What three years of sobriety has taught me...

Last Friday on the 20th of February I celebrated three years of sobriety. It was a funny old day. I went for a short walk on the prom in Lahinch, the coastal town near where I live, bought a nice coffee, bought some yellow tulips and treated myself to a blow-dry. Later that day my husband and I went to the nursing home where my father resides and entertained the residents there for a couple of hours with music and songs. The day itself felt both momentous and ordinary. But then every sober day I chalk down feels simultaneously momentous and ordinary.

I owe a huge amount of gratitude to a few women who have walked alongside me for the past three years and I would really like to acknowledge their important place in my life here. Firstly Susan Christina, the founder of Hola Sober. If I hadn’t found Susan (or she hadn’t found me!), I would not be here, it’s as simple as that. I remember the morning that I was driving into college and heard Susan being interviewed by Janey Lee Grace. Janey Lee Grace has a weekly podcast called Alcohol Free Life. I listened to this Limerick woman speak a language about sobriety that I could relate to. In the conversation, Susan was powerful, she was strong and feisty, and this resonated immediately. I googled the Hola Sober website and signed up for the Pledge course and so it began. That is the beginning of my sober story because for the first time in my life I discovered that there were other women just like me. I didn’t need to do this alone anymore (I had tried to stop drinking several times by myself but had never succeeded in a sustained period of sobriety longer than 6 months). I started attending meetings and became an active member of the Hola Sober community and the initial support and help I received from Susan, the hosts and other women in the community was what kept me going. Some of the women from this group started a Whatsapp group and I enjoyed the daily connection with the other women.

I met Sandra in person for the first time in Tipperary when we were both only a couple of months sober and we connected immediately. It felt like we had known each other for ages. I remember her saying to me “now we have met face-to-face, it’ll keep us even more accountable” and I remember thinking “f***, this woman means business!!! Sandra and I have met - as often as living in two different countries allows! - and her friendship means the world to me. I would not be where I am today without her support.

Fast forward to last year and Sandra asked me if I would help her co-host a meeting within the Hola Sober community. I was so nervous for that first meeting, but gradually I found my groove and when Susan’s health deteriorated and she made the difficult decision to close Hola Sober, I was over the moon when Sarah and Sandra asked me to host the Tuesday support meeting on the new TABB platform.

After three years sober, I do not claim to have all the answers. All I can offer you is my own lived experience of getting through each day, hour by hour, moment by moment and sometimes second by second. The following are the things that have really helped me and some important things I have learned since I stopped drinking, and I hope that some of these things might help you too.

Giving up alcohol does not mean you will be romping around a bunny field for the rest of your life. The bunny field is a concept of a kind of sober utopia created by sober author Clare Pooley. I genuinely thought that I would be skipping through these bunny fields, a shadow of my former self, (looking like Kate Moss), and that I would be 100% happy 100% of the time. How naive I was! Physically, I put on weight at the beginning as my body adjusted to existing without alcohol. Instead of skipping meals, as I had done when I was drinking so the alcohol would have more of an effect, I began to eat normally and to look at my longstanding disordered relationship with food.

The mental health issues that had laid smouldering and swarming underneath the alcohol I constantly threw at them to try and quench any feeling that I didn’t want to feel were sadly still there. When I took the alcohol away, they reared their ugly heads, and I felt like I had been cheated on. So, I had to start at the very beginning and really pick apart why I was feeling what I was feeling and what was within my power to change. It is ongoing and it is hard, but I have come so far - from having felt so stuck for years and years to now feeling so much more alive. Today there is hope, curiosity and there is constant movement and growth and behind all this there is a bedrock of stability. Yes, there are still dark days, but I am far more able and equipped to deal with them now.

At no point was this more apparent to me than when I had planned to go to a music festival with a friend in my camper van the first summer I had given up alcohol. I remember sharing at a meeting and Susan herself suggesting that preparing was key – for me that involved telling the friend I was going with that I wouldn’t be drinking and having alcohol free options in the little fridge in my van. This was huge because it meant I wasn’t thrown by anything during the festival -and by having the conversation before hand with my friend, I had taken any awkwardness and expectation out of the situation -she knew what she was in for and I knew there would be no “ah go on have one” situations. Although I am much further along the sober road now, I still planned with my husband at each of the three weddings we attended last summer what time we would leave each wedding. This really helped me feel more secure, and at the end of the day when you’re not drinking, you do not want to be listening or watching people who have drunk too much into the early hours of the morning.

Noone really does care what’s in your glass! I can absolutely attest to this and if any one is really interested in what you are drinking, in my experience there tends to be a reason for this, more than likely it’s that someone might be sober curious. But honestly in the beginning , I felt that there was a torch light shining down on me picking me out as THE ONE WHO ISNT DRINKING! The truth of the matter is that people are far too wrapped up in their own drinks/drama/lives to really care. Having been to three weddings last year, I can personally vouch for this.

This is perhaps a controversial statement, and I realise that each of us has our own way, but for me, counting the days is important. I begin each day by writing three pages of longhand Morning Pages (a creative practice adopted from the book The Artists’ Way, a book and course written by Julia Cameron – the course is running soon here at TABB!) in a foolscap pad. It is a way of measuring time that provides a daily reminder to me of how far I have come, and that is important to me. I can’t imagine a time when it won’t be, but I know everyone is different and for some this is not so important but to me the milestones are significant and the visual numerical reminder shows how far I have come.

As I have said and will continue to say for the rest of my days, community is integral for me in maintaining my sobriety, and it was the one thing missing for my previous attempts at sobriety. I am stubborn – I hate asking anyone for help – I like to think I can do everything on my own – even if I don’t have a clue what I am doing, but I have discovered the power that is in community in so many different situations. The simple act of a 30 minute conversation with a sober friend can completely clear my head, the text each morning to the WhatsApp group (and I am sure the women get so sick of my good morning gifs) and my ‘it’s raining again in Ireland’ messages. Hosting the Tuesday share and support meetings here at TABB, and writing this blog; all of these acts are of course me giving back and being of service to my community but they also serve me and my sobriety so well, in ways I could never have imagined on the first day that I tentatively emailed Susan at Hola Sober.

This might seem to contra indicate my last point, but ultimately, the only person who can keep me on this road is me! Not TABB, not my dearest sober friends. I have to take responsibility for this decision myself and I have found that very difficult and conversely very easy at times. One of the most difficult times in my sobriety was when the Hola Sober community fractured and seemingly fell apart. I felt anger, I felt rage, I was devastated. But at the end of the day, I had to really look at what role I expected the community to play in my sobriety, and it was a very valuable lesson in realising that no one can keep me sober – only me. And that I think is the kernel, perhaps one of the most important things I have learned in nearly three years.

I have built up my sober muscles, I have pulled the curtains back on my life and faced one of the main reasons I had been drinking for so long, I have pulled the trauma out of the depths of my memory, my heart and my soul and held it up in the clear light of day. I have got several days under my belt. I am not afraid to admit that I am far from perfect and that there is still an awful lot that I have to learn. But despite this time of sobriety I have under my belt, I know I am only one drink, one sip away from relapse. This is simply because my brain, in times of stress, in times of sadness, in times of excitement and in times of joy will still want to revert to that hard worn familiar quest for the hit of dopamine that alcohol used to give me. Old habits die hard, old habits die very hard. It’s crazy how our minds revert to what we have known before or try to – even though I know with every fibre of my being that I am not going to drink – the want is still there- the want for something that will take me out of myself, away from myself. And I am always reminded of that beautiful story I used to read to my son when he was small from the book We’re going on a bear hunt by Michael Rosen – The words “we can’t go over it; we can’t go under it, oh no we have to go through it” as the family go off on their adventure certainly applies to my sobriety.

Despite the challenges I have experienced on this path, giving up alcohol is without a doubt the best thing I have ever done -apart from bringing my son into this world. Why? Because it has given me my life back. Being alcohol free for me personally means I am becoming that person I was always meant to be. The rebellious 15-year-old who wrote song lyrics in the back of her schoolbooks, customised her father’s waistcoats, and listened to David Bowie is finally emerging from the shadows. The alcohol kept her in the dark for years. The alcohol kept her meek, miserable, weak and dumbed down for years. The woman that is emerging is to put it in the words of our lovely host Rosie – sober, strong and unapologetically me.

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Today there is hope, curiosity and there is constant movement and growth and behind all this there is a bedrock of stability. Yes, there are still dark days, but I am far more able and equipped to deal with them now.

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