I'm actually really proud of this, so here goes—
I’ve been sober for one week!!!
It took 516 days, and the daily support of the very best of friends, but I got my drinking down to zero.
Content flags for the following: alcohol, drugs, violence.
Another fair warning: no fiction or poetry chat from me this time, I am going to go on about myself and my addiction for this post. It’s long, sorry. The specific bit of showing off—I’ll repeat it—I’ve been sober for one week!!!—is actually over a month overdue, but I’m doing it now anyway. The long slow process of cutting down without help reached a point, a good point, where I felt able to set a very grand goal: I decided that I wanted to wake up on my birthday, which was October 19, to the knowledge that I had been teetotal for one week. And I achieved that. It felt absolutely huge.
The local recovery place refused me a detox in February 2021, and told me to cut down, on the grounds that I’d learn about myself. A complete breakdown followed. (If you subscribed to this substack back in May of this year, you might well have seen the eight billion words I wrote about that breakdown.) Eventually though, summer 2022, I asked four of my closest friends if I could set up a WhatsApp group and check in with them every day. One of them renamed it tim’s check-in because I was such a state I couldn’t even think of what to call it. I still check in every day, even—especially?—when it’s to say: 0 units. That figure always gets an additional fox emoji from me.
It’s not easy, cutting down. There are setbacks. A bout of unexpected withdrawal shakes can see your intake shoot back up, out of sheer fear. Or sometimes you just have a cunt of a day and deliberately drink yourself to oblivion. It took me, with the daily virtual support of my friends, 516 days to get to zero units. I consider those days to be wasted time and I still resent the person who refused me a detox. But the fact is, I did it. Without professional help, I fucking did it.
I then fell off the wagon and drank for 4 days; then I did 6 days sober, than I drank for 4 days—it’s been on and off since. Two remarks: 1) I’m not that concerned about being teetotal, right now; the fact that I am medically safe to choose not to drink is more than enough to be going on with, and I generally make that choice; 2) I hate the phrases ‘off the wagon’ and ‘on the wagon’ and have been trying to settle on a private one to use. I think I might have, and it might have something to do with that fox emoji; but, like I say, it’s private.
One thing that did happen, in one period of being teetotal, was something you all had in your emails: over five days, the last of them being Halloween, I wrote a story of eighteen and a half thousand words. There is absolutely no way that could have happened if alcohol had been a part of my life, and that’s something I may need to remind myself in future: being sober makes it possible to actually fulfil creative goals.
I wonder how much I’d have got done in the last 18 years if I never had hit the bottle—what if I’d actually been able to do everything I wanted to do. Write everything I’ve wanted to write. Make a living as a musician! I’m definitely good enough, I’m just too ill. What if I was not stuck in this fucking ditch forever. (More truthfully: I try not to wonder. It is a tempting fantasy of hypotheticals which, even in their most modest versions, hurt a lot.)
Yes, that Hallowen story was ropey; and the version that I printed and posted to the friend who asked for it—the version that’s now on my substack on a single page—was subject to another pass of editing. But what’s important to me right now is that I set myself five significant deadlines on five consecutive days, and made every one of them. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever written, and the truth that I cannot avoid is that it only happened at all because I stopped drinking.
I’ve been teetotal before. Summer 2019 was the last time; I did six months, more or less. It was the result of an extraordinary kindness. The previous winter, a close friend’s mother died. That friend lives and works in another part of the country, but when she next visited Brighton, we went for a coffee and a cigarette, sat outside in the cold, all scarves and rickety aluminium tables and visible breath, and she told me that it had happened on Christmas Day. I will not forget the looks we exchanged. Within a few minutes, she also said to me that she suddenly found herself owning a house. Knowing that I was trying to kick the drink, and having no time or energy to do anything with it in the short term, she offered the use of it to me for the summer.
In Brighton, unlike where I am now, if you approach the addiction services begging for a detox to stop drinking, what they will do is book you in for a medical exam, and sign you up to a detox programme. The admin’s chaos and it’ll take months, but they’ll do it. They won’t bullshit you about cutting down and learning about yourself. So I went to the groups, and I took the medication for a fortnight, and I packed my bags and got the bus to a nearby town. I’d been given the keys to a house, to get sober in.
Post was still arriving. Nothing had changed. My friend hadn’t had time to even begin sorting out her mother’s things, and to figure out what to do with the house she’d grown up in. I think we joked about how haunted it wasn’t. It was just someone’s house; it was as if she’d popped out and would be back any minute. Gradually I noticed that it was fitted out subtly with the equipment for someone who had gotten increasingly frail.
The strangeness of that environment is something I had to disentangle from the most striking thing about my memories of that time. I say most striking: it took three years for this observation to strike me. Nevertheless, when it did, it jarred me. I realised that in my memories of that summer, the house was empty. Of course it was empty. What I mean is: I wasn’t there. All my memories of knocking around that house, sober, are visualized from places in the house it was impossible to stand; they are images in the third person, except that the only first person, me, is never there. It’s a completely empty house; a dead woman’s house with nothing and nobody in it.
Soon I realised that every time I had briefly got sober previously I had felt something similar. In 2014 I remember trying to describe my experience of evenings and nights spent without alcohol in a really desperate, overwrought way; I think I used the phrases ‘mapless tourist’, ‘mute interloper’, and ‘fly in amber’. Far simpler would have been to say: I felt, when I was sober, that I wasn’t there.
One reason I’ve always drank late into the night, I know, was to avoid going to sleep at any cost—and not just because of insomnia. I don’t know why, but I know that’s true. I’ve no idea where this resistance to going to bed came from but it’s been there since I was a boy; I always kicked up a fuss about going to bed, and I’ve always been terrified of unconsciousness, especially the moment of transitioning into it. There is one potential trauma that could be behind it, which I only found out about a few years ago: when I was a child, someone tried to kill me. They strangled me; I lost consciousness. I’ve no idea, though. That’s simply information. I cannot in any conscious way connect, emotionally, the attempted murder of a child to the sedimented and addicted behaviours of a 37 year old man, despite having myself been both of them. It’d be mad to think they aren’t connected, but I also can’t claim any conscious sense that they are, either.
As I write this it’s getting dark outside, because it’s winter and it’s mid-afternoon. By the time I finish typing, night will have fallen. I will be sober, though, and the fear is still there. It is the nature of that fear I am trying to identify. In a very silly sense, realizing these things has made me feel as if I have accidentally stumbled into my very own ghost story. In the daytimes, I exist: my self is a stable, present thing. (I believe this is why I have never, ever, ever, been a day drinker: in the daytimes, there I am—and to drink would be to take me further from myself.)
In the nights, though, I seem to vanish. The last two decades of my life I have been fashioning for myself a tiny, safe little chamber of alcohol, nicotine, sometimes drugs, to get back to myself—all this has been done (and this does feel true, insane as it sounds) as some kind of desperate fortification against ceasing to exist. Hell knows; maybe some part of my soul convinced itself after that early trauma that unconsciousness really is death, and that the darkness outside, leaning as heavily as it does on the obligation to become unconscious, must therefore also be railed against at all costs. If it seems wild to be talking like this, about a death that didn’t happen as somehow so emotionally contagious that I have allowed nightfall itself to make a Jekyll and a Hyde of me—yeah, I think that’s fucking preposterous too. If it helps me with my recovery, though, I am fine with it.
These days I try to be outside when the transition from light to dark happens. I try to promise myself an hour outside every day, but it’s incredibly hard to stick to that. In the summer, I go and sit by the skate park. In the winter I wander round the small park nearby, or along the canal. At one point under the blue-pink gloom I will get my phone out of my pocket, look at it, look up again, and the sky will be dark: what was a gradual, continuous change flipped in an instant into a sudden and discrete moment of jarring difference. Somewhere in that experience, in that repeating event, is an analogy for how the passage from consciousness to unconsciousness has become so terrifying for me. I swear, somewhere in that image of a dusky sky snapped dark by a brief distraction is the solution to what’s been fucking me up. Thing is, I can’t for the life of me find it.
I’ve wanted to write something about alcohol and addiction for a month. I’ve been putting it off, and have written this because I noticed yesterday morning that I have been three years off vodka. More showing off. I’m very proud, though. Three years off vodka!!! Other alcohol has remained a problem, obviously—but vodka was the first thing that had to go; it was my whole life.
So, currently I feel very much like I am in a darkened room. The nerve centre of myself, I guess. And I stumble around trying to find the walls, the furniture, the devices which have controls, and I gradually get more and more used to it. I’m finding out which buttons are safe to press and which are not. There have been surprises here: having alcohol in the flat doesn’t mean I’ll drink it. Its mere presence has no effect on whether I choose to touch it.
On the other hand, I must not start watching a TV series which it is possible to watch in a single night. That has, three times, seen me dashing to the off licence around 1am, for tobacco and alcohol, so that I can get drunk all night and finish the series. Stupid as it sounds, that is now a risk I cannot take, and I’m fine with that. To go outside the darkened room metaphor, which is more to do with my own state of mind—this is more to do with the state of my environment—I am gradually finding the edges of my own safety, the shape of it, and setting boundaries where necessary.
All these things, by the way, constitute learning about myself. I want to make the very clear point that I am only learning them by starting from a point of sobriety. What the person at the recovery place said to me, about cutting down in order to learn about myself, was horseshit. In cutting down I learnt absolutely nothing that I could not have learnt by simply being given the help to quit immediately. All that she did, in making the call she made, and flatly refusing me help, was to steal two years of my life, and to trigger a total breakdown. I won’t forgive her for it.
What is harder to accommodate for than environmental factors is sudden anger at hurt when people behave badly. I’m still finding my way around that one. Someone said something triggering to me a week or two ago and I drank for five days. It’s also difficult to get days back: autumn and winter mornings, for me, are the very best of life—the world at its most beautiful and my moods at their lightest—yet I’m missing every single one of them because of this relentless insomnia. There’s been times recently where I have been awake for sixty, seventy hours. It is not easy to stay sober when my body’s primary reaction to it feels like a punishment devised by a demon.
Every bad drinker’s problem is different, and weirdly, these days, I actually can have ‘just one’. A beer, or a glass of wine. Usually, I choose not to—and to have the option of not drinking, of that being medically safe, is such a novelty that I still enjoy indulging it—but sometimes I’ll have something. Almost always it’ll be a single can, while cooking; that became my favourite drink over the last few years, and while cutting down I prepared myself for it being the one I’d miss the most. Every time I start cooking, and wish I had a drink, but then simply bat that thought away, I still count it as a personal triumph.
Here’s the thing, the rule that vodka breaks. The substances I become addicted to seem to exist in pairs. Both need to be taken simultaneously, otherwise I default to sobriety. From 2012-2015 it was meth, and mephedrone. When the latter stopped being available, I wasn’t interested in the former. I’m still grieving for those years; nobody will ever convince me that chemsex wasn’t the best thing ever. I fucking loved it. But, Brighton’s supply of decent mephedrone dried up, and I stopped taking the meth, the GHB; I stopped taking anything at all.
Similarly with alcohol and tobacco: it’s only both that see me losing control. If I’m smoking, I will drink all night. Guaranteed. If I’m smoking, I will make a 2 or 4 or even 8am trip to the 24hr off-license. If I’m not smoking, I simply can’t force myself to be interested in being drunk, and it doesn’t happen. I count this as a tremendous bit of luck, actually—the surprise result that controlling my drinking has turned out to be, in one very significant sense, as simple as not having any tobacco in the flat.
What I do know, with 100% certainty, is that with vodka—cigarettes or not—the above rule does not hold, and I wouldn’t stand a chance. As soon as the first swig is burning on the back of my throat I am in heaven and have already lost all control. But there it is. Best substance in the world!—and I’m never allowed it again. 18 months ago I wrote this:
Oh fuck me I miss vodka so much. I mean it would make everything, in the long term and medium term, and even the ‘just getting through tomorrow’ term, so much worse, but right now, it would be bliss. Eighteen months since I last cracked, for only half of a bottle, and excluding that brief glint, it’s been something like 20 months. Nothing I’ve ever found, before it or since, is like it. There’s been lots of drugs I tried to replace it with but none of them even at their most intense were the first bit of vodka out of the bottle. I’m all day always trying to decide whether I resent it or not, that if I want to have a life at all it has to be conditional on the absence of that exact moment, the first bit of vodka out of the bottle, the best thing ever. I say ‘the best thing ever’ about a lot of things because it's fun to be enthusiastic, and emphatic, and to do that doesn’t mean it’s disingenuous, but at the back of it I always know that my true best thing ever is the thing I cannot ever have, not if I want to hit 50 and then 60 and whatever else. The rest of the bottle is fun, subsidence, insights, mistakes, empathy, another bottle, beautiful chaos, bad chaos, beautiful chaos again, extremely bad chaos, then consequences, always consequences, gutache, not being clear-headed until sunset the next day, embarrassment, sweats, the taste of how cheap it was in the smell of what I sweat out in the shower. The start of the bottle, the very first taste, and the relinquishing of control, it is heaven on earth and always will be. I feel like recovery, if I ever achieve it, will depend on my NOT lying to myself about that. It’s the most true thing I can think of about myself, and it sounds so banal, but it isn’t, it’s like I said, it's a brief access of heaven on earth. And it’s not allowed.
—which I can’t disagree with. I’m only noticing now, writing this, that vodka was my life for a solid, round-numbered decade: 2010–2020. I stopped during the first lockdown; and then, Nov 22, an hour or so after midnight, having already had a lot of beer, I had about half a pint of vodka that had been squirrelled away in a cupboard by the person who lived here before me. That was the last time I ever touched it.
Compared to all the problems I still have to deal with, getting sober hasn’t actually fixed very much at all. I try not to dwell on that, except to say: burn the DWP to the ground, bury alive every Tory you meet. Compared to the rest of my life, three years off vodka is nothing—but, like sobering up completely, it’s still something. Certainly enough to have earned a treat. I am good at treats.
Hell of a ramble, this one. I guess I’ve got a lot more energy for words now I’m sober. Thanks for staying with me if you did. Can’t think of an image for this one so I just this second took a photo of the sky.