the stuff

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait.” Paulo Coelho

 

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Welcome. This is my giving up alcohol blog. My head is muzzy, my hair a mess, my arm aches from a new tattoo and my cat is curled up asleep at my feet. My NoMo clock says Day 1. I am not entirely sure how to use WordPress properly yet, but I have 365 days to learn and a fine cup coffee to spur me on. Let’s do this.

On my blog pages, I am going to write about the process of quitting drinking. My About page tells you a little bit more about me. In Reviews, I’m going to explore books, podcasts and other media about giving up drinking, and under Resources, I’ve started to link to helpful online material about going dry.

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