Leeloo

Today is the day. A year ago today I decided that I never wanted to feel as rotten again in my life...

So where was I a year ago?

A year ago, I woke up after the weekend, feeling like death. The weekend hadn't been unlike most of my weekends at the time, a weekend full of what I would have considered as "great times". And old friend of mine and his girlfriend were visiting, and we'd spent the weekend out and about in town.

We'd gone for dinner Saturday night and had a great meal which was accompanied by copious amounts of red wine. That was followed up with more champagne and red wine at our place. I have no idea what time we went to bed.

The next day, around noon, we went to a BBQ place for a great meaty hangover breakfast. Of course, that was accompanied by some beer, because nothing like the hair of the dog to get rid of the hangover, right?

I knew the owner of the place, and he and I started chatting and having more beers. Eventually, my friends and my husband left because they had to get back on the road. I decided to stay behind because my other friend and I were having such a blast. And why would you ever stop the good times?

I ended up staying for hours, talking to my friend about god knows what and getting progressively drunker. It wasn't until I fell on my butt on the stairs on the way down to the toilet that I realised exactly how drunk I was.

And then it got pretty bad pretty quickly. I realised I had to get home somehow before I'd pass out, so I asked my friend to walk me to the tram because I couldn't really walk straight anymore. I almost fell asleep during the two stops home, it took me every ounce of willpower to stay awake, and I somehow managed to stagger home from there.

At home, I collapsed on the sofa behind where my husband was sitting at his desk and passed out. It was 6 pm.

Like I said, a pretty normal weekend. Good times!

As usually after weekends like this I felt rotten. The hangover lasted two days, and I have no idea how I got any work done without throwing up on my desk, but that wasn't even the worst.

The worst was the anxiety that would eat me up from the inside for the better part of a week after a boozy night. It was a physical feeling, sitting somewhere around my solar plexus like somebody had punched it. It made it hard to breathe deeply, and it felt like endless amounts of pressure building up inside me.

It manifested itself in horrible stories my anxiety-ridden brain was telling itself. Insane amounts of worrying about random details at work - did I do this? did I do that? What if I made a mistake? And of course, then my head would continue to list all the possible mistakes I could have made and the possible horrible outcomes. Thanks, brain.

I've struggled with anxiety for ages, but I never actually realised that I had somehow passed the point of 'normal worrying' a long time ago. In fact, it had gotten so bad that I had started to increasingly feel the urge to cut myself, just to release some of that pressure insight.

It was a very physical urge, like scratching an itch, and it scared the hell out of me.

That fear was my trigger. I knew I had to do something. I still wasn't quite convinced that I actually had a problem with alcohol, because hey, many of my friends were out with me on those boozy nights, so that means that behaviour is totally normal, right? But I knew that a heavy night out directly induced long periods of extreme anxiety... even though I had had to repeat the experiment a couple hundred times to be sure that one was actually linked to the other.

So I decided to not drink for a while. Like a month or two, to see what impact that would have on my anxiety.

The first 3 months

I had already signed up to SR a couple of years prior during a half-hearted attempt to “cut down”, so I reactivated my account and started reading. I read stories of recovery, many of them in this very 1-year thread. I joined the current class, and started posting, and read some more. I read my own posts from 3 years before. Here I was, 3 years older and none the wiser. I had learned nothing.

I also started reading books on recovery, not 'how to guides' or recovery methods, but stories from other people who'd kicked the booze.

It was in one of those books where I read the following sentence (paraphrasing): "It doesn't matter how much or how often you drink. If you start a night with a drink, and you cannot know for sure how much you'll end up drinking before the night is done, you have a problem".

There it was. My relationship with alcohol defined in one sentence. And the confirmation of what I had been feeling under the surface for a while, that the relationship was not a healthy one.

Admitting to myself that the problem was real was another major step. Thinking of myself as an alcoholic made the rules really clear. There was no “just one beer”, there was no “just one sip”… I started treating alcohol like even a sip of it in a sauce for dinner would kill me.

But man, did I have cravings. It was scary to see how much my mind was occupied with drinking. Stressful day at work, maybe go get a beer with friends (“you deserve it”). Going to the park, no fun without some drinks. How are you going to enjoy this great meal with the wonderful wine? Exhausting!

I started building up my strategies. I realised, for example, that on some days around 4 pm I would get really hyper at work, like tons of energy building up inside that needed to be let out. I’d start feeling like listening to loud music and dancing. My normal response to this would have been to call the gang to see if we can go party somewhere.

Instead, I made myself go home and go for a run. I told myself, that I can always go out for a drink if I still felt like it after running. I never did. The energy was burned off, and so was my desire to drink.

I realised how much I was trying to medicate my anxiety with alcohol, and thereby inadvertently making it worse and worse.

And then I found it, the miracle cure I’d been looking for. Non-self-destructive and amazingly efficient at reducing anxiety: crocheting.

No joke! I started crocheting like a crazy person. For months I came home from work, sat down and started crocheting and wouldn’t stop until it was time for bed. I made scarves, hats, ponchos, what have you. Christmas presents for everyone!

It kept my hands busy, my mind occupied, my anxiety at bay, and I think it is the single biggest factor that got me through the first 3-4 months.

I would, of course, still go out with my friends, but I would leave earlier and always take the car. I’d always been very strict on the no drinking when driving, so by taking the car it immediately made drinking not an option. I started to enjoy being able to help my friends out by giving them a ride home. I also enjoyed not waking up hungover in the morning - the weekend is a lot longer than I thought! And, I admit I was also enjoying to feel a bit smug when my friends were suffering from hangovers.

Having made it through the first 3 months, my husband and I decided to take the next big step together - quitting smoking.

We were going on a trip to see his family over the holidays, none of whom smokes, so it was a perfect opportunity. We had our last smoke at 5 am in the morning, I smacked on a nicotine patch, and we got in the taxi to head to the airport. I haven’t smoked since (turns out, not smoking is a lot easier when you’re not drinking).

Fortunately, my husband’s stepmom and I could share our love for crocheting. She had tons of yarn at home and let me choose the yarn and pattern to make a blanket. I almost finished the entire thing over the holidays, and I had to buy an extra carry-on to get all the yarn and the blanket back home. I’m sitting on it as I’m writing this.

And then the magic happened

It was around that time, the 3-4 month mark, that I really started noticing how much my anxiety had calmed down. Instead of worrying, my brain started having new ideas. Creative ideas. Ideas about things I could crochet, things I could write, things I could draw. It was like a sudden floodgate had been opened and creative ideas just kept pouring out.

I had to put them somewhere, so I decided to start a crocheting blog. So here I was, 5 months after having graduated from ‘scarf stage’, creating my own designs and writing my own patterns. It was so much fun. I got to design, crochet, write, and work on my photography. I set up my own website and started building an audience.

Not only was I simply refraining from going to the pub anymore, but I was actually super keen to get back home after work to work on my blog, finish a project, create a new pattern. There was always something to do.

I rode that wave for a good 4 months. When it got a bit warmer outside, I lost my crojo (my crocheting mojo, as they call it in crocheting circles.) At the same time, work got insanely busy, and I was in a constant state of a little overworked until the end of July. I was tired, overworked, and yes, stressed. But I wasn’t anxious, and I wasn’t drinking.

I’d also gotten really excited about another creative idea that had come to me, which was to write my mother’s biography. She has lived and is still living, a truly exciting life which I wanted to find out more about and write down. So I got that show on the road, and so far I have about 6 hours of recording and 12 pages of notes.

The ideas still kept coming. I was working on a design to turn into a crochet blanket, and creating the designs was so much fun that I decided to keep doing them and post them on Instagram. A friend of mine said I should totally print them on tote bags and sell them on Easy. What a great idea I thought, let me find out how I can do this.

Two days later, I had set up an Etsy shop with my tote bag designs. A week later, I had set up my own e-commerce website, added new designs, drawstring bags and more. All of it, after my full-time job. Since then, I’ve also created a line of t-shirts and am working on a strategy for the blog. I’ve already sold about 15 items, most of them to friends and family, but they, you gotta start somewhere.

My intention here is not to brag about the things I have done, but to show you what a brain can do when you stop drowning it in booze.

So where am I now?

I’m on my sofa, on my crochet blanket, drinking a tea. I went for a run with my dog this morning (him and I are trying to get a bit fitter) and then had a great day at work. I’m getting really excited about my job again, whereas before I was mostly stressed out. Next to me is my current crochet project in progress (my crojo came back after all), and I have some tabs open for working on my next blog post.

My anxiety is basically gone, and I haven’t been this content for this long since I don’t even remember when. In a few months, we’ll be moving to a new country for my husband’s work, and I’m really excited about the new adventure.

Even though I do get a bit nostalgic about the ‘party days’ every now and then, I know that no party in the world is worth going back to how I felt then.

I really hope somebody recognises themselves in my story, and to that person I’d like to say: kick that bottle to the curb and don’t pick it up again. You will lose nothing, apart from the horrible anxiety. Your friends will still be there. You’ll still have amazing times, including singing and dancing and all the other things you enjoy. You’ll love yourself more than ever before. You only have things to gain. Read other people's stories. Post here daily. Find yourself a pet project or a new hobby and start obsessing about it. Let it occupy the space that the booze occupies now. Loose yourself in it, and you’ll come out the other end, a year sober, not knowing where the time has gone.

Lots of love and strength,
Leeloo