5 Reasons Quitting Drinking Helped Me Write My Book
A post series inspired by @mamamedicine’s recent blog post on her three years without alcohol.
I truly believe that I would not have published my memoir at the end of last year if I were still drinking - even the very little alcohol I was consuming (around 2-4 units / week, at the weekend only).
This May will mark three years without alcohol, and eliminating this substance has been one of the most profound clearings of my life. Unsurprisingly, it came with challenges — some expected, others unforeseen.
Here are just a few of the gifts I’ve received from this choice.
1. Clearing Cultural Programming — An American in the UK’s perspective
Alcohol is a huge part of culture in the UK where I live. I moved here twenty years ago, and I remember how shocked I was to discover the deep integration of alcohol into daily life. Even having lived with a fraternity (I was a Resident Advisor in my North Carolina college and supervised a dorm of frat boys), I was unprepared for the prevalence of drinking in every kind of occasion here, no matter the tone of the event or time of day. Over time (and especially after having children here), English culture has in many ways become my own. As the years passed, I became more accustomed to alcohol as an accompaniment to every aspect of life. You could celebrate your sophistication with fancy wine, or start your girls’ trip to Spain with beers in the airport at 8AM — a wide range of behaviours are totally socially acceptable here, even within the same person. You can be high and low brow with alcohol and it is all treated as part of life’s pleasures — even (or perhaps especially) when that pleasure tips into excess. My experience of American culture is hardly sober, but I do find that there are firmer boundaries around acceptable alcohol use in the land of my birth. The longer I spent in the UK, the more I noticed my own perspective on and perception of “normal” drinking habits change.
Calling it quits has been incredibly confronting for me personally as I reckon with my dual identities (a theme which I explore in greater detail and in other ways in my memoir), and abstain where others go all-out. People I’ve known for a long time become visibly uncomfortable as I stick to mocktails in settings where drinking is centred (so many!), and other friendships have fallen away entirely. There’s still a perception that not drinking is “boring” here, and I admit that when the weather is poor and the light fades quickly, the appeal of drinking is hard to deny. I find myself bored at times, but I’ve been able to reflect on that not as a self-indictment, but an indication of how life flows here, and what that means as someone who wants to make different choices. Life was definitely fuller before I stopped drinking, but the cleansing that has come with releasing this substance from my life has been undeniably positive. I feel I can stand back from the culture and observe what drives these behaviours with a bit more detachment. The change has made it easier for me to consider which parts of my adopted home I want to assimilate into my identity, and which I want to remain aloof from. I’ll also note that as an abstainer, I notice the growing number of alcohol-free cocktail and beer options throughout the UK, so who knows where culture is heading in the longer term.
But foregoing the desire to “fit in” and make my own way has helped me harness the courage I needed to write my story and share it with the world.
2. Strengthening the Creative Process
I doubt I would have a published memoir out now if I were still drinking. While there is a lineage of creatives who use alcohol and other drugs to help them create (or so they say), I find much more resonance in the idea that consistent creativity requires strength and discipline. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun! But my own experience has been that even the little I was drinking (between one and two drinks on a Friday and Saturday evening) had a huge impact on my creative flow. The “hangover” isn’t just physical, lasting a day or two. For me, alcohol creates an energetic fug that lingers for days, weeks, months…perhaps even years. I really felt that it took me two full years to clear the entire residue of alcohol from my system. I remember sitting in a sauna and recalling Richard Burton’s diary entries about the “drying out” process. Burton was a talented actor, a magnanimous lover, a cultural icon, a fascinating memoirist (his letters and journals fascinate), and of course, an alcoholic. I latched onto this idea that “drying out” the alcohol would allow other creative juices to flow, and found that it really has some merit. Other creatives feel the same; Coco Mellors shares how sobriety allowed her fiction (and life!) to flourish, and Haruki Murakami writes that novelists need to be physically strong. I put myself in this class, and know that my decision to stop drinking is a choice that will flow into my desire to have a long and fruitful artistic career.
3. Lineage Clearing
More personally, I found stopping the flow of alcohol into my life and system facilitated the lineage-clearing work my memoir wanted to perform. No Prayer More Powerful is a story of initiation and transformation — some of this is personal, but much of this is intergenerational. My life story, as for so many, includes a theme of alcoholism; it has been my work, and the work of my father before me, to leave substance abuse behind, to carry forward the hope that it does not leak its poison into future generations. This work is more than simply saying “no;” in choosing to leave behind a substance that left a deep imprint on my family line, I was given perspective to explore the patterns related to it more clearly. The writing that flowed from this decision has been deeply impactful for me, for my family, and for many of its early readers.
4. Greater Discernment
The obvious consequence of clearing out cultural programming, epigenetic expression / family patterns and generally the influence of an energetically-dense (and distracting) substance has been that I find decision-making easier. Literally and figuratively, my vision has been cleared. As I “dried out,” to use Richard Burton’s words, I’d imagine myself as a dirty rock slowly becoming a clear, translucent crystal. As the muck of a substance thick with scary stories (only a few of them mine) ebbed away, I felt a lightness that went hand-in-hand with decisiveness. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still find myself lost at times (or even frequently), but I can see the light that guides me. It’s easier to simply take the next step. I am less distracted and confused with alcohol completely gone from my life.
5. Building the Next Generation
I’m actually really happy that my children were old enough to consciously observe me give up alcohol and what that process looked like. I decided to stop right as we went on holiday to Greece — a time when most people would enjoy a glass or two of wine with dinner (or for me, a cocktail). In fact, it seemed to me that as we sat down for meals at our hotel, I was the only person in the whole restaurant not drinking. I ordered a drink each of the first three nights, and sat looking at it throughout the meal. But I didn’t drink it. By the fourth night, the desire to even order the drink had passed. My children cheered me on massively during this process, even making me a sticker chart that said “NO!” at the top! Turns out stickers can be as motivational for adults as for children; this really helped me celebrate the passing of the days, then weeks, then months. I’m glad my children have seen me choose better for myself, and I hope that whatever choices they make going forward, ultimately they will absorb the model of someone choosing the harder road towards better health and a fulfilled creative life.
Intergenerational healing is a huge sub-theme of my memoir, and I know I had to live various aspects of this process through in order to crystallise them into a form that others could digest and hopefully integrate.
