A pandemic-shaped path to sobriety
by Jade Green
Photo by Jill Burrow for Pexels
TW: Alcoholism, mention of suicidal thoughts
It started when I was 13, and my poison was the humble Bacardi Breezer. Remember those? Fizzy alcohol in bright-coloured bottles, targeted at people with under-developed palates, people not yet ready to tolerate the taste of actual alcohol. The sugar rush you would get from a Bacardi Breezer was probably more intense than the alcohol hit, but still, they did the trick.
I came of age in the early 2000s, when we were living through peak binge drinking culture. In the working class city I called home, the only thing to do after school was drink. Supermarket booze was cheaper than it had ever been, and glossy adverts on TV and in magazines turned casual alcoholism into an aspirational lifestyle. Add to this a dash of social anxiety, a sprinkling of self-hatred, and you have a recipe for pickled liver.
In the UK, boozing is our national sport, a pastime so woven into the fabric of being British that nobody questions it. Every major milestone, from birthday to graduation to wedding to divorce to funeral, is marked with a blackout and a sore head. I took my (literal) first steps in the pub, forged friendships with the help of JD and Coke, met my first boyfriend under the veil of liquid courage. The socialisation structure of my first weeks at University was built around alcohol consumption, and this only intensified when I got a job in a student pub, where free pitchers of snakebite were awarded after every busy shift. Things didn’t change once I was out in Adult World; fitting in with the culture of 9-5 was dependent on your willingness for post-work drinks, boozy office parties, and the shared pain of the Monday-morning hangover.
It wasn’t just the cultural pressure of drinking that shaped my lifestyle choices, but also its medicinal effect. I had severe social anxiety and alcohol fixed that. I was popular, confident, fun when I was drunk. People liked me. Socialising became easy. From an alarmingly young age I had bought into the myth that drinking was ‘cool’, and not drinking was ‘boring’. This was something I believed, deep in my gut, right up until my thirtieth birthday.
When the pandemic hit, at the tail-end of my roaring twenties, I was forced to examine my cosy relationship with alcohol. Office culture quickly petered out, pubs closed their shutters, and we were no longer allowed to see our friends. The pressures of social drinking were suddenly snatched away. Lockdown brought a period of space, silence, time for reflection. I started to think about alcohol’s purpose in my life. I wondered where the line was between casual drinking and full-blown addiction.
I’d always told myself things like: I’m not an alcoholic because I don’t drink every day. I’m not an alcoholic because I don’t become abusive or harmful to others when drunk. I’m not an alcoholic because (most of the time) I don’t start drinking until the evening. I’m not an alcoholic because my finances haven’t been affected by my drinking. I’m not an alcoholic because I can still maintain relationships despite my drinking. I’m not an alcoholic because I can (nearly) always remember everything the next day. I’m not an alcoholic because I don’t depend on alcohol to get through life – well, not really. Alcoholics are those sad, lonely men you see in Wetherspoons alone on a Tuesday morning. Alcoholics have no control.
After the first lockdown came into effect, during the novelty days of the pandemic, I was drinking more than usual. It would start with a cocktail on Thursday night and continue all the way through to red wine on Sunday afternoon. A little craving, followed by a four-day binge. What else was there to do? We were locked down, outings limited to supermarket trips. Inviting aisles stacked with shimmering bottles, 2-for-1 offers, cold beers to get us through summer, wine to make the evenings slip by. A cheeky single malt, for a treat. We deserve it. We’re in a pandemic!
Then June 2020 came, and I turned 30. Being in lockdown, I couldn’t do much to celebrate. So I drank. A lot. On the last night of my twenties, I probably consumed a month’s worth of units in one sitting – beer, wine, whiskey, brandy, you name it. I didn’t really give it much thought. Waking up with a horrendous hangover on my thirtieth birthday seemed…inevitable. Essential, even. Another booze-soaked milestone in the life of a Brit.
For me, the worst kind of hangover is the one where you can’t throw up, even though your body is signalling that it needs to. The one that is just eight hours of feeling sick and clammy, as your liver shrivels in shame and your brain tries to piece itself back together. The one where every time you go into the bathroom and crouch over the toilet bowl, nothing comes, so you sit on the floor like a big, useless lump of dehydrated flesh and contemplate your life choices. This is how I spent my thirtieth birthday – looking into the loo, wondering: ‘why did I choose this?’.
Why did I feel the pressure to drink even when there was no one to pressure me?
If I was a fixed-mindset person (which I can be, sometimes), I would probably look at my circumstances and see alcoholism as inescapable. It runs in my family. It runs in the city where I was born and raised. It runs in my generation, who came of age when binge drinking was at its cultural zenith. It runs in my chosen profession; from Bukowski to Hemingway, the archetype of the alcoholic writer is long established, even glamorized.
Up until the pandemic, part of the reason I believed I had to drink was because it’s what other people did, and I wanted to be liked by other people. I didn’t know it at the time, but many of my friendships were dependent on alcohol to survive. Eighteen months into my sobriety, I’ve let go of those relationships, and that’s OK. I have made the choice to prioritise my health and mental wellbeing over my people-pleasing tendencies, my need to be liked. I no longer buy into the myth that I am ‘boring’ for choosing sobriety. And I have found other ways to soothe my anxiety, to quiet the voices in my head, that don’t involve drinking.
Any time I doubt my decision, or a craving for alcohol sneaks in, I think back to a warm summer night five years ago when I was walking home after a day of drinking. I’d met a group of friends for a ‘bottomless brunch’ and drank my weight in prosecco. I remember being so intoxicated when the brunch was over that I forgot my PIN for the card machine and a friend had to lend me the money to pay. We left the restaurant and continued the session with cans in the park. Everyone seemed happy, giggly, content. As I stumbled home that night, bloated and sun-scorched, I was seized by an intense urge to end my life. Walking up a side-street leading to my flat, I saw tall tower blocks silhouetted against the clear night sky. Thoughts of climbing the nearest block and jumping off raced through my mind. I was crying. The streets were deserted. There was nothing, no one, to stop me.
I’ve since learned that the risk of suicide is eight times higher when someone has been drinking. I’d always thought of booze as an antidote to my mental health problems, but the opposite is true. If you have any tendencies towards depression or anxiety, as I did and do, alcohol is like petrol to a flame. Luckily, that night, my desire to live was strong enough to tip the balance in favour of waking the next morning. But it’s not a risk I’m willing to take again.
Jade Green
Jade (she/her) writes fiction, co-hosts a podcast about creativity called Pivotal Slice, and is keeping her anxiety under control using meditation, running and self-development practices.
You can follow her work here