Reflections at Four Years Sober

This morning, I woke up in my bed in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The fan is circulating the air, and it’s 28 degrees outside. Four years ago yesterday, I woke up in my bed in freezing cold Hackney, London, with a slight headache. On that day, I decided I was going to stop drinking alcohol for good. The direction of my life has changed a few since then, taking me from Hackney to Norfolk and then to Cambodia. I am now, quite literally, 10,000 miles from home – and four years sober.

The 12th December 2016 was not the first time I decided to stop drinking. It wasn’t the second, third, fourth or even fourteenth time I’d tried to get sober. I’d been questioning my relationship with alcohol since the beginning of 2015, and I had started trying to stop in January 2016. It took nearly the whole year to stick, but I am glad it eventually did. I remember how isolated I felt in those early days of trying to stop drinking. How alone it felt to be struggling with alcohol at 24 years old when all I really wanted was to fit in. Back then, I knew only one person who didn’t drink. Now probably half of my close friends are non-drinkers. And if I count social media mates, I have met thousands of fellow sober shakers.

Sobriety’s reputation has shifted massively over the last four years. 

The conversation has exploded and the rise of Instagram sobriety and positive mainstream media coverage is amazing. But has sobriety itself changed? I don’t think so. Are more young people getting sober? The statistics say yes. But it is still a decision that you must make on your own. A commitment that you follow by making the same decision over and over, to not drink alcohol. Sobriety continues to give us the same gifts of clarity, improved health and more time – albeit you can now more easily find sober friends to share your found zest for hangover-free life with.

2020 has been the most challenging year I have had in a long time. And I’m sure many people would say the same. There have been a couple of times over the last few months where I have wished I could numb the pain and temporarily escape reality with a bottle of wine; but I sat with that pain and I am stronger for it. These cravings took me by surprise, as they are something I grew out of as my sobriety matured. It is very, very rare for me these days to want to drink – in fact I’d say I don’t think I’d had a moment of even thinking about drinking since summer 2019. So, these two days of “fuck it” thoughts were confronting to say. Confronting but comforting. Comforting? Let me explain… I do not drink. Since the day I quit drinking alcohol in 2016, I haven’t identified as a drinker. I stopped saying I was trying not to drink and started stating “no thanks, I don’t drink”. This repetition, saying “I don’t drink” over and over and over again has patterned it into my brain. Four years on, when that thought came up, it was easy for me to dismiss it. Drinking alcohol is no longer a thing I do, or want to do. And being able to dismiss intrusive drinking thoughts when they come with ease is comforting to me.

Sobriety is my safe place. When everything else is in flux, I know my sobriety is solid.

I am so grateful that I have not drunk my way through the difficult times of this year, and through any of the times I struggled over the last few years.

I used to drink alcohol to boost my confidence, and to numb pain and anxiety. When I removed booze from the equation, I had to learn how to be confident without it. And how to properly manage my emotions and anxiety. Alcohol had been soothing my struggles since I was 15, I gave up drinking when I was 25. I had a decade of drinking to cope to overcome. A therapist once presented me with an interesting thought: ‘if you start drinking young, you never learn to cope or self-soothe without alcohol. So when you stop drinking, you must re-parent yourself to regulate your emotions and your life without it’. This makes a lot of sense to me. It is something I have been working on over the last four years. Just as a parent might soothe their baby from crying with a dummy or their favourite blanket, I soothed my heartbreak, disappointment and fear with pinot grigio. Time and time again: cry – booze, celebrate – booze, commiserate – booze. I took the booze away and had to learn how to deal with feelings I didn’t want to feel without it. I have learnt how to sit with uncomfortable feelings, and I finally got help for the anxiety that I had been struggling with since I was a child (without realising it). What soothes me now? Stillness, baths, talking to friends, working through issues in therapy and my bed. When all else fails, getting under the duvet and closing my eyes away from the world. What soothes you?

Many people love Louise Hay, and likely an equal number of people dismiss her work as woo-woo nonsense. In early sobriety, her books helped me find stable-ground of self-acceptance. She approaches positive change from a place of self-love, using affirmations and mirror work such as “I love and accept myself exactly as I am”.

In 2016, my mind was filled with shame, and fear, and sadness, of all that I had done and had done to me when I was drinking. I look back now and can see that one of my key reasons for stopping drinking was because I despised myself. I wish I had made the decision to stop drinking from a place of self-love and acceptance, of wanting a better life for myself. I think I would have made the decision and stopped drinking much earlier. But at the time it was because my depression and anxiety were awful, I was struggling to cope, and I just didn’t want to feel any worse than I already did.

Filling my life up with as many positive sober stories as I could find, and there are so many more now, was the turning point for my sobriety – and for making it finally stick.

I found sober role models through the internet, women who had stopped drinking and who’s lives didn’t suck. These women, Holly Whitaker and Laura McKowen, were sharing their sober experiences through their blogs. Inspired by them, on day 1 of stopping drinking I started this blog. Reading other people’s stories helped me shed some of the shame I had and to feel less alone, as Sarah Hepolla wrote in Blackout “if you’ve fucked a zebra, someone else has fucked two”.

It feels like hyperbole to say that stopping drinking alcohol changed my life, but it is the truth. Sobriety became the foundation of a life where I was feeling and doing okay most of the time. I was no longer hungover every weekend, feeling fuzzy at work from lunch-time pints, or distressing by trying to figure out what had happened during (many) nights I blacked out. From the stable foundations of an alcohol-free existence, I got to add-on and change things around to build a life that I wanted. The life I want centres on the values of freedom, belonging and love. I’m not there yet, but I am a lot closer than I was. Better still, I now enjoy the process. What sort of life do you want? Are you living it?

Sometimes I feel like a whole new person, but I am the same person. I am still me of four years ago, but I have shed so many layers – reliance on booze, a constant shame-hangover and crippling low self-esteem. It is a constant work in progress, and I have more work to do. Unlearning the false rhetoric of alcohol marketing, and healing from the years of pushing down my emotions with booze takes time. Yet with the layers shed, I have the space to grow into who I was all along.

When I was four years old, I didn’t need alcohol to laugh, play, dance, learn or hang out with my friends; I don’t need one now either. I get to live my life with my eyes wide open, with a clear head and a clear mind, and with genuine excitement for the future.

Four years sober baby, here’s to the next four!

Want to work with me, or get more sober support? Head to the work with me page.