![]() ![]() That was my fantasy when I drank, and it was still my fantasy on the day I slugged my last drink, some kind of fruit punch, in the early hours of 1 January 2013. During the times when I drank, I had another persistent fantasy, which would pop into my mind every so often: a big, fat, round tumbler of super-strength vodka, shimmering under a layer of ice, so strong it smelled like petrol. Something felt wrong, and this feeling of wrongness would get worse as the year wore on – summer worse than spring, autumn worse than summer. I was never quite in control of the amount I drank, as if my brain had been damaged. I could never have just the one, or just a couple. I had a persistent fantasy that, the next time I started to drink, things would be better. I knew I would drink again on my birthday. I knew I was not going to drink, and this knowledge made me not want to drink. I did not have little nips of this or that. I just said: “I’m off the drink.” People just said: “Cool.” On planes I was happy not to drink the little bottles of wine. I saw that most people, almost everybody in fact, did not care whether or not I drank at their parties. I went to pubs and bars and drank fizzy water. But if you convince the dog the door is locked, it will stop whining and walk away.Įvery year, I stopped whining and walked away. ![]() Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist and addiction expert, told me it was the same thing as when you put a piece of meat in the fridge, and your dog paws at the door, whining and trying to force the door open. ![]() They know they can’t possibly smoke, so they just put the whole thing out of their minds. Being sober made me think of chainsmokers whose craving disappears on long-haul airline journeys. I did not crave it or sneak around and drink secretly. In those moments, I understood something about why my drinking was a problem.ĭuring the times I did not drink, I was not aware of wanting to drink. And without the shroud of a hangover, my mind would feel strangely defenceless any emotion could just barge in and march around for hours. What did I drink last night? How much did I get through? And then I’d remember: nothing. For a few seconds, my mind would be racing. The day after that I’d wake up, and put my head under the duvet, waiting for the pain and the sickness. The next day I’d wake up with a phantom hangover. The first few days of sobriety provided a clue. And then I’d stop, and I’d be sober for 120 days. Drink added something, but it always seemed to subtract more than it added, and the only way I could get things back to normal was to drink more, and all this drinking began to wreck my mind. But it also increased, in a more subtle way, over the course of a month, a year, a decade. My thirst always increased over the course of an evening. I wanted the second drink more than the first, and I wanted the fifth more than I’d wanted the fourth. The more I drank, the more I wanted to drink. When I try to explain my drinking problem, it goes like this: in my head, I was a moderate drinker, but after I’d had a drink, I wasn’t. Tonight, I would be in a different world. On my birthday, I would wake up feeling the sort of anxiety you feel before a date or a party. Drink seemed to have a strange, brain-sucking power over me. I wanted to drink for precisely the same reason that I didn’t want to drink – because I had a drinking problem. In any case, I felt compelled to start drinking again that was part of the deal I’d made with myself, because I really wanted to drink. I’d have a sense of nervous anticipation, a queasy feeling that I didn’t want to start drinking again, combined with a queasy feeling that I did. Then my birthday, my drinking day, would come around again. Sobriety rejuvenates you like nothing else. I remember one conversation after 15 teetotal weeks the guy I was talking to said he couldn’t believe how young I looked. I no longer turned up to appointments late, sweaty, reeking of alcohol. My concentration improved I could buzz through a book in a few hours. But maybe, I often thought, sobriety wasn’t exactly a punishment.
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