Seven years sober

How and why I got sober at 28 + seven years no drinks, no drugs, learning how to handle reality ✨

Hello! I write this from South Africa, at an enchanting spa-farm (that famous hybrid) in Franschoek, a town about an hour outside of Cape Town. It's a place so verdant, so lush, so utterly almost-CGI picturesque, that my one and abiding thought as I was driving here was: 'It's God's own country!'

I have just had a dip in a copper bathtub on a terrace overlooking a kind of lagoon with a mountain in the far distance, a chorus of crickets and (maybe) bullfrogs in my ears, and, if you didn't unsubscribe by the end of this sentence, you have deeper reserves of patience and goodwill than me.

View from the terrace here… don’t hate me!

But, fear not, I'm not going to wax lyrical about luxury travel in this substack (needless to say I'm in South Africa on reviewing duty and not under my own steam). Instead, welp, I turned seven years sober last weekend. Which really is just crackerjack crazy.

I'm a bit cautious around anniversaries now. They are quite big deals in the recovery community and people often mark them - as they should. But I went batshit crazy when I turned one year - I kind-of pressured my parents to buy me this wildly expensive ring (which I do still wear), and had a dinner and paid a photographer to take photographs of me (even writing that makes me wince with embarrassment but if you've ever seen one of my byline pictures in a red and black stripy dress, well, that was from my one year shoot) - and then promptly relapsed two months later. So... well, there's a lesson in there somewhere. This year, I just went to a meeting and then for pizza with some friends, which is a much saner way of celebrating a sober birthday.

I know people are often quite interested in recovery and sobriety and the idea of not drinking etc so I thought I'd share a piece I wrote about the experience for The Times. Fun fact: this is actually the piece I am most proud of. So often in journalism, what you are writing isn't all that meaningful, so I'm very grateful I did get a chance to write something that expressed something I wanted to express and - perhaps, who knows?! - might help someone else.

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How and why I got sober at 28 (then tried again, and got it! at 30)

There is a picture on my pretty much dormant Facebook account that I am transfixed by. It was taken at my sister’s 21st birthday. I am smiling, in a black and gold lace dress, my hand wrapped around the neck of a champagne bottle. I look happy and carefree.

Little drunk Issy (and my gorge cousin)

My memory of this evening and the photograph do not correspond. I remember being wretchedly hungover. I had gone out the night before with a friend in Soho, drank too much as I always did, and came to, early in the morning, alone, in a grim hotel in King’s Cross. I have a shudder-inducing (even now) recollection of drunkenly kissing the hotel receptionist but, apart from that fragment, the rest of the night is gone, lost to blackout.

I don’t know how I ended up in that hotel, what happened to my friend, why I didn’t make it the one-mile journey back to my flat in Holborn. I crept home at 5am and crawled into bed, frightened. I knew that my friends didn’t go out for a couple of drinks on a Thursday night and wake up alone in a hotel room with no idea of how they got there.

Not that you’d know any of this to look at this picture. I was in my aggressively cheerful mode and I looked like I was enjoying myself. You can hide a lot when you’re 24 and determined.

I didn’t get sober for another four years. I stayed on the merry-go-round of blackouts, chaos, petty drama, sly attempts to cover my tracks - topping up my father’s bottle of Famous Grouse that I had emptied with Sainsbury’s own brand whiskey - hangovers that left me rotting like a vegetable in bed all day, and pernickety attempts to control my drinking. I read somewhere that expensive wine and spirits didn't give you hangovers so for a time I resolved only to drink pricey booze. Surprisingly, this hack didn’t work.

There were wild nights that ended in stranger’s houses, or parks, the spree that somehow landed me in two different hospitals. The night I got sloshed at the office party and tried to bring a coworker home with me only to forget where I lived. I have a horrid, smudgy memory - again vast chunks of the evening were swallowed up by blackout - of leading him through the streets of Angel, repeatedly chirping ‘it’s just around the corner’ before eventually passing out at a bus stop.

These nights rattled me. When I drank, I woke a monster inside me who was out to hurt me. But I had no idea what would wake her. Each night was Russian roulette. Sometimes I’d end up home safe and sound, sometimes I’d come to in a strange house in Walthamstow, my phone gone and my bag nicked. Yet for so long, it honestly never occurred to me to stop drinking.

By the time I finally walked into a twelve-step meeting with my ears open to what the people there might have to say, I wasn’t coming off a debauched spree. What did it for me in the end was the mind numbing boredom of my drinking. There’s not a lot said about how grindingly dull active addiction is. The same sloppy cycle forever on repeat.

There were some other things at play. I realised I wasn’t going to keep my job if I didn’t sort myself out. I was approaching 30 and had the sense to notice that society treated a young woman unable to hold her drink with more kindness than is shown to a grown woman slipping in and out of blackout. Mainly there was the abiding feeling that I had been lucky. I had been given many blessings and while my life should have been a broad horizon of opportunity, it had instead shrunk down to an empty flat, a bottle of whiskey, music cranked up high and me dancing alone.

There was fairy dust at work as well. I went to the meeting after a miserable night when I had drunk too much and rowed with a friend. But I had had far worse nights. Why was it this one that propelled me to a meeting? It wasn’t my first meeting either. Why was I ready to hear it then when I simply hadn’t been before? I don’t know. It’s one of the mysteries of recovery. And it’s not much help to those with a struggling loved one they desperately want to see get sober.

It’s difficult to write about a 12-step programme because you are not supposed to. It is meant to be anonymous, easily findable to people who need it and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking. But I cannot write about getting sober without mentioning how I did it. I do not believe I would ever have stopped drinking without the ceaseless support, structure, wisdom and friendship that I found in the rooms of recovery.

Not that I knew that back then. I went to the meeting and left feeling underwhelmed, went on to a dinner party which somehow I didn’t drink at. I didn’t enjoy myself either but I didn’t find a social occasion without a drink in my hand as excruciating as I had in the past.

I kept going to the meetings. At first, I ducked in late, bounding out as soon as it was over, not saying a word to anyone. Until one day, as I was making a dash for it, a young woman asked if I wanted to have a cigarette.

On the pavement, as we puffed away, she told me to ask her anything I wanted to know.

I peppered her with questions. How was I going to go on a date sober? How could I celebrate Christmas if I didn’t drink? How could I attend a wedding without drinking?

She took me under her wing. We went for coffee, to meetings; she encouraged me to get a sponsor. I had been so afraid that my life would be over when I got sober. That it would become a monotonous march of days revolving around interminable meetings in dank church basements. But it was the opposite. Everything opened up when I got sober. I felt like I had stepped into technicolour and all the flowers were blooming. Suddenly I was out in the stream of life, waking up without hangovers, learning - for the first time - how to connect with people and how I actually enjoyed spending my time. I can honestly say that the desperate desire for a drink was lifted very quickly for me.

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. I went to my first wedding sober, kissed someone for the first time sober, celebrated my first sober Christmas.

I went to a bajillion meetings. I stepped off the street and into a parallel universe, a network of miraculous rooms where you could spill secrets and air feelings, be moved to laughter and tears, learn how other people lived, hear their tales of mayhem and recovery and leave tingling with connection. I learnt that alcoholics are not just old men drinking tinnies on park benches; they could be ‘nice girls’ like me. Alcoholism does not discriminate. It comes for the young and the old, the men and the women, the rich and the poor - and everyone in between.

There were stumbling blocks. When summer arrived, I watched with envy as people quaffed rose on pavements and I realised, with sadness, that I would never again lounge in a park and drink coronas in the sunshine. But sobriety, for me, seems like an excellent deal. In exchange for not drinking, I get a whole life.

I have been sober now for five and a half years. When people find out I don’t drink, they are often intrigued. A former colleague, who had been grumbling about needing to cut down, looked at me with avid fascination when I told her I didn’t drink.

‘Is it just amazing?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you feel incredible?’

That Monday morning I didn’t feel particularly incredible. You quickly adjust to no hangovers. I suspect that if you do not have a problem with alcohol, cutting it out of your life would significantly impact your enjoyment of it. But if you cannot drink without the drink upending you, well, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

That’s it, guys! Sending you love! Be back soon xxx