On Ten Years Sober

It was around 4pm on a Friday afternoon in February. I was working at a small start-up in a co-working space in London.

The Friday beer trolley — one of the few perks of start-up life — was doing the rounds, and I grabbed a bottle of Becks.

But something had changed. I took a sip of the luke-warm beer, put down the glass bottle, and walked away from alcohol for good.

That was 10 years ago today, and I’ve been sober ever since.

The sequence of events leading up to a decision to become sober is complex, unique and personal.

When we tell our stories, it becomes clear that we all emerge from the alcohol maze in different places, via our own hard-won route.

Comparing reasons for sobriety, with drinkers and non-drinkers alike, can seem futile. Few people will be able to relate to the unique way we arrived at the decision, or the benefits we say it has brought us.

For each of us, the journey to the end of our relationship with alcohol can be long. We never face just one, but rather a series of decision points, in the weeks, months or years leading up to sobriety. Decision points that we often reject or foreclose upon, returning once again to alcohol,… until one day we don’t.

These decision points go beyond the hung-over, groggy Sunday morning “I’ll never drink again!” declarations which, in comparison, seem to have the shelf life of a dairy product.

The same goes for the self-inflicted martyrdom of a “Dry January”. It just isn’t long enough for our brains and our bodies to experience the change.

Beyond public declarations of micro-sobriety, true sobriety is often a decision reached in quiet moments, face-to-face with ourselves in the mirror. Or via a timeline of absolute low points we swear we’ll never recount to anyone, ever. Or just from a realisation that we want more from life than the snake oil salesmen of alcohol, who promised us so much, have actually delivered.

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Sadly, when faced with a decision, we tend to do two things that make sobriety less likely: We expect the right path to be obvious and we look for reassurance from other people.

Unless hospitalised with alcoholism or told grimly by a doctor that we need to sober up or we’ll die — thankfully, neither of which was true for me — choosing sobriety is likely to be the least obvious decision we will ever face.

In one moment, things will seem crystal clear. But, 10 yards further down the road, we’ll be telling ourselves that our drinking wasn’t all that bad or that life’s no fun without a beer. And the cycle of ever-shifting pros and cons continues.

To make matters worse, when we seek reassurance from others, we tend to get the opposite… “Your drinking isn’t that bad”, “You need to lighten up”, etc.

If sobriety is the right thing for us, it tends to be a decision we make for us and for no one else. It only sticks if we get there via our own route, resolve and determination.

For many, sobriety is the first decision they have ever truly made for themselves, all alone, trusting their own judgement and in the face of contradictory signals. Understandably, many retreat at the prospect.

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What’s so bad about alcohol that I felt the need to walk away from it?

I drank alcohol for 24 years. For some of that time, I believe I enjoyed it. But ultimately, for me, it turned from a fun, social thing into a medication I used to avoid areas of my life that I needed to address with my eyes wide open.

Growing up gay, in the 1970s and 80s, in a Northern UK mining town, I reached adulthood in something of a compromised state: Low in confidence, with no knowledge of who my gay peers were, no visible role models, and deeply, deeply in denial about it all. Too much for an 18-year old to face alone.

It’s no wonder alcohol held such fatal charm. It was never just a fun thing. It was a search for something to ease that pain,… and for oblivion.

But even then, I knew my answers didn’t lie at the bottom of a glass. Drinking, for me at least, meant I wasn’t growing, repairing or living my life as I knew the adult version of me now could.

With each low point on my journey, I also began to realise that, behind all of that marketing and branding and sophistication… alcohol, and the multi-billion dollar industry behind it, would rob me blind given half a chance.

Once your relationship with a drug is tainted, your only way out is to set it aside. That is, if you still can.

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What’s so great about sobriety?

For me, there is still no greater feeling than waking up in the morning, with the sun on my face, and no hang-over from the night before. Ten years on, I still get immense joy from that.

Or being at a bar, at 11pm with friends, and I’m “drunk” on fun and conversation. Or I’m on a date that’s going really well… and remembering that I’m doing it all with a lemonade in my hand, and that I get to experience — and remember — every single detail of it with complete clarity.

It’s preferring to choose to see my life as it unfolds — good, bad, complex, whatever comes along — rather than hiding from it by altering my state of mind.

It’s the ever-present surprise of reclaimed hours, of more energy or better skin, better health… better mental health.

It’s being able to look myself in the mirror, and tell myself I’m so fucking proud for making a decision that only I will ever truly know was the right one for me, in the face of conflicting signals and incoming questions, questions, QUESTIONS that still come, even to this day.

But, as they say, your mileage may vary, and you must ultimately decide for yourself.

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If you’re sober, you inevitably get called “preachy”, just by standing there with a lemonade. But preachy is the last thing I want to be.

I enjoyed alcohol, I think. Then I used it as a ticket to oblivion, on a regular basis, for close to a quarter of a century. So I really don’t have even a small piece of moral high ground to preach from.

Sobriety, perhaps more than anything else in life, has taught me that we ultimately pick our own path. I certainly needed to, to live my life to the fullest.

Copying someone else’s path to sobriety, or even just their reasons for pursuing it, is not a recipe for success. Those who succeeded have ultimately done it for ourselves and no one else. Why else would we do something that provokes so much judgement and so many questions?

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So as I turn 10 years sober, what you see above are the answers to the only questions I feel the need to address about me and alcohol.

For me, even if for absolutely no one else in the world, the decision to be sober was a hugely positive turning point in my life, and sobriety is a path I’m ecstatic to be on.