A Peaceful Day At Disneyland

Did I ever mention it’s really hard work being a drunk? I must have. Not just anyone can do it, you know – it takes some serious grit being an alcoholic. I imagine it’s less cumbersome working out how to have a peaceful day at Disneyland with 20 five-yearolds loaded on sugar than it is planning how to get through the day when you’re in active alcoholism. It’s not just all the stress of working out how to drink (where you’re getting the drink from, where and how to hide it, where and when to drink it, who to drink with and who to avoid) but also how to remain upright and somewhat able to go through the absolute minimum of motions during the day. Defer what you can, avoid anything more complicated than putting one foot in front of the other. And sometimes even that is a feat of champions, to be honest. I think the worst of it was to get through the hangovers, that painful part that were basically all the hours in the day when I didn’t drink. When I should have been living, really.

First off, I had the Hangover Kit and I’d buy these supplies usually at the same time as I picked up wine and soda:

• Berocca (vitamin drink)
• Resolve or Alkaseltzer (relieves headache, settles stomach)
• Dioralyte (for rehydration – preferable to Resolve/Alkaseltzer as contains no caffeine)
• Chewing gum (to disguise rancid wine breath)
• Coconut water
• Bananas

Obviously I was a seasoned drunk – a veteran, you might say – and quite often when it came to drinking I’d show signs of the organisational skills I very rarely display at work when I actually need them. Sometimes I’d have a glass of Dioralyte inbetween drinks during the drinking session itself in an attempt to rehydrate whilst dehydrating. Oh, it’s such madness! When else would I voluntarily do something really terrible to myself and simultaneously also try to mitigate the harm? It literally is like buying first a knife to repeatedly stab yourself with and picking up a medical kit to tend the wounds during the same shopping trip. FUCK ME. I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry – it actually makes me really fucking angry that I succumbed to this. But then wiser women than me have fallen before me, and wiser women than me will no doubt fall after me too. Unless I went into black-out (and let’s face it, in black-out anything can happen and I wouldn’t have a clue) I’d have a Berocca before bed too, in the pathetic hope I might feel alive in the morning.

The first step would be mixing a Berocca with Dioralyte and gulp down first thing. This was my idea of giving myself the best possible chance of surviving the day ahead. During the first half of the day I’d avoid coffee, despite morning coffee being one of my absolute favourite things in the world, because it makes me feel even weaker and dizzier when I’m hungover. Sometimes, if I had some coffee, I felt like I was swaying and vibrating – a sensation that is every bit as yucky as it sounds. I’d try to eat bananas and drink lots of coconut water – I think it was my friend Tumbler (who, incidentally and tragically drank herself to death) who advised me to ingest anything containing potassium. I recall her saying something about getting twitchy due to dehydration and something about potassium would help counter this. Save yourself convulsions really. It might all have been bullshit, the misguided and desperate attempts of us alcoholics to believe what we wanted to believe. Actually, it was the drinking that was bullshit, but I guess I wasn’t ready to accept this at the time.

I doubt any of the things in my Hangover Kit made much of a difference, actually. I think, as with many other things, much of it was in my head. Like if I knew I’d had some Dioralyte, which contains salts and minerals you typically lose when you have a stomach bug and helps you rehydrate, I’d feel calmer knowing I’d had some, thinking I had replenished some of my body’s desperately depleted defences.

Oh, God – just writing this makes me feel tired, desperate and sad and I’ve put almost one year between myself and this sorry existence. I remember it so well, though. With every word I just typed I felt all of it, perhaps it’s muscle memory and my whole body remembers exactly how it felt. Well, my body spent long enough experiencing it, so figures I guess. Good riddance. Please God, never let me lose sight of why I stopped drinking. Never let me forget. I’ll be ever so good, if you just grant me that one wish. Eek.

As for now, I’m still revelling in the realisation of how sobriety so easily puts life right at my feet. I’ve been thinking lots about what I want to do with it, this life. Don’t get me wrong, I consider the spot I’m in a pretty damn sweet one and to be honest if I never have or do anything beyond what I have or do right now, I’ll die a happy woman. Even so, now that drinking isn’t confining me to a miserable groundhog day style life of endless hangovers, why not aim a little higher? Like, you know, dreams and stuff. My little aha-moment Friday night extended to another realisation that positively made me shriek with excitement. I decided that perhaps that first book I write can be found much closer to home – here. So I printed off everything I’ve written in this past very-nearly-one-year.

The average novel is between 80,000 and 100,000 words in length. When I was trying to give writing a shot four years ago, I stalled and got stuck somewhere around the 50,000-mark. It just seemed such an arduous task, such an awful amount of work and never mind editing and reshaping and reworking the whole thing over and over. As I always did when I was drinking, I fizzled out and that half baked, half completed first draft is still gathering the proverbial dust on my hard drive. I figured that if I ever decided to write about drinking and sobriety (not that I’m a sobriety ninja – I’ll forever be a work in progress on that score), perhaps there might be some stuff from this blog I could use. I doubt there’ll be anything I could just lift, but certainly plenty of material by way of subject matter (even like this when I’ve written about hangover strategies) that I might be able to knock into shape. Well. I decided to print off the whole damn thing so I can read through it all armed with some highlighters and sticky page markers. I was going to do this when I hit the one year sober anyway because I want to look back on this past year and relive it.

When I was done printing I had a HUGE, thick pile of paper. 400 pages of single spaced lines of words, words, words. I checked the word count. 260,000. And there it was again, sobriety placing a huge lightbulb right in front of me. Without even thinking about it and with no actual effort or having to make time, I’ve written three novels’ worth in this past year. No, no – I know, it’s just my blog musings and nothing I could ever publish, but it showed me how it’s entirely do-able to knock out this amount. Attempting to write a book is obviously a whole different process – plan the structure, fine tune the archs of the story I want to tell and craft each sentence carefully and then go over it another ten times. But still. That pile of paper containing MY words really showed something to me that I needed to see.

I can do this. I can so totally do this. I can do this because I’m sober.

Today I’m not going to drink.

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