Stopping drinking, anxiety and the ever-growing shame spiral.

It has been five days since I last had an alcoholic drink. I know right?! Believe me, I’m as surprised by this as you are.
I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, predominantly because I seem to have drunk through a summer of excess because I’m so bloody happy. Sickening. After years of trying, I seem to finally have my work/life balance in the perfect place (although work related boozing does tend to see me lifing it up a little too much at times) which has given me the time and physical/emotional energy to have a social life. It also appears that I am mellowing in my old age/married life/cats have worn me down and I am (relatively) happy spending time with people, especially some of the incredible people I have met since I moved to Stamford in 2015.

Anyway, back to the drinking. Since my teens, I have battled with social anxiety.

I have missed out on countless opportunities and events by being unable to make myself leave the house. And this is my biggest fear. When I was a kid (maybe 7 or 8, I’m not actually sure), one of the Gladiators came to a play centre near where I lived and we went to see them. I can’t even remember who it was now, maybe Hunter?! We loved Gladiators and I really wanted to see him. I had never been to this place before and I couldn’t figure out how to get around to where the stage was so I tried to climb over some chairs to get to where I could see people. A member of staff told me that I couldn’t go that way and I was too shy to ask how to get round. I never did find my way around to the stage and I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had missed out on (quite literally nothing) for weeks afterwards, to the extent that it is still something I remember now. Ridiculous huh?!

This has been a recurring theme throughout my life. I am terrified of missing out on things. I am always the last person the out, the one encouraging the night to continue, keep going, never end the fun. I’m the one who is referred to as a bad influence (which I categorically deny, we all make our own choices) all thanks to the elixir of alcohol. I have never been this person sober. Actually, correction. I have never viewed myself as being this person sober.

In fact, when sober, I can’t go to group exercise classes on my own. Sometimes I struggle even to walk into the town where I live. Supermarkets are a no-go area for me. Staying over at other people’s houses (even sometimes my families) is difficult. Visiting friends who live further away fills me with dread. Nightclubs, which used to be my stronghold, are now out of my reach unless I help myself along in other ways. As I have grown older, my lack of confidence has become crippling. There was a point in my life, not all that long ago, where I only left the house to go to work. For five years.

Five fucking years of my life, wasted. Not achieving anything (apart from a pretty successful career which I later walked away from), not going anywhere, not meeting anyone. It was during this period that my social anxiety was crippling, only I didn’t recognise it as anxiety until very recently when a remarkable therapist helped me to turn my life around (after around 17 years of seeking out help, I’ll leave my experience of NHS mental health services and the government for a later time).

It was during those five years that I found myself the subject of bullying by harpies in the charitable sector; the type of women who treat people like shit and absolve their sins at Church every Sunday. I have always had an extraordinary ability to say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person and it’s something I have never really grown out of. I’m from Yorkshire. My humour is incredibly dry, verging on (or just outright) sarcastic and even though it comes from a good place (I am actually quite nice), sometimes it may not appear that way. I acknowledge that I am not the easiest person to get to know. I am very guarded, my walls are firmly and resolutely up until I trust you and that takes time because fuck me I’ve been burned enough in the past to stop throwing myself (or let anybody else throw me) directly into the fire.

It doesn’t take much to treat somebody with kindness, even if you don’t like them. It was this experience that made me always make a concerted effort to make new people feel comfortable at work. To always talk to the person in the corner of the room at the party who doesn’t know anybody. In fact, that’s how I met my husband. But again, another story for another time. The point is, you don’t know the demons another person is fighting to have got to where they are. Support, encourage, motivate. It’s not difficult to make people feel good about themselves, leaving the house for some people can be as life-changing as climbing Everest for others.

In my 30’s, I guess I am more able to read situations better and have learned some things from my lifelong incredibly poor judgement. Or I apologise more. Or I just don’t give a shit what people think about me anymore. I’d like to say it was the last one, but the rest of this article will show why this isn’t true.

Rambling. So much rambling. So, back to the drinking (recognise a pattern here?!). I have always, since a very young age (sorry Mum), used alcohol as a social crutch to be the sociable person who can talk to people that I have always wanted to be. It may come as a surprise to people who know me that I am actually incredibly shy, painfully inadequate at small talk and too happy to sit in silence to have any ability to start conversations with strangers. Or people. I find conversing in general incredibly difficult and eye contact is completely out of my league. I have no interest in talking about the weather, I want to get straight down to the deep and meaningfuls and you just can’t freak strangers out like that.

Every relationship I have had (including my friendships) have been built from drunk. Many of them have been broken by the same drunk building blocks. Last weekend, a number of incidents occurred during a very drunken weekend where I was less drunk than my usual standard, that made me deeply unhappy and before the weekend was even done and I was only halfway through my challenge to drink every beer at the festival (which I did, later story as the boozy stories are always best told in sober times), my enthusiasm for drunkenness had worn off.

1. A drunk male friend asking me why all of the “fit barmaids” were stood on the other side of the bar and I was on my own on this bar. Firstly, we’re not bar maids. We’re bar staff if you insist on labelling us. Every time you say “barmaid”, I can’t help but think of my male colleague in a French Maids outfit and that sort of vision throws me off my stride all day. Please don’t do it. I’m too busy to be stuck in that fantasy. I think I speak for all women here when implying that they are not attractive (or not as attractive as the 18 year old bar staff half your age are) is just a no go. Whether somebody is attractive to you or not, a) women are not here purely for your sexual gratification so fuck you and b) fuck you. Do you, as men, have any idea the trials women go through to feel good in their own fucking skin? Of course not, because you speak from a position of male privilege where you are less frequently bombarded with the perfect media image being a size 0 with tanned skin and blond, straight hair. It has taken me 32 years to get to a point where I don’t hate my body. And I say don’t hate it because I still don’t like it, but my hatred towards it has lessened over time from being loved and from loving myself. Don’t you dare tell me that I and my imperfect body are not up to your standards, because I would never do that to another human being and equally, I don’t give a fuck about how you think women should look.

2. Another drunk male friend (patterns everywhere) calling me “poison” because I had very gently suggested that he go home when he was unable to stand and another customer had complained about him trying to get men stood at the bar to rate an 18 year old serving them out of ten. He then told my husband that I was poison, fell into the table, knocked our glasses off and shambled out of the building. If I am poison for trying to look after you and stop you from taking things further than you already have, then so be it. Underneath the hard exterior, is a really good person who tries fucking hard to keep all of the people I love safe and happy. Eurgh, even just writing that has made me feel incredibly vulnerable. And a bit sick.

It’s easy to say that I don’t give a fuck and yet both comments really got to me, so much so that I am still thinking about them and writing about them a week later. Both friends have apologised and made it very clear that they absolutely do not think the things they said. But it is almost impossible for me to believe that things said when drunk are not meant when they are sober. Instead, both comments took me back to being a bullied 13 year old who genuinely believed themselves to be ugly and some kind of evil person because this was what people told her she was. Twenty years down the line, the same issues crop up over and over again.

All of this got me thinking about drunk shame, because lord knows I’ve been there. I have got myself into such a catastrophic state that I have been unable to see my friends for weeks afterwards until, I hope, they’ve all forgotten about my idiocy. I had a conversation with a fellow feminist about reclaiming the word “cunt” until a (ahem privileged, white, cis) male stormed out of the pub because he was so sickened by our conversation. I should add that this was around 11pm, I would have understand the reaction at 11am. I got so drunk at a wedding in Australia that I collapsed on the way home and smashed my face onto concrete on the third day of our holiday. All of our holiday of a lifetime pictures (and engagement pictures) have me with significant facial injuries. Here's a few:

I have created arguments for no reason on drunk walks home. I have refused to walk home with my husband because I am being a drunken, cantankerous twat. I have fallen over on dancefloors, pavements, down stairs. I once got so drunk on pre-drinks that on getting to the bar, I fell down the stairs and immediately had to go home. I have been sick in alllll manner of places.

That feeling in the morning is worse than dealing with anxiety on a day to day basis. I have woken up smiling before slowly remembering what I have done the night before and being riddled with shame. The combination of a raging hangover and drunk fuelled shame mixed in with general anxiety and guilt is too much to bear. The shame spiral gets progressively worse throughout the day. Around lunch time, I’ll force myself to check my messages. Mistake. I’m spiralling all over again. Then my photo reel. Who the fuck is that?! And more importantly, where the fuck was I?!

People start messaging. “Great night last night, you were hilarious”. I don’t even remember seeing them. Dear God, what did I do? I make the mistake of going on to social media only to find myself tagged in masses of ridiculous photos. I look shitfaced in most of them. I start untagging myself from the worst ones then think I should probably check my timeline to see if I posted anything at stupid o’clock in the morning. Yes, of course I did. A rambling monologue about why people are cunts. Brilliant. It’s been liked. A lot. I can’t delete it now that I know people have seen it.

More messages. “How’s the head?” No exclamation mark, did I offend them last night? I don’t even remember seeing them. WHAT DID I DO?!

SPIRALLING. And the spiral continues, not just throughout the timespan of the hangover, but for days and sometimes weeks afterwards. After the Australia incident, I spiralled every time we took a selfie in front of some sort of tourist monument (yeah, I’m looking at you Sydney Opera House) and barely drank for the rest of the holiday. I’ll be anxious walking into the pub I work and drink in (try not to mix the two, get shitfaced somewhere that you can avoid for months at a time), ready and armed for the pisstake that, of course, rarely comes. Because people aren’t always the dickheads you make them out to be in your head and your drunkenness is forgotten because you’re not that much of a dickhead, you’re just REALLY LOUD. Most of the time. Sometimes you probably are a massive dickhead.

So let’s put all of this together and make the story really short: I saw people being dickheads when they were drunk, they upset me by being dickheads towards me when they were drunk, it reminded me that I am a dickhead when I am drunk and I don’t want to be a dickhead to other people and upset them or be a dickhead riddled with hungovers, drunk shame and additional anxiety.

And so here we are, five days later. And it’s Friday. I want to go out but I’m not sure if I can go out. I have to work all weekend, in a pub, surrounded by incredible beer. There’s a comedy night on that I would love to go to, in a bar. There’s an open mic night on Monday, in a bar. There’s a friends birthday party next week, in a pub. Still, I am determined to do this, even if it’s only for a few weeks. Why?

Because my life has been overtaking by anxiety and hangovers and the two are really not good for each other. I believe that stopping drinking will give me the kickstart I need to pull my life together (which feels, at the moment, as though it is momentously unravelling and I can’t find the thread to stop the entire thing from falling apart) and to focus on improving my health (yes, including my married weight which I am not fucking happy about), improving my mental health, tackling my anxiety, moving my writing forward and putting back together the building blocks of my life before everything comes tumbling down.

So before you think you know somebody and judge them, remember that you have no idea what demons they too are battling, just like you.

Thanks for reading my random ramblings.

TL/DR: Drunk people are dickheads, I don’t want to be a dickhead.