One year ago I was a bit of a mess.
Trapped in a destructive pattern of needing wine to get through ‘crazy hour’, stumbling through the rest of the night, waking up dehydrated and ashamed at 3am, making a resolution not to drink so much next time, then repeating the whole damn cycle again. And again.
It was awful. I have so much compassion for my previous self because I vividly remember how stuck she was. The thought of sobriety was insurmountable. She didn’t want to give up alcohol forever. She didn’t want everyone to know that she had a problem. She thought she could manage it, just moderate it… but inevitably she would just end up right back in the very place she didn’t want to be.
It was one of the greatest struggles I have experienced on this planet.
Then one day, everything changed. I couldn’t ‘unsee’ the truth any longer. It wasn’t the circumstances of that night so much as the blinding clarity that came with it. That what I thought was helping me was actually making it all worse. I was trading my sanity, health and soul for what ended up being about half an hour of artificial calm.
Here are the exact words I wrote in my journal that fateful night:
Day 0 – 20 February 2019
Remember this moment. The pounding headache, blocked nose, stinging eyes, fogginess but also the blinding clarity. You are/ I am an alcoholic. It isn’t what we wanted. But our self-sufficiency and ego-mania drove us to this.
Alcohol controls us. It is the hangman’s noose, the leash, the poison that numbs, that blinds, that cripples every single moment. It isn’t just the ones where the drink is going down but the internal debates, the half-hearing, the ‘will I, won’t I’ sessions that take over. It is finished.
God. I am a flawed and broken human. I need your grace like nothing I’ve ever needed before. My family is too important, I am too important to sacrifice on the altar of numbness and drunkenness. I’m scared. Of being present, of being irritable, of having to face the puzzle pieces completely sober.
I want to make something of this life, but I need to ditch the crutch, the weights, the straight-jacket.
From this day forth, I choose to be sober, alcohol-free. I choose life. I choose freedom. Family. Connection and love. I choose to feel, to hurt when it hurts, to process emotion in real time, even if it feels overwhelming.
I choose to speak up for myself, to find out who I am and to be okay with the true self that has lain dormant for so long.
God, I cannot do this without you. I am in need of your soul-filling, supernatural power. Please sustain me, remind me, keep me on the path. It will be difficult but I choose this. I choose to leave the shackles behind. I am so sick of putting them on day after day. I believe you can set me free. Please help me take one day at a time and not to get ahead of myself even if I’m tempted to congratulate myself.
Alcohol is an addictive poison that corrodes heart, liver, family, love and soul. There is no shame in becoming addicted to something that is, by nature, addictive. As long as I continue to see alcohol as it truly is. It is not something fun, desirable, consequence-free. It holds strings out, padlocks the hands of those who learn to need it.
I am choosing to break those shackles today. With the help of God.
The story has begun.
Writing it out again makes me weep. That moment was such a gift, even though the pain of realisation felt like being doused by ice-cold water. It was a fork in the road, a chance to change direction, a moment of salvation.
One year on and I cannot believe the changes that have been possible because of that one choice. I’ll write about them soon, but today I wanted to focus on that moment.
The one that changed my life.
Sobriety has become one of the greatest gifts. Something I couldn’t fathom in the slightest before taking the leap off that cliff. It was hard – incredibly hard – to rewire insidious brain patterns that screamed at me every night for a good few months, but day by day, moment by moment, those screams have become muted.
We only get one shot at this life. I thought it would be too painful, too scary to face the things I was hiding from, but the crazy secret is that it was infinitely more painful to hide from them.
As a marking of this first anniversary, I’ve decided to do a series on sobriety, going deeper into the moments that shifted my thinking before that fateful day, and the changes I have noticed as a result. If you have any questions, please let me know! I would love to do a Q&A post if there is enough interest. (You can PM me and I can keep your name off the question if privacy is important to you).
