6 months alcohol-free: The verdict so far

The healthy highs and social lows of life on the wagon. Welcome to the 'messy middle'...

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Because it seemed like a good idea, and by the time she realised she had no clue what was on the other side she‘d already reached the mid-way point AND told the internet it’s what she was doing, so she had to carry on.

This week I am sending out all of my love to anyone treading the messy middle of change.

Maybe you’re in the middle of creating new fitness or eating habits, the middle of trying for a baby, the middle of a career shift or a major project, the middle of setting new boundaries with family and friends, the middle of moving house or the middle of a divorce.

Or - like me - the middle of an extended sober stint. 

(Incase you didn’t realise, the chicken in the opener is me, six months into a 12-month ‘sober 2024’ challenge after several non-sober decades and nine years of falling on and off the ‘mindful drinking’ wagon 🐔).

When it comes to personal growth (which, I would argue, could be the result of ANY of the examples shared above) the internet defines the messy middle as: “The uncomfortable intermediate phase, when your awareness has increased, but you haven’t grown or changed much – yet.” and “The part where progress is slow and challenges your desire to keep going.”

The messy middle: The part where progress is slow and challenges your desire to keep going.

Dr Joe Dispenza, the brilliant neuroscientist, healer and mind-body expert, calls it ‘crossing the river of change’ (do you also have an image of a chicken swimming across a river right now?! 😆).

I call it discombobulating, frustrating and lonely. And sometimes just plain boring.

There are many benefits of removing alcohol from my life/system. There are. I promise.

I’ve gained so much time and energy and am learning to trust and like myself more.

My skin and my bank account have never looked better.

And if you are in any way considering your own sober stint I absolutely recommend it.

But, if you are in any way considering your own sober stint you probably already know about the benefits.

And so, right now, instead of reeling off the highlights, I’m going to be very honest about my AF experience to date.

Because, if I am honest, the novelty of a new challenge wore off a while ago and the end seems a loooooong way off (do marathon runners celebrate getting to mile 13.1, I wonder? Or - more likely - do they think: ‘Oh sh!t, that was hard and I’m still only halfway round!’?).

And, as summer rolls in, I’m finding it difficult to remember why I’m voluntarily opting out of something I have found really fun and - when the fun stops - really soothing, for a really long time.

Or…. did I just think it was fun? Maybe - as my friend and addiction expert, Shahroo Izadi, likes to tell me - I have been giving booze too much credit and my life and the things I choose to do with it are actually fun without the booze? (Because I’ve been drinking since I was 15 most of my fun and social experiences - if not all - have been laced with at least a little bit of booze, so how would I know?!).

And maybe there are other ways to soothe myself that don’t involve killing my braincells and KO’ing my mornings?

And there’s that voice. That calm but relentless little voice inside my head that has been whispering at me since before I started any kind of official self-development that the best thing I could ever do for my Self and how I feel about her would be to stop drinking.

Of course, there’s only one way to find out what life (and me!) is like without booze, and that’s by taking it away.

Which is what I’m doing. Which is what I’ve been doing for six whole bloody months (my longest sober stint since being a teenager) and which I need to keep reminding myself is a GOOD THING TO DO.

And so, while I weirdly don’t feel in a celebratory mood at this six-month mark, this does seems like an excellent time to reflect on the ‘sober 2024’ journey so far and sharing some of my biggest learnings…

The kind of questions I’m getting asked a lot on Substack/Instagram (and the inspiration for this post)

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MY SIX MONTHS OF SOBRIETY DIARY (after three decades of drinking)

Month 1 - January - There’s never a good time to give up drinking

I started the year with a bang. Or, more specifically, a ‘pop’ as my first test turned up in the form of an airport lounge with free champagne on tap.

I don’t think I’m alone in associating airports and travel and holidays with a drink of something special, but as that wise woman Shahroo also told me, holidays are a great time to try out new habits as we’re away from our usual triggers (people, places, things).

And she was right (she’s always bloody right). And even though I was holidaying in party-ville Miami (last time I was in this city was for a five-day bender to celebrate my friend Johnny’s 40th), I was able to avoid Happy Hour and instead embrace early nights, peachy sunrises and beach yoga vibes to come home feeling lovely and rested and ready to embrace the new year. (Which is exactly what a January holiday is supposed to do.)

This was a month of riding high on general ‘new year, new me vibes’ and enjoying the novelty of several sober firsts (like asking the hotel to remove rather than replenish the mini bar. And I cannot rave enough about how much better it feels to fly long haul sober. Arriving in the USA not dehydrated or drunk or already hungover was a revelation!).

Month 2 - February - Hibernation mode and an important question

The grim winter continued in the UK. I tried a LOT of red wine substitutes (because: long, dark evenings and not much else to do = red wine time, am I right?!).

(NB I think the 'mouthfeel’ and taste of red wine is one of the hardest alcoholic drinks to fake/recreate, but Jukes sparkling red wine in a can is now a favourite at dinner time).

With not much else to do, my new addiction became sobriety memoirs featuring booze and all kinds of other drugs, the grittier the better (see below for six of my favourite reads).

I LOVE a sobriety memoir, sometimes feeling deep compassion for the writers as I see myself reflected in their stories of shame and pain, and other times feeling bloody relieved that my bad choices under the influence have never led me to the very dark places they’ve found themselves (homeless, alone, hospitalised, jailed).

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1. Glorious Rock Bottom by Bryony Gordon

2. A Million Little Pieces: A shocking exploration of addiction by James Frey

3. The Weight of Air:, A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery by David Poses

4. High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict's Double Life by Tiffany Jenkins

5. Girl Walks Out of a Bar by Lisa F Smith

6. Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs by Marc Lewis

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I also started becoming more aware of my cravings and triggers and, having deciding to approach this year on the wagon with an experimental mindset (vs sheer willpower), each time I wanted or thought about wanting a drink I started asking myself the same question: Do I want to change how I feel?

If the answer was ‘no’ (often the case) I’d explore what had brought on the craving (Friday night, TV time, cooking, airport, lunch in a pub, certain friends etc), remind myself that the main job of booze is to chemically alter our brains so we feel different, and move on with my life.

If the answer was ‘yes’ I’d get more curious about why that was (turns out I especially crave a drink when I feel sad, bored, scared, nervous or have imposter syndrome or something really important to do/prep for), then acknowledge it, try and find another way to shift my emotional state and - if needed - get journalling on what was coming up for me.

Month 3 - March - Here come the feelings

You know those feelings I’ve been telling y’all to invite in and feel all this time? Well, full disclosure, I’m not the best at doing this (we teach what we most need to learn) and booze has been a brilliant numbing solution for me since I was a teenager, so I think we all knew what was going to happen once I took it away for an extended period…

No emotional painkiller + a new BOTM dedicated to my self-development nemesis: MONEY ISSUES meant whole heaps of feelings making themselves known and demanding attention this month. Many of which I have actively avoided since forever. This month SUCKED. Life sucked. I sucked. Being sober sucked. And I couldn’t even have a glass of wine to make myself feel better! 😆 BUT - as part of a ‘going sober for my self-development’ experiment - this means it was actually a huge success. Here was the truth I was seeking. Here were the feelings that I have been wanting (not wanting) to feel. Here was my self-development…um, developing. And, as my friend (and sometimes coach) Ro told me (not unkindly): you asked for this!

And she was right. I did ask for this. I did want to know what life feels like without booze. And now I did. (But that doesn’t mean I had to be happy about it.)

Month 4 - April - A glimmer of self-forgiveness

More bloody feelings. More bloody journalling. More unravelling. And so much bloody time on my hands (sober long weekends are the longest long weekends EVER).

And also - thanks to some cosmically-timed advice from BOTM author Kate Northrup in our online author event for Money, A Love Story (see below) - the introduction of some much-needed self-compassion, for both current TJ and her previous self.

Kate Northrup is a fan of revisiting our past with rose-tinted spectacles as way to see the silver linings in our journey so far, however difficult it has been. And when I told her that I couldn’t in any way find a way to reframe the colossal waste of time, money, energy and potential that had been my ‘hot mess’ years, she kindly advised that sometimes self-forgiveness is what’s needed as a way to heal and move forward.

Hello, lightbulb moment! 💡 And a real chance to practise what I preach (See this article for full details of the ‘rage on a page’ style writing and burning session that resulted and led to me making a new kind of peace with myself as I celebrated my longest ever sober stint at 3+ months).

Month 5 - May - The happiest of birthdays

This was a great month. May is always a busy time for me, prepping for events, a big new BOTM, and podcasts, articles and speaking gigs around Mental Health Awareness (MHA) week. It’s also my birthday. And this year it was a month filled with sober firsts including my first sober birthday as an adult, my first sober Hen do, my first sober festival and several big birthday events for old friends.

This was the month that I faced one of my biggest fears: of not being ‘fun Toni’ without the fun stuff. I know I can have fun without booze at non-boozy events. But can I still have and be fun without the booze when everyone else is getting tanked? Turns out, I can, and, as my friend Jack who often doesn’t drink because he’s driving told me: ‘only people with boring friends have a boring time when they don’t drink’.

Month 6 - June - Mamma Mia! My biggest test yet

I went into this month feeling GREAT after a brilliant, productive, friend-filled and FUN-filled May. I wasn’t just surviving this booze-free experiment I was thriving on it and convinced this was the new improved sober Toni 2.0 for now and forever.

I was feeling the benefits and also feeling the love as more and more people got in touch to let me know they were a) impressed I’d stuck it out this long, and b) inspired to take some time off the sauce themselves (shout out to my new sober-ish buddies!).

Lots of people wanted to know how I felt, and I told lots of people that I felt bloody amazing,

And then.

And then…. a big fat Greek gay wedding in Skiathos.

A wonderful four-day celebration of love and community and champagne and tequila with a load of old friends (remember that five-day bender in Miami) and a LOT of very fabulous, very confident, Speedo-wearing party people whom I had never met before.

Cue imposter syndrome, social anxiety, feelings of comparison and self-doubt, and good old-fashioned ‘why the hell haven’t I been working on my beach bod for the last six-months?!!’ shyness.

All of which I know - we know - can easily be cured with a strong Margarita or two.

Which were free-flowing and quite literally free for the whole four-days as our grooms and very generous hosts covered everything, including the bar.

(If you’ve tried to change a habit around any kind of substance you’ll know that putting as much friction as possible between you and the substance is the best place to start. A free four-day bar filled with your favourite drinks + professional party people + disco + sunshine + no responsibilities is an example of exactly how NOT to do this).

Through a lot of willpower and the support of my awesome husband, who somehow tracked down alcohol-free Mythos at pretty much every place we went, I stayed on the sober train. And I’m proud of myself for that.

I loved so many elements of this wedding. I was delighted to be invited to celebrate my friends, and 100% happy that I didn’t RSVP ‘no’ and stay at home just because I wasn’t drinking. But alongside the feelings of love and joy and connection the experience also brought up some of my deep, dark shadow self.

This was more than just FOMO or icky feelings as fun-time strangers dismissed me as non-PLU* when they found out I didn’t drink, or I headed home with the oldies as the after parties raged on without me.

(*PLU = person like us)

This was a sad and confused kind of not good enough-ness and ‘where do I fit in now?’ feeling that - because I’m not damping it down with wine - is still lingering.

I’ve done enough work to know that lingering feelings need to be held and investigated with curiosity and also compassion (thanks, Kate Northrup!).

That they are here to tell me something

And I think I know that ‘something’ probably involves revisiting my self-worth and self-esteem issues (dammit!).

Which is probably to be expected, but doesn’t make it any less painful.

In (more) wise words from Dr Joe Dispenza, I’m in the process of ‘breaking the habit of being myself’ and this is hard because changing emotional habits prompts the same chemical responses as going through actual drug withdrawal. And I’m kinda doing both at the same time.

But also - lest I start to take myself too seriously and forget that choosing not to drink free champagne is really a total first world problem - I would also like to share some words from my equally wise husband in Skiathos: ‘You’re not not invited to the after parties because your sober, you’re not invited because you’re not a hot, 30-something single gay man. And some things you cannot change, no matter how many books you read.’

CONCLUSION (SO FAR)

Thank you for reading this far. If you have, can I presume that you have a passing interest in what it’s like not to drink?

If so, I hope this hasn’t been too negative a read, and I hope it doesn’t put you off trying a sober stint yourself.

As identified, I’m right in the raw and messy middle. But the beauty (and the frustration) of committing to this process for a whole year is that when challenging times come (as they have!) I won’t cave and have a drink, instead I’ll ride it out (as I’m doing!) and spend time reflecting on what’s happening until I can report back to you from the (hopefully supremely positive) other side at the end of the year.

If I was in AA I suppose this is the kind of thing I would share with my sponsor or group, but I’ve tried AA and it isn’t for me. I don’t identify as an alcoholic or as being in recovery, and I’m not on board with the disease model they embrace. I am, however, somebody who has been addicted to alcohol and who is now trying another way, which is involving highs and lows and a lot of uncomfortable firsts. And in the absence of AA support I’m sharing them with my husband and friends, and here with you.

A big learning from these six months, and especially the wedding and boozy summer invites, is that when I attend boozy events with friends who like to drink I am going to feel a bit weird. And so I have two options:

1. To stop going to these events and seeing these friends.

2. To accept the weird feelings and suck it up.

After trying both I have landed on a combination of the two… I’m still going to see booze-loving friends and go to some booze-soaked events BUT I’m going to be more picky about which ones (people and events). I’m going to include more alcohol-free people and activities in my life. I’m going to take the time to reflect on the weird feelings but I’m also going to accept that they will be there for a while yet as my nervous system gets used to a new way of being and living and feeling.

And ultimately I will keep going with my challenge because, however icky these feelings and however dark the shadow side may turn out to be, I am 100% sure that swimming through a river of change is much better for me than drowning in an ocean of wine.

Thanks for reading,

With much love from SH SQ,

Toni 💛

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