Why mummy gave up drinking

Day 150. It’s been a while since my last blog. I’ve been super busy – tidying. I’ve always been on the ‘anal’ side when it comes to organising, but the last couple of weeks I’ve become a neat freak warrior on ‘Speed’. Netflix has a show called ‘The Home Edit’, which is seriously addictive and has stepped my organisation skills up a level; arranging my wardrobe and bookshelves in rainbow order, and sad as I’m sure it sounds, I’ve never been happier. My kitchen drawers are becoming a masterpiece and frankly, my pan cupboard is nothing short of a work of art. Having everything in its place is so mentally soothing and peaceful for me.

So why on earth am I waxing lyrical about tidying my house? Because I’m finding joy in the most basic of things….FINALLY. The boredom stage has long since finished and moreover, I’m even finding fun in inherently boring tasks. The Dopamine levels in my head are well and truly back in production and I’m loving my newfound dedication to self-care and general self-improvement.

Go back 150 days to my day 1 and this was the antithesis of how I was feeling. I was at rock bottom. Dejected, miserable and feeling utterly confused and hopeless about everything – save for one certain fact – I knew I needed to quit alcohol. How did I know? I asked myself one question about a million times. The same question that drove you to read this blog.  Am I an alcoholic?

Since you’re reading my blog, I’m hazarding a guess that you’ve asked yourself this question many many times, and you’re still none-the-wiser as to the answer. That’s certainly where I found myself. I couldn’t find the solution in books, blogs, podcasts or the Oracle (also known as Google). Even my own doctor couldn’t make that diagnosis. Why? Because alcoholism isn’t measurable. There is no test to determine if you are an alcoholic. There is no such thing as a definitive diagnosis. As my doctor said – “It’s a grey area”. Well, that’s bloody helpful.

In the Oxford dictionary, Alcoholism is defined as ‘addiction to the consumption of alcoholic drink or alcohol dependency.’ So how do you know if you’re addicted or dependent? Is addiction categorised by the amount you drink, or the frequency? If you have once glass of wine, but have a drink every single day, is that enough for you to be labeled an alcoholic? If you only drink on a Saturday, but then nail two bottles of wine in a single binge each week, is that indicative of an alcohol problem? Or is it simply that if you drink more than the recommended fourteen units per week – then you’re alcohol dependent – maybe that’s the benchmark?

When I gave up drinking for good, I was consuming two bottles of wine, six nights a week. I took one day off a week to prove to myself that I wasn’t physically dependent. If I could go a day without alcohol and not get the shakes, that had to be proof that I still had control and was not an alcoholic. I was able to work a full-time job, raise two young children alone and run a side-hustle business; I wasn’t just coping, I was excelling. Real alcoholics are the surely the ones who need to drink in the mornings, the people who lose their jobs, get caught drink-driving and ruin their close relationships before they eventually turn yellow and die from liver cirrhosis. I wasn’t even close to being that bad. I was super high-functional.

So, could I have been a functional alcoholic? According to Wikipedia, a high-functioning alcoholic is a person who maintains jobs and relationships while meeting criteria for having alcohol use disorder – except the criteria for that isn’t definable either – so I was still none-the-wiser. I’ve read more ‘Quit Lit’ than anyone else I know – but I still can’t tell you the definition of an alcoholic and I certainly can’t tell you if I am one or not. I’ve got no quiz, mechanism or method to advise if you’re one either. But….I do have an answer for the question ‘Am I an alcoholic?’ The answer to this question is why I began day 1 and why I’m now at day 150, happily cleaning my kitchen cupboards and making rainbow bookshelves.

So beautiful readers, here it is. Am I an alcoholic? The answer – It doesn’t matter. Everyone should quit. Whether you’re 90 years old and only enjoying a sherry on Christmas morning, drinking Vodka for breakfast, a mum drinking Pinot the second you finish the school run, whether you’re sober all week and then smashing 12 cocktails on a Friday night or if you like a single glass of red each night, can easily moderate and sit comfortably within the recommended 14 units a week – everyone should quit – because nothing good comes from drinking poison, in any measure. If you drink any alcohol at all, you are somewhere on that slippery slope.

Alcohol / Ethanol is a highly addictive, dangerous poison that will kill you if you drink 50ml of the stuff neat. Whether or not you’re physically dependent, mentally dependent or barely bothered, you wouldn’t mix arsenic with fruit juice and call it a treat, even if it did make you feel good for a while, you’d still think someone was barking mad for trying it. If you drink enough, alcohol makes you vomit. Why? Your body is extremely intelligent and when it’s being poisoned, it makes you vomit to try and rid you of the substance causing damage!

I’m not denying that I’ve had many fun nights drinking, but whatever buzz or benefit you think you’re getting in the short-term, is far outweighed by the negative consequences. Here is my list of pro’s and cons for drinking alcohol.

Pros

1. The initial fuzzy feeling from the first sip to about the end of the first hour.
2. It feels like alcohol makes us more sociable (it doesn’t – it lowers our inhibitions – see below).

Cons

1. Waking up every night at 3am with a surge of anxiety. Lying awake tossing and turning going over all the horrible things you’ve ever said and done until you get up. Self-loathing and acknowledgement that you need to quit (until that evening when the craving kicks in again).
2. Never sleeping through the night. Getting up umpteen times to go to the bathroom, glug water or take Paracetamol for the impending headache. I always woke up feeling hungover, tired and grouchy.
3. Anyone who drinks alcohol smells terrible to sober people. I don’t want my children to grow up with a memory of a mum who smelt of alcohol when they were kissed goodnight.
4. It’s really expensive. I worked out that over the past 25 years I’ve spent £100,000 on alcohol. A mind-boggling figure. Think of what you could do with such a significant pay increase!
5. Drink too much and it makes you vomit. Even drinking moderately disrupts sleep and makes you feel like shit the next day.
6. Sober is sexy. Drunk is the opposite. Very unattractive. Drunk people sound stupid too.
7. Drinking makes your skin look sallow, causes premature aging, weight gain, acne and weakens your hair and nails. Attractive hey?!
8. Drinking kills brain cells and actually shrinks the size of your brain.
9. Alcohol causes multiple types of cancer and liver cirrhosis. It kills more people than any other drug known to man – and yet this is the legal one.
10. Alcohol lowers inhibitions. We believe it increases confidence – but mother nature created inhibitions for a reason – to protect us. When we drink, we make poor choices and embarrass ourselves.
11. Missing several hours of your life each day in ‘black-out.’ I regularly drank from around 4pm. I never remembered anything past about 7pm each night. So much time is wasted by drinking.
12. You never find out what you truly love or enjoy because you’re numbing out the good as well as the bad.
13. Children suffer when parents drink. Whether it’s full-blown neglect or simply choosing not to play with them instead of having a drink. They suffer.
14. You lose countless days of your life spent recovering from heavy drinking sessions.
15. Alcohol causes depression.
16. Alcohol significantly increases domestic violence in seriousness and frequency.
17. Alcohol causes injuries from falling or making dangerous decisions.
18. Alcohol causes daily anxiety that we treat by drinking more alcohol!
19. Alcohol destroys relationships.
20. Alcohol can lead to lost employment.
21. You never learn to be an adult! You spend your life numbing out every emotion so you never learn to process difficult things. You live in fear. When you get scared, you stick your head in the sand and have a drink instead of maturely processing and dealing with your problems. Alcohol makes all problems worse.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I could go on forever. What I’m trying to get across is that the benefits of feeling that initial alcohol fuzzy glow are far outweighed by the negative consequences.

What I can say with absolutely certainty is that when you quit, everything will get better. My life has changed so much more than I expected, and everyday I’m surprised by new improvements and positive transformations that have come from being sober. Whatever aspects of drinking I miss are inconsequential compared to the benefits of giving up. Life is quite simply much better without it, and my only regret is not quitting sooner – or ever starting in the first place!

At the end of the day, ethanol is extremely addictive. No one dying of liver cirrhosis ever thought they would get to that stage until it was too late. We all like to think we’d be able stop, don’t we? That we’ll catch it just in time? Life doesn’t work that way. Every person who dies from alcohol started by drinking the same way you and I did. No one is immune – we can all end up the one drinking in the morning.

We’re all on the same sliding scale of addiction – but some of us are further along than others. Where ‘alcoholic’ is on that scale just doesn’t matter. ‘Enjoying’ the odd glass of poison within the recommended Government allowance is still a pointless and harmful pastime. You’re still somewhere on that slope. One trauma or significant personal disaster away from increasing your intake and sliding down very very quickly. No good can come from it.

So – do you think you’re an alcoholic? Does it matter? I don’t think so. But if you’re asking yourself that question then quitting for good is the answer you’re looking for.

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