THE RECOVERY POSITION (Sept 2004)
As the government points the finger at problem women drinkers and moves to clamp down on sexy adverts selling us the boozy lifestyle, Tania Glyde looks at life after hangovers and talks with others who now say ‘no’.
I knew it was time to stop drinking when my hangovers were lasting longer than the parties where I’d got them. When I felt as bad after half a bottle of wine in front of the telly as I did after 24 hours on the vodka. My body was rejecting alcohol long before I became conscious of it. My hobbies could be listed thus: ranting, shouting, trivial yet all-encompassing drama, and blind acceptance of terrible behaviour by others. I was emotionally bankrupt and I didn’t even know it. Drinking made me ugly outside as well as in. My lips were stained black from red wine, my skin both dry and greasy, my mouth like a blocked garbage chute. Of course, so was everyone else’s. Safety in numbers, or so I thought.
After a long, slow car-crash of life events, for which I am eternally grateful, a switch flipped in my head and I decided to get sober. It’s not an easy step to take. UK booze culture is impossible to avoid. Not for us a few small glasses of wine over a long lazy dinner Mediterranean-style. As any good Brit knows, consumption of food cuts into valuable drinking time.
No matter what your gender or sexual orientation, your path to sobriety is your own. You can neither blame your old crowd for your problems, nor expect emotional back-up that they may not be capable of giving. And if they can’t handle your sobriety, or badger you to have ‘just one’, they’re not your friends. I’ve been lucky. I underestimated how supportive my friends would be. I’ve only had to shed a couple of people who couldn’t deal with the new me. One couple I knew simply stopped speaking to me. Some people don’t like it when their rent-a-party isn’t around any more.
The drunken woman is this year’s media bogeyman, and she ranks not far behind the local paedophile in the lexicon of public threats to morality. She binges endlessly, carries on like a slapper and, by damaging her physical health, costs the taxpayer a fortune. To prove it, doctors have been interviewed, and statistics rolled out. Alcohol concern reports that in the fourteen years to 2002, the number of women drinking over the ‘safe’ limit (14 units per week) rose by 70 percent. This type of statistic always makes me laugh, if hollowly. In my partying days, over 100 units were easily, and regularly, consumed.
The media’s response to all this is ambiguous, to put it mildly. Trawl through the press and you find a heavily conflicted view of women drinkers. Back in the nineties, the ladettes told us that women could match men pint for pint, and piss just as far if we felt like it. Not long after, along came Alcopops and fruity cocktails, heavily marketed at women who considered themselves a little more sophisticated. The overall message was, and still is, that women have the right to enjoy themselves, and if it involves getting drunk, all the better.
However, the drunken woman is simultaneously condemned as ugly, embarrassing and notoriously uncontrollable. Whenever a club or bar, or even an entire area, is declared over, ‘too many hen nights’ is usually cited as the reason. The confusion becomes even greater when you look at the increasing number of celebrity magazines, aimed almost exclusively at the female reader, which offer page after page of intoxicated c-list celebrities falling out of their dresses, accompanied by derogatory blurbs and suggestive captions. The message seems to be: get pissed if you want to be popular, but if you step over the line, you’re fair game.
For some women, however, the party ended long ago. Kerry, 38, has been sober for two and a half years. ‘I’d got to the point where I was drinking round the clock. I lost everything – my job, my friends, my flat. I was dying.’ she went to three different clinics before finally managing to stop. Although she was never a big scene-goer, ‘my friends have always been mixed,’ Kerry got herself a whole new sober crowd to go with her new life, as well as ending a seven-year relationship. Sometimes a scorched earth policy is the only way when you’ve been sucked into a lifestyle you can’t control.
Mae gave up drinking five years ago, aged 33. ‘I didn’t drink every day, but when I did, I would purposely get myself into a lot of shit. I needed to prove something. I would end up sleeping with men.’ like so many people, she knew there was a problem several years before trying to give up. The crisis came when her girlfriend caught her snogging a cab driver in the living room. For Mae, the best thing about giving up was that it enabled her to come out, properly, to herself and others, for the first time in her life.
Unlike men, women don’t generally go round beating up strangers, or stabbing people to death because they looked at us funny. We don’t enact intricate violent turf campaigns at football matches, nor kick car doors in for the hell of it. Not usually anyway. In my experience, the drunken woman is the biggest threat of all to herself.
In her inspiring book, Drinking, A Love Story, the writer Caroline Knapp sums up the emotional effects of alcohol dependency: “alcohol offers protection from… the pain of self discovery, a wonderful cocooning protection that’s enormously insidious because it’s utterly false but it feels so real, so real and necessary.”
The use of drink and drugs as a coping strategy is particularly embedded in the gay scene. ‘Peer-pressure’ sounds so teenage, but that’s what keeps us boozed up. And it’s not surprising when the only reliable, and safe, places to meet other dykes are bars. If you’ve been concealing your sexuality all day at work, endured endless lascivious interrogation, or are just plain sick of homophobic abuse, something’s got to give. Dykes are already a minority, so it takes balls (ha!) To declare yourself a minority within a minority: an alcohol-free dyke. There are signs, however, that times are changing. Many lesbians are choosing to go sober and embrace the real world, not needing to hit rock bottom to shock themselves into sobriety. Clare, a thirty-one year old journalist, tried for six months before finally managing to stop earlier this year. ‘When I got a new job, I realised that if I wanted to make the best of it, one of the easy ways was to get sober. I’d been pushing myself to the point of blackouts; I was hung over every day. So I gave it a try and everything became so much clearer.’
Once you’ve managed 24 hours without a drink, you’re probably going to need support if you’re going to stay on the wagon. Kerry and Mae joined alcoholics anonymous. Kerry got a sponsor – AA jargon for ‘sober mentor’ – and is now a sponsor herself. Mae did AA for two years, but stopped. ‘I got a sponsor, who was nice enough, but all of a sudden it got very serious. I just didn’t need all these rules. I don’t want to be labelled a ‘dry drunk’! If I didn’t have amazing friends already, I might find it more appealing.’ anyone from a minority knows you can have enough of labels, but with support agencies overloaded, AA is still the first port of call for many people. However, as Jan Bridget, co-founder of the lesbian information service, points out her report on alcohol services, ‘because AA is Christian-based, and Christianity – along with other religions – is particularly responsible for society’s homophobia, it will be inappropriate for many lesbians and gays.’
Neither Clare, Mae nor Kerry considered themselves to be ‘proper’ alcoholics while they were drinking. But what they all have in common now is that they’re done with partying like they used to. Mae: ‘I’ve had such a good time, but now it’s time to do something else.’
Caroline Knapp explains the impact of sobriety in more philosophical terms: “alcohol is what protected me from growing up… until I became sober, I’d never really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose. I’d spent most of my life waiting for maturity to hit me from the outside, as though I’d just wake up one morning and be done, like a roast in the oven.”
Abstinence could also be an age thing. In your thirties, you start to take stock of the future as well as the past. And one look at Courtney Love, at 38 still staggering in and out of courthouses on a regular basis, losing custody of her child in the process, is enough to make anyone turn to carrot juice. I’d say ‘get out while you can’ to anyone who feels they’re reaching the point of no return. Miserable though it is for all concerned, rock stars can afford to yo-yo in and out of smart clinics; most ordinary women can’t.
For Clare, it’s still early days. But she has already found a non-drinking girlfriend, who she had to seduce ‘completely sober’. Sober sex is an intimidating new world for many people. Drinking pushed me to do more outrageous things than I might have done normally (or so I thought at the time, having never previously had a sober period to compare it with). But I was also, at times, risking emotional and sometimes physical damage. This may be part of life’s process, but it’s not always healthy. When you stop drinking, you attain a calmness and objectivity which others may resent; you also get your memory back. A sober woman is a less persuadable woman, which partly explains the near-universal mistrust of non-drinkers. ‘You’re boring now’ is just another way of saying ‘I can’t control you any more.’
Never forget that just as alcohol gives you a false high, a grandiosity that cannot last, the comedown is just as illusory. No wonder the media promotes therapies and pills so relentlessly: on any given day, most of this country is in a state of artificially induced depression. It doesn’t have to be like that.
Claire: ‘drinking is about hiding from yourself – now I’ve discovered an honesty with my friends and family that I’d never enjoyed before.’ not to mention money saved, a greatly improved bullshit detector, and a clear head, whatever time you get up in the morning.
Sober pride, anyone?
