Bryony GORDON
When I had my last alcoholic drink four years ago, things felt unimaginably grim – and not just because it was 10am and I should have been at a family event almost 200 miles away. In the months following the decision to get sober, I realised that the beverage options – for those of us who had had our drinking privileges taken away – were not exactly plentiful.
There was water, and then there was tonic water and, if you were lucky, there was something flavoured with elderflower, which would be offered to you by uncomfortable hosts like a gift they weren’t quite sure you wanted, but that they had gone to the trouble of getting you anyway. I was always touched by this thoughtfulness, but as I sat at umpteen dinner tables sipping the sugary-sweet floral drink, I couldn’t help but think: “They seem to have mistaken me for a wood sprite, rather than a woman who relatively recently woke up in a field having blacked out after a 24-hour drink-and-drugs binge.”
About six months into sobriety, a non-alcoholic “gin” hit the market, but one bottle of it cost as much as a case of champagne. There were many reasons for me to stop drinking, but one was the money I would save. So I left the drink on the shelves of swanky off-licences I was too frightened to go into anyway.
How times have changed! Yesterday, I celebrated my sobriety birthday, and there were no end of alcohol alternatives to toast this milestone, which has come to mean much more to me than my “belly button” birthday (the day I was actually born).
In the supermarket, there are now shelves of booze-free drinks from big breweries and distillers desperately trying to keep up with the zeitgeist – even something called “nosecco” (see what they did there?). These alcohol alternatives look every bit as ghastly to me as their boozesoaked siblings (someone wise once told me that non-alcoholic drinks are for non-alcoholics), but I’m pleased as punch – if you will pardon the pun – for all those intriguing people who like the taste of booze but not the effect.
At the beginning of my sobriety, my abstinence was the most interesting thing about me. “YOU DON’T DRINK ALCOHOL?” people would holler when I turned down a glass of wine. Now, I can’t move for people telling me that they have decided to ditch booze. “I never drank that much, I wasn’t like you,” they are very, very careful to tell me, “but I do feel so much better for giving it up!” I nod politely, and wonder if they expect me to give them some sort of medal.
This week, I read in The Telegraph about the rise of sober festivals. I suppose I should be thrilled that things like this exist, but I am afraid that my initial thought was: “Surely, the point of getting sober is not having to wade around in mud for three days, pretending you’re having a good time.”
Still, make no mistake: sobriety is now cool, in a way it most certainly wasn’t when I got dragged off to rehab. I read in a Sunday supplement that the hip set now drink kombucha and lightly sparkling CBD drinks when out “partying”. Apparently, Kate Moss is sober. Lily Allen just got to two years. Noel Gallagher announced last week that he was ditching the booze after a heavy summer. It is now so normal to commit to periods of abstinence that even our Prime Minister has apparently decided to get sober in solidarity with his pregnant wife, Carrie.
Another newly “sober” friend – who I have never seen drink more than one glass of merlot in a sitting – told me the other day that it turned out I was “on to something” when I dried out, way back when. Well, I was certainly on something. And while sobriety has taught me that most people are well-meaning, and not everything is about me, there is a part of me that wants to point out that it didn’t feel very cool and trendy as I detoxed from decades of dependent drinking.
Sobriety is the best decision I ever made in my life – but it was also the hardest. When you have grown up in a booze-soaked culture that teaches you all of life’s answers are at the bottom of a bottle, it is a shock to discover that, actually, they aren’t. There is no balm for the pain that is suddenly staring you in the face. In time, of course, I have learnt that this is what makes sobriety so great, because after the ugliness comes the glory. But when you are an addict in your early days of not drinking, it can be hard to believe that this will ever be true.
Maybe we are in such denial about the dangers of alcohol, that we can’t even give it up without trying to turn it into some sort of trend – like knitting, or goat yoga. And that is fine: whatever gets you through the day (or the night) and all that. But in this rush to glamorise the alcohol-free life, let’s not forget that, for some, getting sober is not a trend – it’s a matter of life or death.
We can’t even give up alcohol without turning it into a fashion, like goat yoga