Season 7, Episode 1: Creative Musings- One Year Sober
Sobriety is bloody hard - and it gets easier and it also doesn’t.
I am baby-sober.
Being sober or alcohol-free is a daily practice and ritual that I am ever-mindful about. Nothing and I do, and I mean nothing I have ever done, studied, practiced or achieved in life comes even close to how hard and revealing giving up drinking alcohol has been. Nothing. In this recording, I make attempts to make sense of the past year, yet it is still unfolding in front of me - 38 years worth of committed boozing is not unfurled in one year. Yet unfurl it does. Over and over like the seasons, like nature, like a fern on a forest floor in the dark and light. As such the podcast episode is a long, rambling, creative musing about my first-year-foray into an alcohol-free life.
It’s just me, sharing my experience and making sense of it, reporting it and creating the legend around it in real-time and is by no means a call to action, OH HELL NO nor a virtuous journey into my new-found sobriety, SWEET LORD NO; nor is it in any way shape or form meant as a way to encourage others to get sober or a laundry list of all the amazing benefits I have felt now. I’m a better person.
I am better - but only better than me before.
And it’s hard.
It has been a year since I last drank alcohol, when at my ten-year-in-business celebration I observed myself drinking knowing that the next day I had booked my first session with the Alcohol Mindset Coach (watch this space, no really, she’s next week’s guest, on the actual one-year anniversary of our first coaching session). At 6 months sober I wrote this essay about my experience.
And I remind myself that I am always baby sober. Always, always, always baby sober as my relationship with alcohol will always be unpredictable. Any person who has an unpredictable relationship with alcohol, I now wonder, as myself, I wonder if the relationship can ever be a functioning one - or will it always be a bit mad? Even when I have years and years of sobriety behind me, 1 drink, 2 drinks, 3 drinks will likely lead me into a blackout and unpredictable outcomes. These are the outcomes I will not risk. And oh it feels very good to type this.
In Season 7, we are starting the ‘Creative Musings’ series where Sarah rambles and muses on a theme connected to the guest
The difference between a ‘full-blown alcoholic’ or all-day drinker, and a binge drinker (and how upset I get when I feel love and respect for people with severe alcohol addiction)
How short the journey from heavy binge-drinker to an addicted alcoholic is very short
My history with binge-drinking and how it escalated over the years
The 3 shocking recent incidents that led me to STOP
The benefits of drinking that I miss and how I satisfy those benefits
The holy hell of the first 3 months, the 6 month point and how it’s going now
“I miss the instant relief that the first 2 or 3 drinks give you. You really have to feel all the things that they provide relief from”.
The top three benefits I have noted of giving up drinking
1 - NO HANGOVERS
2 - Knowing I will never miss a train, stay too long at a party, not be able to have hotel breakfast due to being hungover, and sleep is restorative. If I wake up feeling sick. I am sick. Good to know.
3 - Clarity and Integrity; I can tell quickly when I am acting out of integrity and course-correct. Sometimes it’s my own poor behaviour, other times it’s a witchy feeling about other people’s behaviour, and most majorly it’s about what I do in my business.
I’ll also add that the relationships I do have are no longer designed around drinking.
Special thanks goes to non-alcoholic beer, my outstandingly loving, supportive and fun husband and the dear friends who have acknowledged that much of my nonsense over the past year may have been down to being newly sober and have held space and a vision with me. I can never be grateful enough. Thanks. Cheers. Merci. ありがとう。
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