Bryony Gordon: ‘I never thought I’d last a year without a drink’

On Monday, I celebrated my first sobriety birthday. I say celebrated, but really, how do you celebrate an entire year without a drink? With a drink?

That’s not really an option if you have had to renounce booze because you are an alcoholic – and yet, as I’ve discovered over the past 12 months, it’s difficult to find a way to be merry that doesn’t involve being superficially merry.

Our entire culture is soaked in alcohol – I couldn’t even go to this year’s school summer fair without someone trying to thrust a glass of Pimm’s into my hand. “No, thank you,” I would try and smile sweetly, taking a deep breath before explaining that, no, I’m neither pregnant nor taking antibiotics, I just drank my lifetime allowance of alcohol by the time I turned 37.

As my counsellor in rehab was fond of pointing out, I drank everyone else’s, too. “The way you drank, Bryony, WAS NOT NORMAL. NOT AT ALL!” He would tell me this on an almost daily basis, in case the thrice-weekly AA meetings I was being forced to go to, not to mention the eight grand I had to scrape out of the now-empty house repair fund to pay for rehab, were not reminder enough.

Except the way I drank was normal to me. I had made it normal, surrounding myself with other people who didn’t drink normally, justifying my blackout drinking with such excuses as “stress”, “tiredness” and “being a character”. I could not make people laugh or, more pointedly, make myself laugh without eight pints of ale and three glasses of champagne, or whatever it was I was chucking down my throat like water by the end of my drinking career. 

And it was easy to tell myself I didn’t have a problem, because by societal standards I was not an alcoholic. I didn’t drink during the day, or even every day. I never, ever sat on a park bench swigging from a cheap bottle of spirits. I didn’t even drink spirits. (Ha! Take that, health police!)

The only problem was that about once every six months, I might wake up in a pool of my own vomit, or come to and discover faint memories of horrifying events that I wanted to flesh out and forget all at the same time. And every day I woke with a stultifying sense of shame that I could not stop at one or two; that my life was increasingly dominated by alcohol, even when I wasn’t drinking it.

The hangovers were getting longer. I planned my working week around nights on the lash (mostly, I only ever went on the lash in my own house – as my counsellor later said, my park bench was my sofa, as it is with so many alcoholics). I did not want to drink any more, but I could not stop myself.

After one particularly large session, I found myself at an AA meeting in my lunch break. It was about two years ago. Once you have gone to an AA meeting, you have ruined drinking for yourself, and yet still I couldn’t stop. I knew that I had to get sober, that really it was the only option for me, but the thought terrified me. It was like being pregnant, waiting for labour, except knowing that the labour was going to last forever. 

I will spare you the story of my last months of drinking – I’m still not ready to say some of things that happened to me out loud – but it was basically like the Last Days of Disco, without any glitterballs. I had my last alcoholic drink over the August Bank Holiday in 2017. I don’t remember what it was – a lukewarm beer, perhaps? – but I do the burning shame that surrounded me as I traipsed home at 10am to a horrified husband and a thankfully clueless four-year-old.

I was done. I rocked up at a treatment centre a few days later, where my husband asked what the odds of getting sober were. We were told that about 40 per cent of patients would be sober at one year. I realised that being there at all made me one of the lucky ones. My husband told me he didn’t doubt that I would be one of the 40 per cent, but I did, every waking moment.

Getting sober can, at times, feel like an improbable thing, like getting a Brexit deal or England winning the World Cup. I did not enjoy rehab, but I knew that it was the right thing to do. The first six months of sobriety went by agonisingly slowly, every single second feeling hard-won.

I thought some things would be easier without alcohol, like running marathons or writing books, but in actual fact they were far, far harder without a pint of beer or six at the end of them. Life felt both flat and excruciatingly unbearable. They say that the good thing about getting sober is that you get your feelings back. And the bad thing about getting sober? You get your feelings back.

I decided to replace my obsessive thoughts about drinking with obsessive attendance of AA meetings. I made friends, began to laugh, felt happy, joyous and free. Then came the blisteringly hot summer and the sight of people everywhere necking rosé.

With the initial hurdle of getting sober seemingly vaulted, I was faced with all the issues I had been hiding under the alcohol for two decades. I crashed into a deep depression. June felt like it would never end. July was a write-off. In August, I announced that if I could get through this episode of mental illness without picking up a drink, then Marvel should ask me to join the Avengers.

“What would your superpower be?” asked Harry, slightly confused.

“Sitting with my feelings!” I cried, “I bet Iron Man has never had to do that!”

I couldn’t see a way forward, but I also couldn’t see a way back. One night, I was in so much pain that I thought about having a drink, but the thought was just as quickly replaced with one asking how it would help.

I would get out of it for a bit, sure – but then whatever I was attempting to ignore would come back the next day, and with interest. So I sat with the misery. I tried to embrace it. I accepted that it was all part and parcel of life.

So in the end, when my one year anniversary eventually came, just the day existing at all was enough. I didn’t need a lavish dinner celebration, or gifts and cards.

The reward was already there when I woke up, evidenced in the fact that having a drink was now as unthinkable to me as not having one was a year ago. I could see that life was magic all on its own, without beer or champagne and wine. The joy I was looking for had been there all along, and I didn’t need to drink to that.