It Gets Better and Better –
Jan. 31, 2020 – My own sobriety date, four years ago last week, coincides with an attempted dry January – embarked on, ironically, to prove I didn’t have a problem – gone disastrously wrong (a story for another time…). But it had taken me years to get to that point. I’d visited destination rock bottom countless times before I finally called it quits. ‘You always want another drink,’ an infuriated friend once shouted at me. ‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘I just don’t want the party to end.’ But it had, a long time before that. For 15 years, I’d topped myself to the brim with alcohol and it had slowly drained me of everything. When I realized I had embarked on a sober life, I mourned the loss. Drinking wasn’t just what I did, it was who I was. A drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a bottle in the crook of my arm was as inextricably part of my physical identity as being short or blonde was. ‘Shall we get another?’ – a statement pitched as a question – was my personal brand. Who would I be without it? The fun part is finding out. And ‘fun’, by the way, is very much still part of my vocabulary. The most tantalising lie I told myself, the one that nearly hooked me back in, was that I would be both boring and bored without booze. It took me a while to grasp that people who are only entertaining when you or they are drunk are not that entertaining.
