Four Years

I think I had my first drink at eight or nine. I was obsessed with the sophistication of it, having watched my parents throw parties in our home in suburban Australia. My siblings and I were swept up and banished to the upstairs living room, but I would sit on the staircase and listen. I loved how everyone in the room would sparkle after an hour or so, ringing with laughter; more animated, more alive.

In the rare instance that we were home alone, when my brother or sisters were distracted, I would open my parents liquor cabinet and pour tiny cups of Cinzano. I'd swirl it around in the glass, mimicking them, and I would sip it slowly. The flavour was strange, but special, and I loved how it made me feel. It was illicit and terrifying, and so grown up.

After the first few awkward years of high school I met my best mate. We were inseparable, gay, kindred spirits. On New Years Eve, when we were fourteen, he stole a bottle of champagne from my parent's fridge and we drank it secretly in my room, listening to music. Afterwards I hid it under my bed, anxious that I'd get caught. I didn't know it then, but it was the beginning of a pattern.

At fifteen, he scored speed at a party. I was terrified, so I pretended to take it with him, waiting to see what happened. When he was okay, I took it too. We roamed the party, drinking, manic and overwhelmed. His Mum picked us up and asked why we were so excited. Another mate threw up on himself in the back seat and she didn't notice.

At sixteen we bought some weed off a guy at school, and paid someone outside a bottle shop to buy us booze. We'd been declined by so many people that we were about to give up, and eventually one man agreed. He asked us what we wanted and in a panic we realised we hadn't discussed that. Someone blurted out “a litre of Baileys!” I had never been as ill as I was afterwards, but as we huddled around the bottle, the clouds of smoke, in an empty car park, we were invincible. Afterwards we ran along the streets, stumbling, laughing, sick to our stomachs with sweet milk.

On Sunday afternoons I would make my parents a martini each, with olives perched precariously on the side of the glass, carrying them carefully to the table. A few years later, during their divorce, my Mum would pour her heart out to me, and in the next room my Dad would pour another glass.

At seventeen we started sneaking into gay bars and queer nights. We realised if you got to one of them early enough, when it was still a pub serving food, no one would ID you. We'd drink beer and play pool and flirt with older men. I'd lean up against a wall, comically confident, smoking a cigarette like I was a chanteuse. By eighteen, we were seasoned, searching for bars with the cheapest specials, and for guys to buy them for us. We wandered the city, incoherent. I knew my best mate was slipping further, always drunker, gone, wild. He would get a feverish look in his eyes, like hot coals. Ambitious and terrifying, but somehow familiar, like me.

He secretly attended an AA meeting, but never went back. We laughed, incredulous, that he would even consider that.

At twenty we started taking morphine he was stealing from the pharmacy at the hospital he was training at. He looked up recipes for ketamine and made it in his microwave. We got high in his apartment and mixed pills and powders and wine, still listening to music. We got naked and cried laughing. On Christmas Eve my Mum found me passed out on the porch of our house. I couldn't work out how the keys worked.

At twenty one he died from a mixture of drugs and alcohol at a music festival. I found him in his tent in the morning. I stopped taking drugs for many, many years. I did not stop drinking. I wish that I had.

My twenties were a tug of war between my obsession with success, to not be defined by grief, and drinking to oblivion to escape it. I found jobs I could drink through, and hobbies I could drink at, and mates I could drink with. I stacked the deck, and in doing so I found something more powerful than grief—I found slow and steady self destruction.

And then, in my late 20's, I moved to London. I was a new person, untethered from my past. I could start fresh and clean. I found rugby, and rugby drinking was not at all like the drinking I'd done before. You could drink in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. You could drink when you won and when you lost, when you played and when you didn't. You could drink until nothing hurt anymore. You could drink until you didn't exist. You could do all that, and it was celebrated. I felt understood. I felt like I was home. It was the beginning of the end.

Around this time doctors got involved, and I tried to quit, and I failed, and I tried to quit, and I failed. I told myself next year I'd get it under control. Made rules, broke the rules, made more rules, broke them. And then lockdown hit, and all bets were off. And that was the weirdest thing about rock bottom—I didn't know it was coming until it was there. It's a thousand tiny steps off the edge of a cliff. Somehow I was hiding bottles around the house, vomiting most mornings, cycling between gin and anxiety. I had recurring dreams of throwing myself off the balcony and the lights all going out. I woke up. I had another drink.

And then, one particularly unspectacular morning, I was being violently ill in the bathroom when my husband asked what I was doing. I didn't realise he'd stayed home. I didn't have the words, or the heart, to explain to him that I did this most mornings, that I was still drunk, that there was something broken loose inside me, something fundamental. Everything hurt. I didn't know what to do, so I cried, and I threw up again. He gave me a hug. I didn't realise it, but I'd reached the end of a road.

So for ten months I was sober. I lived off sparkling water and willpower, but I felt liberated, and excited, and free. I found other sober mates, and followed sober curious Instagram accounts, and watched all of Netflix. I told everyone I was taking a month off, and just kept saying it anytime someone asked. Lockdown meant there was no pressure, no parties, so I could wrap myself up in blankets and masturbate and weather the storm.

And things were really, really good, for once. Eventually things were so good that I started to wonder why I'd even stopped. Things could be this good, and I could drink. Those truths could coexist, because I had decided it. So, I started planning it. I had a tattoo booked in Brighton the day I'd hit a year, and I figured it would be the perfect time. And then, just like that, I saw it all happen, like a fork in the road. I saw how it would go—I would get a glass of champagne, and then a bottle, and then I'd get another, and I'd hide in the hotel room and drink until I was numb and empty and untethered again, and it would never end, and I would die this way. I would die from this thing and I didn't want to. So I was finished.

That night I went to my first AA meeting. I gave a fake name, hid myself. I didn't say anything, but I liked hearing people talk about this thing that I thought I had.

I took a phone number from a guy, Michael, who was chairing the meeting, and who seemed just like me. I had all these fears about AA, about what it made me, and about the kind of people that would be part of something like that. I thought it was shameful—that it was its own form of death. But Michael seemed funny, and happy, and he told a harrowing story, but he told it in a way that could've been my story. He wasn't defined by it, though. He seemed light. I called him the next night, and walked 23 or so laps of the block in the dark, and poured my heart out, and he listened.

So I came back the next week. And the week after, and the week after. I used my real name, I stopped hiding. I took phone numbers and I messaged people. I made new mates, weird and funny and interesting, who understood. Really understood it. I got a sponsor, started doing service, did the steps. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed with sadness, had dreams about drinking. But mostly I felt overwhelmed with relief, and mostly I felt free. I kept coming back. Eventually I moved away from AA, but I still love what it is, that it exists. That it's always there.

And now I'm here, just shy of four years later, still sober. My story is my own, but it's not unique—it sounds familiar, like a hundred stories I've heard since I stopped.

I thought sobriety was a kind of death, but if it is it's only because it's the end of something, and the start of something new. My life is immeasurably different, infinitely better, without alcohol. I could not have imagined. The days are easy, for the most part. I am fitter, happier, sleep better, eat better. I am kinder, more connected, more alive. I no longer obsess about drinking. I don't focus solely on how much wine is left in the bottle every time I go out for dinner. I am no longer trapped in an endless cycle of gin and anxiety. I no longer fantasise about falling off the balcony and all the lights going out.

But more than anything, I've learned that I am more than my history, my alcoholism. But I am that, too. We are all made up of a million things, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible. It's what we choose to do with those things that matters.