Here in the Southern Hemisphere, we have Dry July instead of Dry January. I guess the powers that be just accepted there was no point encouraging people to give up booze during the beach and bbq season. I think it’s a great initiative, but it’s not one I participate in, because for me it’s Dry ‘days that end in y’.
It has been nearly five years since I last drank alcohol. I stopped for real during Covid, but it had been a journey of stopping for quite some time.
I had hoped I could be a “light drinker” in perpetuity but becoming a light drinker temporarily only served to highlight how flipping awful I felt the next day when I’d had a glass of wine.
I wish this was the whole story. For a long time I just let people believe that it was a health choice and nothing more. Although, now that I think about it, maybe they didn’t buy that while I was mainlining sugary drinks and Doritos…
The real story is much more difficult to swallow. I’ve always had difficulties with alcohol. I took the mini fridge out of our caravan and made it a beer fridge when I was 15. I remember so many unspeakable things I did whilst drunk, and I know there are hundreds more that I don’t remember.
But for me, the most unspeakable is that sometime around 2019 I started driving my kids home from my friend’s place when I had been drinking. I would start with the intention to have just one drink, but it was never just one. We could have easily walked home, I probably could have even called my husband to pick us up, but it became normalised. Until one day I raised my head up and thought, what the fuck? That’s not who I am.
So now I am happily alcohol free, and I never have to think again about how many drinks are okay, and how many is too many, and that works really well for me.