I read your article (Welcome to Anxietyland: I used alcohol to hide my fear – but booze became a very bad friend, 3 May) with the particular recognition of someone who is still in the middle of it.
I’m 37. I’ve spent the past few weeks signed off work with burnout and depression. And like Gemma, I found that alcohol was very good at taking the edge off. Until it wasn’t.
What the piece captures well is the seduction of it. The way it promises relief and delivers it – just enough, just long enough. What it doesn’t mention is the cost. For me, that cost included hurting myself on the nights when the alcohol stopped working and the feelings became too big to contain. It took me a long time to connect the two. The drinking made the dark nights darker. The dark nights made me reach for more.
I haven’t given up entirely. But I’ve stopped drinking alone. I’ve stopped using it to go numb. One morning I poured every bottle in my flat down the sink and decided that if I was going to feel awful, I was at least going to feel it clearly.
That sounds simple. It is not simple. Feelings that have been numbed for years don’t arrive gently. They arrive all at once, at night, when you’re alone and there’s nothing left to hide behind. They are loud and frightening and completely real.
But I’m learning that feeling them is the only way through. Not around. Not with something that promises to make them quieter. Through. It is hard. It is also, slowly, freeing.
Gemma writes that giving up alcohol didn’t solve all her problems. Neither has changing my relationship with it solved mine. But it has done something important. It has made me stop running long enough to start looking at what I’ve been running from. That’s not a cure. But it feels like a beginning.
Paula McInally
Wolverhampton
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