How Sobriety Came About

During my four years of my marriage, I had enjoyed the novelty of being a homebody. To a degree. But from the second he walked out, it all fell apart, and I rediscovered with earnest an enthusiasm for non-conformity, eagerly demonstrating this to whoever cared to look via a cornucopia of vices: smoking (I’d previously given up during pregnancy but felt that divorce provided me with a reassuringly sound reason to take up the habit once again), nightclubs, heavy drinking and the occasional recreational drug experience.

In the evenings, after I had put my daughter to bed, I would prop myself up against the doorframe and look out onto my pretty garden, large glass of Pinot Grigio in one hand and Marlboro Light in the other. My divorce anthems humming in the background (Eminem, The Red Hot Chili Peppers), I would inhale angrily on cigarettes, hating him, despising my life, and relishing in the self-destruction that melted away the pain – at least for the few hours that I was imbibing.

In 2004, alcohol adopted its undeniable role as my predominant form of self-medication. Nights out would begin with a bottle of wine, downed at home before I even got out of the door. I would approach whoever I was meeting in a bar with a barely disguised drunken meander, silently praying they wouldn’t notice. I’d order only large glasses of white wine and had zero understanding of why anyone would even attempt to moderate their alcohol consumption.

Men came and went. I spent entire weekends seething with rage, hungover, depressed, lost and unable to identify a way out of the pit of despair into which I had fallen.

When I wasn’t drinking, I was learning how to be a single parent and managing my divorce. The legal process of disentanglement took approximately a year, a period of time that passed in a blur. And throughout it all, I was leaning with an ever-increasing dependence upon white wine.

Alcohol dependence is a funny thing. When you are in the midst of it, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to recognise you have lost the ability to choose. It feels as though you are making a choice to drink every time you rock up at the local off-licence and peruse the alluring bottles on the shelves with the eye of a connoisseur and the heart of a liar. It feels as though you are making a choice to drink each time you arrange a convivial Sunday lunch – you’ll invite friends or family over, and then proceed to slug glass after glass of wine, as you simultaneously attempt to cobble together a passable meal through drunken eyes. You’ll tell yourself that you are choosing this life when you spend a whole Saturday afternoon in the pub knocking back pints of ale with some bloke you don’t really care about.

You are lying, brazenly, to yourself. The narrative is thus: I am a sophisticated grown-up who is indulging in alcoholic beverages as a way of enhancing my life, my food, my social life. I enjoy drinking. It adds value to my existence. I deserve to drink alcohol because my bastard ex-husband is holed up with his girlfriend, ten years his junior, and I am careering, ever deeper, into a place that I don’t like, a place that is gradually becoming my new normal. The world is filled with happy couples who love one another, accept one another, who are all part of ‘the club’. And I am on my own, fucked. So, I will smoke. And I will bloody well drink. And, because I can, I will occasionally take drugs. I’ll do all of it with anger boiling inside me with such force that it makes me glare at strangers, hate people, hate the world, hate myself. When I am drunk, I will cry and shout. I’ll text my ex-husband and inform him that I despise him, that he has ruined my life.

But I am choosing this life. I like this life. I want it.

When my marriage was eventually and officially dissolved, I took my then boyfriend to a fancy hotel in Clerkenwell, London, and we threw a divorce party, just the two of us. From room service, we ordered countless bottles of Moët. We snorted cocaine on the luxurious bed, stayed up until dawn and listened to loud rave music. I was twenty-eight. I hated myself. I had failed. But I’d recently seen a picture of Nicole Kidman, snapped by the paparazzi as she celebrated her divorce from Tom Cruise; arms outstretched, head thrown back with joy and relief, and I took it as a sign that I too should rejoice in this moment. Divorce was good; it required champagne and it demanded drugs. I would absorb this new identity and fuck the rest of the married world. Fuck convention and fuck my dreams that I could be loved. Fuck every single man who I couldn’t believe would ever love me. And fuck me.

The dance of alcohol-fuelled self-hatred, remedied by yet more alcohol, continued for several more years. It settled into my existence and identity, familiar and reliable. A rolling, foamy tide, washing over the beach, over and over. It became who I was. The sea grass basket that lived by my front door was permanently overflowing with empty bottles of Chablis and Barolo. I would only buy wine costing in excess of £10 because I could then tell myself, with a sense of smug satisfaction, that this was not alcohol dependence at all but rather an appreciation of fine wines.

The anger I felt towards my ex-husband did not diminish with time. I stored it all up in a secret pressure cooker that I concealed with false smiles, drunken laughter and a relentless mission to “have fun”. But it was there. It crept out at unexpected moments, a seething ball of fury and hatred that showed up in vehement rants aimed at strangers over insignificant nothings. It revealed itself when I sat on my living room floor and cried for hours on end, screaming and holding a knife to my wrist, pondering whether or not it would be best to just depart this world for good. It emerged in every last disastrous relationship that I fell into when I showed nothing but contempt for the confused men who tried so hard to make me happy. In 2011, after eight long years, I finally reached the summit of my self-destruction.

One ordinary night, sometime in April, I told myself that I deserved “a glass of wine”. (This sequence of four words constitutes a blatant lie, as anyone who has experienced the tenacious deceit of alcohol dependency will understand. There is no such thing as “a glass of wine”. Only bottles. Once popped, the cork will never be replaced.)

My daughter was not at home and so, with the freedom that my solitude brought, I consumed around forty units of alcohol in the space of three hours, almost triple the recommended upper limit that we are advised to spread over a whole week. When I awoke several hours later in a hospital bed in Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital, it was with the light of a torch shining directly into my eyes, held by the hand of an obviously busy and inconvenienced duty nurse. Shame engulfed me, slowly at first but then gathering momentum and filling every corner of my soul with such a weight that I completely lost my sense of self. I disappeared, eclipsed by the enormity of what I had done.

These moments in life leave their impression. They change us. I left behind a large fragment of my identity in the hospital that morning. A part of me abandoned forever: the wilful, angry, immortal devil that had been holding my hand with such a firm grip for so long, dragging me this way and that, whispering in my ear that the road of destruction was my certain destiny… It vanished.

I cried every day for months, following that last dalliance with wine. But from the ashes of soul-crushing shame emerged my new, most important chapter. Sobriety. 

"Your addiction is not you, but it feels like you because you’ve spent so much intimate time together.” ~ Toni Sorenson