Becoming the ‘sober friend’

Sometimes, things change, and you suddenly find yourself different, but you’d not have noticed if it weren’t for something bringing it to your attention.

Content Warning: this article obviously talks about alcoholism, sobriety, and retells some of the stories along the way. If those things are likely to trigger you, please don’t read this article, head to a meeting or do what you need to do to stay sober instead.

I’ve been changing for a long time, I’m not going to lie. It’s been a journey. Sobriety isn’t typically something someone does over night, it takes time. It takes work. This is me looking back at my journey towards kicking my habit of getting drunk & drinking heavily.

They say life’s a journey, and it’s all about the friends you make along the way. I guess that can sometimes be true, but for me as an alcoholic, I now question: were we really friends? Or were we just drunks together?

That’s a challenging proposition to ask yourself. Maybe, who knows? No offence, I just changed. Some friends have remarked “was that me?” to which I can only say: maybe, but I’m sure you have your reasons for your own consumption habits of this drug we know as alcohol.

It can be hard to talk about addiction in a society so addicted to the consumption of alcohol, one which remains steadfast in pretending alcohol isn’t a drug and isn’t a problem, until it is. We normalise the consumption of it to high heavens, and then wonder why it’s a problem? I’m not advocating for prohibition either, because that doesn’t work, but rather making sure we’ve alternatives to always drinking.

When I lived in the UK, it was standard behaviour to go to the pub after work, and the drinks would just keep flowing. That’s how we did “office socialising”. I still remember an executive twice my age at a company raving to me about how good viagra is, I don’t think he remembered that conversation the next day, recovering from his hangover. The alcohol fuelled so many awkward and strange conversations, but the pub was also where big decisions might get made, so you had to be there, be part of the “family” – a term that’s bullshit for any company for many reasons.

The key point is that whilst we live in an alcohol-normalising society, one where you can’t opt out of advertising about consumption of this drug, we end up with unhealthy & unsustainable relationships to the consumption of alcohol, and it permeates throughout our societies.

It’s all too easy to fall into alcoholism like I did, where I’d not want to stop drinking because my brain was getting all those “good fun time vibes” that alcohol gives you, distorting your perception of events.

Often after I’d parted ways with the group at the bar, even if I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to continue drinking, I would continue drinking until I’d had my fill.

It’s all too easily and normalised in our societies to be “needing a drink” because of a long day at the office and “needing the drink to left off some steam”, which all gets back to how we process stress, how we structure our lives and workplaces, and the behaviours that results in.

Recently I was at the hospital for a medical appointment, and that involved me having to give the doctor my full medical history. Of course, I knew the questions that were coming: “Do you smoke? do you drink? do you do drugs?”.

After a bit, we reached that question “do you drink?” and I knew what I needed to say “no, not often, but I am a recovering alcoholic”, and said it.

My doctor was surprised, and enquired further, so I explained: From the age of eighteen, I’d drunk heavily and would regularly get blackout drunk to cope. I needed that drink when I couldn’t deal with everything happening in life. However, in the last year and a half, I’d finally stopped my addiction to alcohol.

Her surprise continued, as she asked if I did Alcoholics Anonymous, no, therapy, not for that, groups, nope. How, she asked? And I calmly explained that I’d just reached a point where the alcohol just wasn’t serving me anymore.

She remarked that that was impressive. It didn’t feel impressive.

Twelve years, many, many relapses, and I’d finally managed to stop being a drunk.

I think I surprised people when I first started referring to myself as an alcoholic. It was like they’d feared someone uttering that word, like “macbeth” at a play. Maybe it implied that *gasp* they might be alcoholics too?

Maybe they perceived themselves as drinking just like me, so if I had a problem, they must have a problem. That’s not my place to say, but I do encourage you, dear reader, to ask yourself if you’re happy with the alcohol consumption in your life, or has it become a problem?

Most people who’ve known me over the past 12 years probably wouldn’t have describe me as an alcoholic, they just knew I liked to drink & spend time in bars. After all, a significant majority of my friends are bartenders and people of the night that I’d met along the way, this isn’t a piece against them, you’ve got a job to do, and that just happens to involve serving alcohol.

I don’t think it ever directly impacted my life in that way that most people think of when you describe yourself as an alcoholic. I don’t think it ever affected my work, maybe once or twice I got called out for having alcohol on my breath, but a lot of the time there were excuses: I was late because of the train / my alarm didn’t go off / I had an anxiety attack / I’m young, I made a mistake.

All those things were in some part true, but it’s also true that I was often hungover in the morning after having drunk too much the night before.

Most people think of like interventions, being arrested for being drunk, getting in trouble, loosing jobs, etc, when you say “I’m a recovering alcoholic”.

That wasn’t me, I could probably be at best described as a relatively high functioning alcoholic, but I was still an alcoholic.

If that’s not the case, I’m sure someone might correct me, but to my knowledge I don’t think it ever truly affected my life the way people expect for “an alcoholic”.

Maybe a few people noticed, but they never called me out about my behaviour. In some ways, I guess they let me get away with it, who knows, would I have even listened to them if they’d tried to tell me I had a problem? Was I ready to admit I had a problem?

I’ve touched on being an alcoholic before in the past in my writings, heck, some of them were written whilst I was drunk. You can read such in Bright Liars (2014), Exploring My World In Words (2014), and A Swig of Pride (2014).

That year, 2014, was probably one of my lowest, when I’d first started to understand that I had a problem, but my alcoholism started much earlier. The moment that took me over the line of “enjoying a drink & a party occasionally” was in 2011.

It was 2011, I was eighteen, and had just moved half way around the world to London. I was struggling: I had work or home. That was it, I didn’t yet have friends in this new city. I was working too much, and feeling stressed, and one particular night I found myself walking down Leather Lane, dark, empty, and quiet.

I walked into the nearest off license to my office, looked around, beer? Nah. Wine? Meh. Finally I went to the checkout and asked for whiskey or something. He had cognac, and not the good stuff. That would do.

I don’t really remember much else of that night, but I do know I later went on to write a JavaScript testing framework called Cognac, and joked about being driven to drink in a talk on it – little did the audience know that on my bedside table was a bottle of the hard stuff that helped me sleep & relax.

I knew what I was doing was wrong. I’d been raised better than this. I was taught to consume alcohol “in moderation” (now, as a mostly sober person, I question that a bit, but that’s a different story)

I also know I messed up majorly by partying in Sydney before my move, one last hurrah, and then found myself in London with not enough money to my name & having to borrow against my first 3 months salary. That was an alcoholic’s fuckup.

Over the years, my alcoholic tendencies ebbed and flowed. Sometimes I was worse, sometimes I wouldn’t drink or would try to stop, only to fall back into the beer glass or bottle.

For majority of my adult life, I’d find myself in a bar after work, at least four, usually more than six drinks in, striking up drunken conversations with other people drinking. That was just how I made it through my evenings. That’s how I coped with stress of the day.

I did manage to kick the strong liquor at one point, and decide that I’d only drink beer. It was never just beer though, not really, because I’d be imbibing so much it may have well been a whiskey or few.

At one point I’d had a particularly bad day, and on automata had walked into my usual haunt near Liverpool Street Station, the bartender greeted me, “meantime?”, “nah, whiskey, thanks”. It went down too easily, another. The drinks kept coming, and after maybe an hour or two I’d drunk probably 10 shots of whiskey neat.

I stumbled outside, my world spinning, there was no public transport for me that night. The back of a cab is all I remember until waking up sprawled across my bed in a cold sweat, shaking.

The cruelness hit me a week later, as I was in Ireland at a conference, and there was a tasting of whiskey, where I had to excuse myself from the bar to avoid puking from the smell alone. I wasn’t able to drink whiskey for several years after that one night at that bar near Liverpool Street.

Getting sober wasn’t easy. I had to deal with a fuckton of problems. I did try complete sobriety several times, I got the cravings, I got the shakes, every bar glared at me, a bright liar calling me inside. Eventually I managed to enforce some rules that helped manage the worst of my alcoholic tendencies.

Probably the three highest impact changes I made were:

1. Not keeping alcohol in my flat anymore. If I don’t have easy access, I can be too lazy to seek out a drink. Pouring that bottle of whiskey down the sink felt damn good.
2. I stopped working from offices. Something about that environment made me crave a drink. Was it that shitty lighting? Was it my anxiety? Who’ll ever know?
3. I started to go to therapy regularly, once a week to have a different method through which to process stress and keep my depression and need to drink at bay.

From there, it was easier. Not easy, but easier. I worked through the triggers, I went to therapy to deal with those triggers, and to try to learn different coping mechanisms to live a healthier life, a life I wanted to live. I won’t say I’ve everything sorted out, but I’m no longer at the point that I regularly feel the need to drink.

I probably lost a friend along the way, he was older than me, and he’d decided he no longer wanted to drink without stopping. He wanted a different life, I still remember being a bit offended when he pointed out how neither of us had a handle on our alcohol consumption. Sorry former friend, I was an asshole and had a problem, but also thanks for being there for me for as long as you were.

That probably later helped me get sober. If he could do it, I could surely do it.

There’s probably dozens of more anecdotes just like this. Eventually I reached a point where I cut my drinking down to just one or two nights a week, ah, yes, classic binge drinking and excuses of an alcoholic:

I’m not a drunk, I only drink (and get drunk) once or twice a week with friends.

I came to realise that was a problem too, the pandemic probably helped me here, because I couldn’t get drunk at the bar. I’d count my drinks, I’d try to mix with alcohol free drinks, but it was difficult, there was always that pressure to drink.

Then something changed, and I’m not exactly sure what. Maybe it was starting hormones (I figured out along the way that I’m transgender), or maybe it was trying to become fertile so I could finish a fertility treatment and maybe one day have kids.

I honestly don’t know. I decided to stop getting drunk, and just did. I decided to change my life to a life that I wanted to be living, not just passing through the motions of living.

I relapsed a several times, no doubt, but so far it’s maybe been four to six times in the past year. I learned the importance of being kind to myself, hearing the serenity prayer also helped a bit, not that I’m religious.

[God] Grant me the serenity to Accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.

TV Shows like Grey’s Anatomy, featuring characters like doctors Amelia Shepherd & Richard Webber definitely helped me reframe what it meant to be an alcoholic, and how to approach my own habits of consumption of alcohol, which certainly gave me a different perspective.

Everyone who learns of my new found “sobriety”, or control on my alcohol consumption, almost always asks me “do you feel better?” like they expect me to be shitty rainbows or something.

Maybe they want that answer of “yes, absolutely”, because then they’d feel that they too could find sobriety. But that simply isn’t the case: I just manage my problems differently now, and have different priorities in my life. My life is no longer driven by alcohol.

My therapist says I look and sound much better, and reinforced what my doctor said the other day about my decision to just quit that alcoholic lifestyle as impressive, but it doesn’t feel impressive. It feels like I’ve done the bare minimum to keep living.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally sober, but I now know my limits, and can stick to them almost all the time. I don’t crave a drink often, and can often handle that craving differently when it comes. I also have people in my life now who’ll remind me of my limits & call me out if I drink too much. I drink at maximum two alcoholic drinks, then switch to alcohol free options or go home. Maybe I’ll let myself have a glass of wine with dinner, if it’s meal appropriate, but I don’t need that wine with my dinner, water is fine too.

Some nights that I want to see friends out at a bar, I won’t even drink alcohol at all, opting for two alcohol free beverages, because I’m not at the bar for the drink, I’m there to see people I consider friends who I don’t otherwise get to see.

Some nights I consciously choose not to drink alcohol, and yes, I’ll be saying not to that shot that you’re offering me. I won’t try to rub it in your face, but I will explain that I’m alcohol free that night.

So yes? I guess I’m that “sober” friend now.