Seeing my mother, Simpsons-colour jaundiced in a hospital bed thanks to alcohol, was not the wake-up call that stopped me from drinking every day; I served another four years after that. It didn’t occur to me to try sobriety after oversleeping for my uncle’s funeral following a midweek cocaine binge. Demotions at my dream BBC job, narcotic breakups, a canyon of debt, fist-fights I’d forget, and self-harm, were not enough to convince me that maybe me and booze were not meant to be.
But after coughing up a violet collage of cheap red wine and blood on a Monday morning just over four years ago, aged 30, I did it. I stopped. It was the defining decision of my life.
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My upbringing was comfortable in that my parents were and still are together, I have four siblings I love, and we went on holiday once a year. In my soul, my priorities have long been family, football, music and creating things. But behind my positive outlook and happy mask was a sadness that was alleviated by writing, drawing and making music.
This naturally led my adult life into the batshit paths of a career in journalism (BBC, MUNDIAL, The Guardian) and playing in bands (you won’t have heard of), which I’ve done since the age of 18. These are two worlds where excessive alcohol and drug consumption are assertively normalised; I was like agent Dale Cooper enthusiastically arriving in Twin Peaks, knowing I’d found my people in both of them. Like agent Cooper, my innocence would soon be demolished and I’d find myself with the demons in the Black Lodge.
Cards on the table: I didn’t initially get sober for the right reasons. It started as a one-week trial to secure a date with a beautiful girl who I ended up with for a long time. She’d just stopped drinking herself and had noticed cans of beer, glasses of whisky and bottles of wine in almost every picture that existed of me.
Thankfully, my desire to impress the beautiful girl reluctantly pulled that first trigger, and the familiar and ugly family of anxieties and withdrawals drastically dissipated by the day, and as panic attacks went from weekly, to monthly, to seldom, I finally understood that platitude of sobriety called “clarity”.
