Someone just reached out to me on instagram, thanking me for sharing my own journey with sobriety and recommending a great mocktail syrup I should try. Every time someone DMs me or leaves a comment to say they’re trying it for themselves, I feel a little swell of pride - for both of us.
But that pride is often followed by a pang of guilt, because if I’m praising you for something, I must be condemning those who aren’t following suit, right?
It’s so difficult to reconcile the benefits of sober living with my honest-to-god respect for anyone else’s choices. Almost everyone I know still drinks, some socially, some daily, some may identify themselves as problematic drinkers, others may be but haven’t recognised it yet. Some can drink once a year and never think of it again. Whatever your drinking habits, they are nothing to do with me. Unless you’re a danger to yourself or others, it’s not my place to tell you how to live your life.
My relationship with alcohol was always strained. I’ve talked this to death, but for those just tuning in.. there’s a family history and I was warned from a young age to be careful of my consumption. That warning haunted me. I will never really know if the seed it planted would have bloomed or if I ever would have considered it to be a problem, had it not been suggested, but it was always there.
It’s almost like being born an alcoholic. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I never felt dependant on it, but my brain told me it was coming for me eventually. As a result, I had a great deal of shame about drinking. It felt like I was doing something I shouldn’t be and my hanxiety started before I took my first sip.
I never needed alcohol as a social lubricant and before I gave up entirely, I spent many late nights out sober. People would comment at the time, ‘I could never do that’ and I did feel a little tingle of satisfaction from that. Like I was doing something special. Honestly, looking back, it feels a bit performative. Like, ‘look at me! I don’t even need alcohol to have a good time.’ But I think that message was for myself more than anyone else.
Just a few days ago, we were at a kids football presentation and I was drinking my zero % lager. Someone commented that that was unusual for me, and I told them I hadn’t had a drink in 18 months. They were genuinely aghast. I can’t blame them really, I was doing cartwheels on the dance floor after the Christmas party, why wouldn’t they have thought I was drunk? But again, I think that’s all to prove to myself that I’m ‘just as fun’ without it. - normal people don’t do cartwheels, do they? If you’re familiar with the RHOBH, they are my version of Kyle Richard’s splits. You had better believe, if I could do the splits, I’d never not be doing them.
So is my sobriety really about me, or is it about how I’m perceived? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Perception guides so much of what we do. We change our behaviour based on the responses of others, we conform to beauty standards because we want to feel accepted. The new world of social media has created a fresh way to seek validation. So now the approval you’re fishing for is global. Sobriety can be a way to avoid criticism, but the ‘sober curious lifestyle’ is also a movement. Like a club you can join and feel included.
But if you give up something that’s inherently bad for you, does it matter what motivated the change?
Yes and no. If it pushed you to do something you already wanted to do, great! It was the final push to get you off the starting block and your core reason should keep you going, but any change you embark on purely for the approval of others is unlikely to stick.
Additionally, it’s a whole separate issue if you’re putting so much stock in the opinions of others that you’re altering your life to fit theirs.
I saw a reel the other day from a woman who was having her first drink after 2 years without alcohol. She’d abstained while dating a sober person, in support of their recovery. That’s a really lovely thing to do for someone, but it really blew my mind that 2 years wasn’t automatically forever. That really speaks to the call needing to come from inside the house on this one.
After 6 months, I felt like I’d stepped outside of my body and was looking down at past me with a totally new perspective. It was like a spell had been broken. Until I stopped, I had zero interest in sober living. I couldn’t imagine why I wouldn’t drink. Now, I truly cannot imagine why I ever would. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, ‘just give it a go, it’s so easy’. I’d save myself decades of heartache.
The final straw for me was my 12 year old son telling me he didn’t like being around adults drinking. I obviously had my hit of instant shame for ever having made him feel uncomfortable, but rather than bat it away and think, ‘he needs to toughen up’, I thought about the times in my life, as a child, I’d wished people would stop drinking. I then realised, if I have to think too hard about this at all, I have a problem. If I cannot immediately stop, then that’s the reason I should.
I like to see it as getting out before it caught up to me, but really.. it probably already had. I drank every day in lock down, I once fell asleep on a birthday zoom.. for my own birthday. I always tried to keep my drunk self away from other people, I would leave my PJs and toothbrush downstairs so I could get changed and sleep on the sofa after a night out, and I’ve been known to make an Irish exit if I felt I was past the point of fun drunk. But that was all part of the embarrassment over being drunk in the first place. I used to say, ‘nobody starts out intending to get wasted’, but if that happens enough times, and it makes you mentally unwell for weeks afterwards, why would you keep doing it?
So when I tell you I take pride in my sobriety now, I really do. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself and my family. My kids will always be able to call me in an emergency, knowing I am ‘okay to drive’. They will never be embarrassed of my behaviour when introducing me to new partners or friends, and their kids will only know me as I am today. I feel all of those things deeply, but saying them out loud feels mean.
It sounds like I’m suggesting that anyone who drinks is unreliable, and embarrassing. When I talk about the benefits of quitting, it feels like I’m piling on the negatives for those who have no interest in cutting their consumption. If you weren’t a card carrying member of AA, then taking that hard left turn feels like you’re jumping on a trend for attention. Especially if you’re waxing poetic about the many ways in which it’s changed your life for the better. I may as well be knocking on doors selling my new version of the bible.
It’s very difficult to say, ‘I did this great thing for myself’ without it reading as, ‘and you chose not to’.
I would imagine people who lose large amounts of weight feel this too. Have a look under any Meghan Trainor post. I understand that she built her brand on body positivity, but it does feel like body positivity is only accepted so long as you never get smaller. When someone makes a choice for them that doesn’t align with your own, it’s uncomfortable. It’s like that friend who got divorced and then 3 others followed. When a peer makes a change, you start to question your own relationships - with people, with work, with hobbies and behaviours. We can become so complacent, it usually takes an external jolt to make us consider what we’re actually doing.
That reel I saw made me realise that my experience isn’t going to be the same for everyone. I had convinced myself that once you get far enough away from it, you’ll see that it was never any good for you. You’ll wonder why the cycle ever began and you’ll never look back. The idea that someone would flip the switch back after 2 years shook up that perspective.
For some people, the lifestyle they’re living right now is based on other people. So much of how we live is down to environment, current responsibilities and budget. If you have a partner who’s super active, you might go along with that, but if you’re not that person then you will stop once they’re not around. You might have people who drag you to gigs you enjoy but would never go to alone, maybe they made you join a book club and you’re reading something you have no personal interest in.. but now you’re someone who goes to a book club.
Some things are trends, in so much as we’re being influenced to try new things. If performative sobriety is a trend, I don’t hate it. It could break the cycle for some people like me, who really did want to stop, and it could give others a temporary break from something they may have developed a habitual relationship with.
Talking about the benefits will always get someones back up, but I think the key to remember there is that if you aren’t worried about your drinking, it wont bother you. I have a good relationship with food and my body, and so I’m not triggered by content about diet, exercise or weight loss. It’s not for me, but it doesn’t make me feel anything but, ‘good for them’. If someone made a reel about the dangers of ice cream sandwiches.. we may have a problem My addictive personality has eaten 3 boxes this week alone. Usually I lose interest in my hyper-fixation food pretty quickly but this one seems to be sticking around.
If you’ve been considering trying them, I’d honestly say, don’t get involved. You may one day find me buried under a pile of Ben and Jerry’s wrappers but know, I died happy. This is the lifestyle I’ve chosen and I’m not accepting criticism at this time.
See you in the next one
