Opinion: Here's what 20 years of being sober has taught me

"Alcoholism is a terrible death. People just don't understand. The addict itself does not understand," writes Tanya Gold. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

A few days before St Valentine's Day in 2002 – I can't say exactly when, I was too drunk – I had my last alcoholic drink. The timing is a pretty metaphor, I grant you, but it is mere coincidence. All drunks run out at some point, and I ran out early, at 28. I ran out with a bottle of cheap vodka (is there any other kind?) and with Jaws on the telly. Metaphor-tastic, again.

I was hospitalised for madness – that is the best definition of my behaviour at that time – on St Valentine's Day and, due to some weird alchemy, which I think was probably love – a counsellor was kind to me, held my hand and called me "lovely" as I gawped at him – I stopped.

I hung on. I promised I would give it a year and, at the end, if I were no happier, I would give myself permission to drink myself to death.

But I was happier, so I didn't. It was, though I didn't know it at the time, an act of hope. I didn't think I had hope, but the alcoholic is a very an unreliable narrator. I always thought I stopped drinking at 27. Then, for this article, I checked. I was a whole year out.

I don't want to write about what I was like when I was drinking. To be a using alcoholic is, among other things, to imagine yourself fascinating, because what else do you have? It is a defence mechanism because what you really are is chaos. You will know that we are not fascinating, but both tragic and boring at the same time.

Sometimes, I think I over-dramatise my drinking to frighten and shame myself. I think that if I create a big enough shadow to flee from, I will know to run forever from it. That keeps me safe, but not exactly happy.

The truth is that girl that I was is so far away now, I barely remember her. I feel a vague kind of pity and affection, as if for a long-dead sister, and I wish she had known – and this is trivial, but heartfelt – that she is prettier than I am. I want to give her that because she saw a monster in the mirror. But I won't write her life story again. It was short, it was unhappy and it ended. I was lucky. I lived. Plenty don't.

Alcoholism is a terrible death. People just don't understand. The addict itself does not understand. We float away on rage and insanity, and people are baffled and, I suspect, relieved.

Over the last 20 years, I have learned two essential things about my alcoholism. The first is that the voice – the voice of despair and anxiety, the voice that tells me to drink – wants to kill me. It really is that simple. I learnt that one night, toward the end of my using, when I stared into a mirror at 3am, on equal parts vodka and cocaine, and said so to myself.

I have waited in vain for her to be silenced but she will always be with me in some form. I have her for life, like my legs. I try to ignore her. Drink makes her strong and vast; love makes her small. But she's always popping up to make trouble. She's reliable like that, and only like that. I must push her down.

I understand that addiction narratives are compulsive: they are bloody, a holiday to someone else's insanity and shame, and I have written plenty of them. I find it soothing, writing my survival – my name – in ink.

But, 20 years on, I am not sure they are helpful: not by themselves. They are cautionary tales, like the mad novels of the Temperance movement, which were called things like "Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There". Walt Whitman wrote his – Franklin Evans, a tale of youthful drunkard – in three days while drunk. That is an indication of how stupid they are. Do not be like me, they say, and not much else.

Yet addiction runs through our society: alcohol, drugs of all kinds, food, pornography, sugar, television, smartphones, home furnishings, money. Does the odd cautionary memoir by a once-shamed middle-class writer stop this? Of course, not. Despite the plethora of testimony, we are curiously ignorant about drugs, because we choose to be.

There is much we know – turn to a new book, The Urge, by Carl Erik Fisher, if you want to know it – but much we don't. It seems to me the only sensible thing to do is to decriminalise all drugs; the most dangerous, alcohol and sugar, are already legal anyway. Then, we can use some of the vast profits of the alcohol companies (and illegal drug lords, when we have stolen their trade) to provide rehabilitation to those who need it.

There are drug epidemics, it is true, and they are usually caused by what is called "social wounding", which happens when societies are unequal, or in turmoil, or despair. But the treatment for that must be more wide-ranging than attending 90 AA meetings in 90 days, or six weeks of residential rehab with a Friday night music session run by a priest with a tambourine. That, I hand over to you.

Perhaps, in the end, that is what I have learnt in 20 years. To turn my gaze, and look less within, and more without.