365 days of sobriety

It’s 365 days, give or take a day or two, since I had my last alcoholic drink.¹ This is the longest streak since I started paying attention in 2021 or 2022. I don’t have a deeply personal, tragic or inspirational story to tel here. It’s just a commitment that I’ve made to myself, which I find easy enough to follow as long as I remember why I have made it.

I don’t think I’ve ever been addicted to alcohol but in the last few years I have observed an increasing correlation between alcohol consumption and poor mental health in my experience. Recently I’ve had a few conversations with various friends about our respective responses to alcohol and caffeine, and at least once I’ve ended up saying something like, ‘I need uppers, I don’t need downers’. Alcohol is a depressant. For the roughly two decades that I drank alcohol socially, there was a small sweet spot of enough alcohol to feel relaxed but not so much that I would either doze off or take my mind down dark avenues of depression and paranoia. In the last few years, perhaps through some combination of lockdown drinking, friends’ post-lockdown rebound partying, and just getting older, the probability of either of the ‘relaxed’ reactions started approaching zero. The most likely outcome was that less than one glass of wine would make me miserable. Or, to phrase it a little more objectively, there was an increasing correlation between my drinking alcohol and my experiencing symptoms of depression almost immediately.

I sometimes feel a perverse kind of impostor syndrome because I can just say no, and the longer I’ve been saying no, the easier it’s been – so I don’t belong in recovery environments because I’m not recovering from an addiction. I was a rather insufferable teetotaller in my early twenties and don’t want to be that person again, but even when I was routinely turning up to social events with a bottle of wine, I wasn’t a heavy drinker and I don’t think anyone would mistake me for one. I will give my reasons if people ask why I’m not drinking, and I’ll gladly support any efforts to resist the normalisation of heavy drinking in Australian culture. But this is possibly the most words I have ever written or said about alcohol in one sitting.