The Cutprice Guignol

When I quit drinking, I have to admit – at first, it really fucking sucked.

I had heard a lot of talk about what sobriety what do for me – the ways it would free me, the opportunities it would give me, the self-knowledge that I’d come to access that I never would have been able to had I still been abusing alcohol. But the self-knowledge turned up to be mental illness I had been doing a good job self-medicating with substances, the opportunities mostly came in the form of crying on the bathroom floor, and the freedom? Yeah, I didn’t even know where that came into it.

When I first quit my substances of choice, I have to admit, it felt a whole lot like a collection of doors slamming in my face. All the coping mechanisms that I had relied on for so long had suddenly been snatched from me, but more than that, so had a whole lot of fun – or, at least, what felt like it. One of the hardest parts of getting sober, especially from more socially-acceptable drugs like alcohol, is the way that it makes you feel like you’re own strict parent. No, you can’t do that. That’s not good for you. You need to stop that, and this, and this, and even all the good stuff that came with it, too. At first, freedom felt like the furthest thing from my mind, almost impossible to conceive when I was cutting myself off from so much that I had, as destructive as it had ultimately been, enjoyed for a long time.

And it struck me recently how much my outlook has changed on that in the time since I quit drinking. Because I don’t think I realized quite how much of my brainspace was taken up with alcohol until I stopped. Not just thinking about when I was going to drink, but how it came to infect virtually all of my life, especially my social interactions. One of the reasons I was so drawn to alcohol in the first place was because of the comfort I felt like it gave me socially, a comfort I often lacked in myself as a teenager when I first began drinking. So much of my social life was fixed around alcohol (partly by design, as a cover for how much I was consuming) but, with the compulsive approach I took to it, my mind was always half on the person in front of me, and half in a constant and frantic calculation about the alcohol. How much was there? How much could I feasibly have without drawing attention? When did the shops close, how late could I stay here before I wouldn’t be able to pick up another bottle of something on the way home? It was this constant roiling rush of questions that I wasn’t even aware of until I stopped engaging with them entirely, in the form of quitting drinking completely.

And let me tell you – when you take that out of the equation, your ability to actually be present in the moment caught me entirely off-guard. I didn’t even realize how much of my mind it was taking up until I stopped, the way that felt like the freedom I had been promised when I originally quit. When my mindset shifted from a question of how much and how often and how obvious it was that I had an issue to a simple answer – no – it was a weight off my shoulders socially that allowed me to be there with the people I cared about. It took a while, but it did end up feeling like the freedom I had heard about when I first quit drinking, and, eight years later, I’m so glad that I stuck it out long enough to have the perspective to see that.

If it’s something you’ve had experience with, I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments below – should you want to check out any more of my writing on quitting drinking and sobriety, check that out here, here, and here. If you’d like to read more of my writing in general or support this blog, please consider checking out my Patreon or buying my books!