OPINION
The best thing about being an alcoholic in recovery – other than the fact you get to keep your family, your home, your job and your mind – is that you get two birthdays, like the Queen you are. There’s your “belly button” birthday, which seems a curiously childlike term given that most alcoholics are hardened enough to know exactly where babies come from, and your sobriety birthday, which is self-explanatory.
I recently celebrated my sixth sobriety birthday, which is as miraculous as the idea of Laurence Fox announcing he would like to stand for the Women’s Equality Party. To give you some idea of how unlikely my sobriety is: when I washed up in rehab, I told the counsellor that I reckoned I had drunk my lifetime’s allowance of alcohol by the age of 37. “Five people’s lifetime allowances,” corrected the counsellor, having heard some of my more egregious reasons for being there.
Back then, I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol. Now it is hard to imagine one with it. But I talk about how it used to be a lot because I know how extraordinarily awful alcoholism is; how many lives it affects. And yet every time I mention that I used to be addicted to alcohol, some smart Alec will inevitably pop up in the comments and ask me to change the record. But I can’t change it, because it is only by remembering I am an alcoholic – and doing the work to stay sober – that I get to be everything else: a mother, a wife, a friend, a sister, a daughter, a writer, a vaguely useful member of society.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to recover loudly – in fact, because of stigma, most people don’t. I am immensely lucky not just to be sober, but also to be able to talk about it publicly. Most weeks, I am reminded of how important it is that I don’t pick up a drink, via the dozens of desperate messages I receive from people who can’t quite put their glass down. My quickest piece of advice is: put all your preconceptions aside and find an AA meeting. But given it’s now Sober October, I thought I would share a few of the other things I wish I had known when I was first trying to go alcohol-free.