My last drunk was nothing spectacular. It was mundane, grubby and, if you have a dark sense of humour, a little funny.
I’d been viciously hungover all day and went to a friend’s for dinner, swearing to myself that I wasn’t going to drink. He needed to get ingredients and, at the supermarket, sure enough I was pulling a bottle of red wine off the shelf. Back at his, I gulped three glasses down while he toyed with his first. I was relieved that I’d bought the wine, thinking, ‘He can’t complain I’m drinking all of it because I bought it.’
After dinner, he produced a bottle of whiskey from somewhere that you wouldn’t expect whiskey to come from - somewhere like Shanghai or Hong Kong. He made a song and dance about this special whiskey, pouring us teeny tiny measures. I was secretly furious. I just wanted a proper drink, not a 5mm deep sip.
Obviously I got drunk. I started smoking, his flatmate came home and we had a row about me smoking in the flat. I said something stupid - I can’t remember what - and they laughed at me. I barrelled out of there and into a cab.
I asked the cabbie to stop off at Chicken Cottage because, what can I say, I was a classy drunk. I staggered up the stairs with my chicken nuggets, drank some more whiskey and passed out, waking up the next morning, fully dressed and feeling like death.
As I was getting ready to go to work, fighting waves of nausea, I found congealed red gunk on the kitchen counter. Horrified, I checked myself for wounds. I had occasionally hurt myself when I was drunk. At last I realised that this substance was not, as I had feared, blood, but in fact leftover sauce from the Chicken Cottage.
In the office, on edge from the hangover and lack of sleep, I looked around and thought: I bet no one else here started their day by mistaking Chicken Cottage sauce in the kitchen for blood.
I had had far worse nights than this. Nights that ended in hospitals, in parks, sleeping with people I shouldn’t or - an Issy classic - wandering the streets all night because I’d forgotten where I actually lived. To this day, I have no idea why this miserable little night of wine, whiskey and Chicken Cottage did it for me. Why did this night lead me to get sober and not the night where I landed myself in two different hospitals? I still don’t know. It’s one of the mysteries of recovery. Why one thing is a breaking point but another, seemingly more serious thing, is not.
I have now been sober for almost five and a half years. I did it with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. I tried many times to do it alone but it never worked. The tricky thing about writing about AA is that you’re not supposed to. The worry is that I might gush about AA then relapse which could make people think AA was useless. For a long time, I followed that guidance. I’ve never posted a sober anniversary on Instagram. I’ve written about my sex life in a national newspaper but I’ve shied away from talking about my sobriety.
But I’ve been thinking lately. I want to write about getting sober and the truth is, there is no way for me to do it without mentioning AA. I’ve also been considering the two pieces of journalism that have meant the most to me. The first is a beautiful account of going to rehab by A.A. Gill. He wrote so tenderly and with such humour that apparently his editor at Tatler burst into tears when she first read his copy. The other piece is a blog post, by the late film critic Roger Ebert, about his 30 years clean and sober. Both these pieces helped me in the early days when I was afraid that AA was an embarrassing cult for emotional oversharers and that not drinking made me a freak sure to be shunned by society. Just knowing that Gill and Ebert had walked the same path gave me comfort.
And I’ve been thinking about the stereotypes around the word ‘alcoholic’. It’s so easy to think this word applies only to old men drinking tinnies on park benches during the day and not ‘nice girls’ like me. Many of my friends and family were horrified when they learnt that I was going to meetings to tackle my drinking problem. And yet, I know that alcoholics come in all guises. I’ve seen the old men, yes, but I’ve also seen young men and women of all ages, all occupations, from every socio-economic background and every part of the world, who simply could not stop drinking once they had started.
I hope my account helps someone. Or perhaps it will simply shed a light on a condition that touches every life. Who among us doesn’t have an addict in their life, whether it’s a boss, colleague, friend, sibling, parent, child or partner?
The day after the Chicken Cottage night, I went to a meeting. It wasn’t my first meeting. I’d been to a handful over the years. I definitely didn’t walk into that room thinking I was never going to drink again. And I didn’t walk out thinking that either. But I didn’t drink that night.
For the next week or so I did the typical thing, as I later learnt, of arriving at a meeting just as it began and bolting out as soon as it finished. I only introduced myself as ‘Issy’, never using my full name ‘Isolde’. For fear of what? That they’d track me down and find me in the real world? I don’t know. I was ashamed that this was where I had ended up and had no desire to associate with the other people there.
But after one meeting, as I was making my escape dash, a girl grabbed my wrist and said, ‘Do you want to have a cigarette?’
As we stood on the pavement outside, she said, ‘Ask me whatever you want to know.’
‘How am I ever going to date if I don’t drink?’ I asked (it might have been closer to a wail).
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I go on dates all the time. But not right now, you’re new, leave it a bit before you date.’
I asked her other questions - all along the same lines. How was I going to celebrate Christmas if I couldn’t drink? How could I go to a wedding without drinking?
This lovely girl took me under her wing. We went for coffee, to meetings; she told me about the steps and encouraged me to get a sponsor. To this day, I call her my angel. I’m not sure I’d have stayed in AA without her friendship. Other people in the rooms (which is what I call AA) have told me they had angels too - people who showed them the ropes with love and kindness. I recently went to this girl’s wedding (where the thought of a drink didn’t cross my mind.)
I had been afraid that my life was going to be boring and revolve around interminable meetings in dank church basements if I decided to stop drinking. But really it was the opposite. Drinking had shrunk my life down to an empty flat, a bottle of whiskey and a packet of cigarettes. Now it suddenly opened up. I was going places, meeting people, waking up without hangovers, learning - for perhaps the first time - how I actually enjoyed spending my time.
That first year was magical. Some people struggle in the beginning but I got the pink cloud - a state of elation often experienced in early recovery - and I felt, at the age of 28, that I was suddenly living in technicolour.
It was a year of firsts, guided by a sponsor I adored. I went to my first wedding sober. I asked for a pay raise for the first time. I went on my first date and had my first kiss sober. I celebrated my first Christmas sober (it did feel a little odd without a drink in hand).
And I went to a bajilion meetings. I got to know a whole other London. Stepping off the street and into a parallel universe, a network of miraculous rooms where you could spill secrets and air feelings and receive no judgement, be moved to laughter and tears, learn how other people lived, hear their (usually cracking) stories of mayhem and recovery and leave tingling with connection.
How do meetings work? I still haven’t got a clue. It’s just talking and listening with no feedback. Why that should lessen the desire to drink, I do not know. And yet it does.
I go to meetings regularly to this day which often surprises people, as though you should ‘graduate’ out of AA. Perhaps some people do but there is an expression ‘came for my drinking, stayed for my thinking’ that applies to me. Although I have not experienced a craving for a drink in a long while, I still have the ism, as I call it, at work in my head. I can still get obsessive about things that are not good for me. I am still an alcoholic.
And I wouldn’t want to stop going to meetings anyway. I love meetings. I love the stories I hear there and the people I meet. I have met my dearest friends in meetings. Recovery people are often the best people - they tend to be brave, resilient, caring, hilarious, sparky, determined and, of course, just a little bit crazy. I’ve been to meetings all over - in New York, London, Paris, Nashville, and a little less glam, Suffolk. I’ve seen a sprinkle of famous people in the rooms and heard some truly great shares. But most of all, the rooms have given me a soft place to land. Whatever mess I get myself into in the real world - which happens less now that I’m not slipping into blackout on a regular basis but still happens - I can come to a meeting, share the troubles and sorrows and receive support. It is the only community I have ever been part of where people want the best for you, without agenda.
In recovery, I’ve done things I never could have imagined I would do. I moved to New York. I survived a pandemic, sober, 3,000 miles away from home. I returned to London. I lost jobs and gained new ones. I bought a home. I had my heart broken and mended. I’ve had adventures with friends and I hope to have many more. While recovery hasn’t all been rainbows or, as one friend memorably put it, ‘butterflies and blowjobs’, I am forever and always thankful that I found my way in. I wouldn’t want to live any other way. And it’s there for anyone who needs it. What magic.
This was beautiful, Issy. Love your vulnerability, warmth and wit shining through. 💗