Going nowhere, nicely

It’s been thirty days since any kind of alcohol passed my lips, besides residual Christmas pudding brandy. My friend really sloshed it on. It burned for ages. I made everyone present sing the figgy pudding song. Some of them were professional musicians so the song ended up sounding absurdly lovely.

I’ve got a vegan haggis guilt-tripping me in the fridge I haven’t cooked. A solitary Burns night celebration seemed like a fun idea when I was feeling whimsical in the first aisle at Aldi. I got invited to a friend’s birthday Burns Night celebration but I couldn’t go. I think I’ve celebrated with friends every year for the past three or four times otherwise. I love it—taking it in turns to read a verse of Address to a Haggis.

I am not vegan but meaty waste makes me feel more guilty. Perhaps I’ll test it tomorrow.

The smell of red wine is the greatest challenge.

It doesn’t help that I really love booze. Both the taste and the idea of it. I love juicy pale ales, I love whisky, I love tequila, I love mezcal, I love G&Ts, I love wine. Part of my decision to embark on a creative writing masters was probably my interviewer telling me that study days often concluded at the pub, and that it was usually very convivial. I love conviviality.

Last year I intended to do dry January but failed at an early hurdle. Looking back, it wasn’t just the booze, but all sense of personal intention, as if I didn’t really have much faith in my own intentions at all, or any reason to have any.

This year is different because I’ve learned that my intentions are rooted in real needs that I have—the need to honour and protect my life, my body, my desires and my spirit.

Since I’ve come this far, I’ll restate, I intend to continue my not drinking streak for at least five more months. Six months at least, because I feel that gives me time to experience a different mode; a different way of being. I might decide it’s a better way to live.

Like many people, I get anxious in social situations.

Typically, at first booze lessens this; it creates a pleasant, fuzzy protective barrier between me and the spatially disorienting starkness of my surroundings. Sentences get to go on their own journey. One second I’m talking with a stranger. The next I can feel their breath on my ear, while they whisper something the people around us can’t hear. This all seems like a natural succession of events. I laugh at things that aren’t funny. The more drinks, the further the plot advances.

But too often I have lost the plot, and never got it back intact. The winter before last, I woke with half my front tooth missing. I’d been sad, and I hadn’t been looking after myself. For weeks afterwards I felt concussed, disturbed and paranoid. I hadn’t really drunk that much – a few glasses, but I hadn’t eaten dinner and I was tired, and I was vulnerable. It can feel shameful to admit vulnerability after a certain age. Shameful to have not learned my lesson. About lots of things.

So I’ve decided to try and take that pressure off. I don’t want to punish myself, but to test if something else is better.

Mostly it is.

One challenge so far was hosting a literary event entirely sober. I wouldn’t normally drink more than one or two during, but afterwards, the need to relieve my interior tension was an absence I keenly felt. Similarly a few nights after, I spontaneously collaborated with a musician that became far more of an intense performance than I expected. I experienced an electricity I doubt I’ll forget, and afterwards adrenaline coursed through me, heightening my awareness of my own sobriety; my discomfort with being.

Without anything to drink, unless I catch a conversational wave, my faculties for small talk exhaust relatively fast, and I find myself restless and keen to leave; to end the story before it begins. In that kind of situation, it’s hard to tell whether I’m boring, or bored. Possibly a little of both.

This makes me realise that I’m allowed to leave. That I don’t always have to find out what happens in the end, or transform the dull into delight.

Sometimes it’s nice to just wake up in bed and carry on with life.

There’s more I could say, but I’m bored, or boring. Think I’ll go to bed.

P.S. I’ve got a new chapbook out with Salò Press—a Norwich-based small press who were very lovely to work with. It isn’t made up of stand-alone poems so much as one long sequence or surge. Writing it made me laugh. It made me cry. I hope it makes people laugh. It’s meant as a kind of ragged celebration.