Like many millennials who grew up in a smallish town, my relationship with alcohol came barrelling into my life hard and fast. Teens getting their stomach pumped on the weekend was a pretty normal occurrence; so was giving a stranger on the street a tenner to buy you and your mates a bottle of cheap vodka. “She’s speaking on the big white telephone” was slang in Devon for having your head down the toilet.
Everyone found it funny: funny that one time I woke up in a flower bed, and that none of us could ever remember getting home. On holiday in Spain aged 16, I got so sick on sangria that, let’s just say, I never drank anything “with bits in” ever again. Then, university happened, and those three years went by in a white wine blur. Cheap “trebles”, bright blue shots, the Snakebite concoction of lager, cider and blackcurrant. Constant low hum headaches and empty wine bottles rattling about under the bed. Entering the world of work, it was “after-work drinks!!!”, where you got to find out all the juicy stuff about your colleagues and your boss. I drank my way through all of those nights too without ever stopping to ask: is there an option not to do this?
It was only in my mid-20s that I finally started to unpick my relationship with drinking. My career was gaining momentum and in my spare time I was reading self-help books and watching Ted Talks. Through my job, I was interviewing psychologists, talking about mental health and listening to doctors explaining facts about our diet, brain chemistry and behavioural patterns , but the elephant in the room was the fact that I was still drinking every night.
I really wanted to change my relationship with alcohol and started making progress. Then, 2020 happened. Even Gwyneth Paltrow admitted to knocking back the whisky sours seven nights a week during the first national lockdowns. And if it was good enough for the founder of a wellness brand, it was good enough for me. I made a playlist to get drunkly emotional to. I purchased things while drunk, I bought tickets to a band I used to like when I was younger and then asked for a refund when I’d sobered up. I sent people sentimental text messages, waking up the next day wincing. Nothing that bad happened, but I was drinking more and more again each night, convincing myself it was nothing but a chic wind-down part of my routine. I remember placing a huge wine order, thinking it was fine because it was organic with a trendy east London label on it. But I was taking a big bag of clinking bottles out to the recycling bin every week. Something occasional had slowly turned into a nightly habit again, and I couldn’t pinpoint when.
It was only when I interviewed author Ruby Warrington, who coined the term “sober curious”, that things started to really change. Ironically, I’d arrived severely hungover to the interview, but Ruby’s non-judgmental message of turning a curious eye to your drinking habits, and/or the role drinking plays in society got my attention. After yet another lockdown was announced, I sheepishly got her book down from my bookshelf. With a deep breath, I decided to be genuinely curious and admit I really wanted something to change.
Some people have to give up drinking completely; they can’t have a couple because they know where it would lead. Alcoholism is real. It requires a serious, courageous ongoing recovery process. That feels separate to what I’m describing here. I had fallen into grey-area drinking, a term coined by Jolene Park, that which describes the feeling that you don’t have a “drinking problem”, but you do have a “problem with drinking” without it being a severe alcohol use disorder.
Many of us want to question our relationship with alcohol while also maintaining the possibility of moderation. The insidious involvement of alcohol in our daily lives means that until you reach rock bottom there has been little incentive to question it as a lifestyle choice, until recent years. My question is: why do we have to wait until we have a serious problem to question our habits? I knew I didn’t want to give up drinking entirely, but I wanted to give up getting drunk. There was nuance to the conversation for me, and it wasn’t until I discovered the mindful drinking movement that I felt I could put words to this without needing to label myself.
Prompted by exercises in Ruby’s book, I gave up alcohol for three months, and found myself reconnecting to the part of myself again that didn’t need to binge or fill a hole. I reconnected with my body and learned how to settle my nervous system through breathwork. I started being more honest with my loved ones, I made changes in my career, I stopped people-pleasing. I found space in my life to be creative for the sake of it. I committed to journalling. I no longer wanted to numb myself out. I enjoyed the odd drink again.
Now, I always have alcohol-free beers in the fridge, because I prefer them. I’ll enjoy a glass of red wine if I’m having a steak. But I won’t drink for the sake of it. I don’t miss getting drunk at all. I want to feel present for my life. For me, being sober-curious feels like you are living life intuitively rather than passively. Friends who just wanted to get inebriated with me have fallen away. Industry pals who only ever enjoyed a drunken gossip are gone. I don’t get invited to crazy parties any more. My life is so much better now. I’m so much happier and less anxious. And, did I mention, my skin looks fabulous, too.
Emma Gannon is an author, novelist and host of the creative careers podcast, Ctrl Alt Delete
