1.
“Will you open these bottles so I can get rid of all the wine? I’ve forgotten how to use the corkscrew.”, I said to P as soon as he walked in the door a few weeks ago. I was deep-cleaning the kitchen and decided to tackle the shelf of pub quiz wine. You know, the wine you win at pub quizzes and raffles, and tell yourself you’ll cook with it. Until you remember that you’re only supposed to do that with wine you’d be happy to drink, and is anyone ever satisfied with the raffle wine?
2.
I was in college the first time around when I had my first alcoholic drink. I quit drinking the summer I turned 29. I’d spent a few years before that cutting out different forms of alcohol. Red wine didn’t agree with me, but white wine was fine. No, wait, the problem was rum. Hang on, what if it’s…well, you get the idea. Blackout drinking was my thing. I got tired of spending the morning after piecing together the night before. I could figure out the course of a night based on receipts and asking friends, but that’s not the same as remembering it.
In her reported memoir, Negative Space, Lilly Dancyger writes, ‘it’s so easy to believe that you must be fine when you have the worst-case scenario to compare yourself to.’ Dancyger is talking about her drug use in the context of her parents’ addiction to heroin, but it accurately portrays something I struggled with for years. I was comparing my relationship with alcohol to a close family member’s alcohol addiction, an addiction that played a part in their death.
My birthday and my sobriety date are within a few weeks of each other. This summer, I turned 40 and celebrated being 11 years sober. I have now been sober for the same length of time that I drank. 11 years. A fact that seems significant. But also insignificant.
3.
The day Danny Healy-Rae1 was first elected to the Dáil in 2016, I tweeted that I wished I still drank. I was three years sober, but political anger and frustration still came with the urge to order a gin and tonic. I resisted, but I was reminded of this moment when the US election results came in last week. I’m still full of political rage and anger, but drinking didn’t cross my mind. I understand why many people are struggling with their addictions in the wake of Trump’s re-election.
When the pandemic shut the world down in 2020, I was grieving my dad’s death and marked his first anniversary in lockdown. Grief, stress and the forced solitude of cocooning, even when the initial level five lockdown restrictions ended, left me wanting to drink on many occasions. Non-alcoholic wine and prosecco became a crutch. Then, the voice in my head decided that since we were okay with non-alcoholic prosecco, we could probably handle proper prosecco. The urge was back, so I quit non-alcoholic drinks. No-alcohol and low-alcohol drinks work for many sober people, so this isn’t a blanket statement on whether anyone else should or shouldn’t drink them. But for me, they became too close to the alcoholic versions in ways that were best avoided.
When I read Wasted: A Sober Journey Through Drunken Ireland by Brian O’Connell, shortly after I quit drinking, I found comfort in O’Connell’s exploration of alcohol addiction versus problem drinking, which isn’t an addiction. That felt familiar. That made sense to me.
It’s not that labels aren’t necessary or important, but people don’t always fit neatly into boxes. The language that works for one person does not work for everyone2. There are also many ways of getting and remaining sober. The same framework does not work for everyone3.
I’ve spent years saying that I didn’t know how to describe my sobriety. These days, I am comfortable saying I experienced alcohol addiction rather than it simply being problem drinking.
Notes on Stories [Courtney Smyth] — Courtney Smyth on what it means to tell stories and be a writer.
Who Moved My Cheese? [If Books Could Kill] — I highly recommend this episode of the If Books Could Kill podcast if you need a laugh. The cheese puns! The bonkers parable!
This Country Is Still That Country [The Querent] — Alexander Chee shares some of the lessons he learned as a member of ACT UP.
The Sentence That Changed Your Life [CRAFT TALK] — Jami Attenberg asked some of her writer friends what their favourite lines from other writers are, and the resulting edition of CRAFT TALK is a balm for the soul. The comment section is full of gems as well!
The Sky is Falling; We've Got This [Birds Before the Storm] — Margaret Killjoy on why despair is not the answer to Trump’s re-election.
Kings From Queens: The Run DMC Story [Sky Documentaries] — This three-part series about Run DMC is excellent. It unexpectedly made me cry.
For readers unfamiliar with Irish politics, Danny Healy-Rae is an independent right-wing opposition TD (member of our national parliament, Dáil Éireann) for the constituency of Kerry. Explaining his political beliefs would take multiple articles, and you still wouldn’t understand them. Here is a selection of news coverage: last week, in response to being corrected on a factual error during the debate on the Finance Bill, Deputy Healy-Rae made completely unnecessary remarks about the fact that another TD is raising their child without gendering them (you can read more about People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy and his partner’s decision not to gender their child in this article); in 2018, Deputy Healy-Rae supported anti-abortion legislative amendments that would have criminalised pregnant people for having an abortion, then went on local radio to deny that he wanted to criminalise women; he believes that god controls the weather and fairy forts are responsible for a dip in a road in Kerry.
Here is an extract from Holly Whitaker’s book Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol, where she discusses why she stopped calling herself an alcoholic.