We all hate New Year's resolutions! Former fun friends who’ve gone down the Alcoholics Anonymous route tend not to be much joy to be with, but it doesn’t have to be that way: there is a third way between AA and the drunken highway. Following a late-night New Year's Eve talk with a judge mate who became sober, she promised me an op-ed on her journey. I found it grounding and inspiring. I hope you do too!
"I’m in AA," is as much the death knell for any party conversation as the equally dreaded, "Actually, I’m a vegan."
So I went to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on January 3 four years ago. It was a revelation. First surprise, the room was not full of street drunks. My first meeting was in a genteel suburb of Wellington. And the people looked like the people of our genteel capital. Most were women. Most were old. They looked like my gran. The next day I went to a meeting in Hastings, once a drinking town with a fruit problem, now a place of arty types and hipsters, and it was full of the same. It was welcoming, like walking into your favorite pub — except everyone had clear skin.
AA was incredibly useful in the early weeks and months. It filled the time. Getting pissed and being hungover is enormously energy-consuming, especially when you have to function in court and look the part. I'll spare you the grungy detail of how I faked it for so long.
Weekends became a surprise. It can be somewhat alarming when the former drinker finds herself up bright-eyed at six on a Saturday morning with an entire day stretching ahead that would have normally been populated with pre-ladies lunch drinks, lunch drinks, post-lunch drinks, sofa drinks, and just one more nightcap before bed drink.
But I had stumbling blocks. One of the key tenets of AA is that you are "an alcoholic" and will always be one. It is a disease and I didn’t feel like I had a disease. I felt like I functioned well in my day job, had a great circle of friends, I was a strong person, but I was just a little bit insecure. According to Catherine Gray, author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, one of the most googled questions on booze is “Am I an alcoholic?”. It’s a sliding scale. There is too much stigma, too much disagreement about the word. After decades in the law, I had become alcohol dependent. I needed drink to function at my best, to feel happy. I needed to drink to feel fully myself. And within a few weeks of not drinking anymore, I realized what a complete fiction that was.
So after three months of weekly meetings, I decided more AA wasn’t for me. Stopping drinking is my positive choice: I was choosing sobriety — embracing it in all its clear-headed, joyful, energy-full way — not giving up drinking and mourning my defects.
A big influence on me was, somewhat ironically, called Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol by Holly Whitaker. She says not to drink in our society is the more interesting and rewarding thing to do.
Her insight into AA is that much of its philosophy is about admitting that you have no power over alcohol, as if this is a novel situation for you, to be under an external power, a weakness — it’s designed for strong people who have “a disease”. However, many who get in trouble with alcohol are people who feel rather powerless because of their gender, psychology, childhood, economic situation, sexuality or race, or who for whatever reason — perhaps to do with none of those things — feel they can’t cope with life. That’s why they turn to the bottle. It’s because they feel weak. They need “Dutch courage”. And our society sells you the false dream of a cure for all that. AA says there is no problem with alcohol or society; there is a problem with you.
I realized that AA is a lifeline for many, but it is not the only lifeline.
Instead, I read myself sober, then I exercised myself sober. I used supplements to rebalance the ravaged neurotransmitters, I walked and walked every day and for the past two years I have been lifting weights like Precious McKenzie and swimming like a fish. I meditated, although claims to meditate always remind me of a Peter Cook gag. “I’m writing a novel,” one partygoer says to another. “No, neither am I.” Some meditation then, but not as much as I’d like to think. A balanced diet helped — once I controlled my desperate need for a sugar fix a high protein and high fiber regular eating program for me helped me through depression and anxiety.
For a boozer, everything is an excuse to drink. ‘Oh no, it’s raining! We’d better go to the pub and have a drink. Yay, the sun’s come out, the courts closed early. Let’s rush home and have a drink! The court closed late, again! I hung in there when the rest had buggered off, my reward, you guessed it, a drink, preferably a bottle.
I decided to give up for a year — that way you know you will be confronted with good and bad days, with celebrations, with stress and who knows? With bereavements, weddings and maybe taking that long-postponed holiday to an all-inclusive resort in Fiji. Free champagne may come across your path but the decision has already been made. If you just give up until things get tough, you are doomed to fail.
How does it feel to be sober after four years? Like I’ve drunk two large G&Ts the whole time. And those that matter accept the new sober me just as I am. Huh, with the way ‘no alc’ is taking off these days I must have been a trendsetter!