No joke.
There’s no doubt about it, living alcohol free in Ireland is a radical move, particularly for an Irish person who has a stereotype to live down to. It kind of runs against the barley grain as it were.
What with current lifestyles embracing gluten, meat and sugar free living, could alcohol be next?
Me, I drank too much. I didn’t just have a glass of wine, or a couple of beers and a nice sociable chat. I drank to get drunk.
And the reasons? There are lots of reasons, for the laugh, for the confidence, to fit in, to hide my anxiety, to bolster up my low self-esteem. How else was I going to talk to girls? Sad but true, and because I was Irish it was part of my identity, making this kind of madness totally acceptable.
Somewhere along the line though, I lost my confidence. My grades plummeted along with my motivation and self-belief. Soon enough I was drinking every weekend and within a few years I reached the stage where I didn’t know how not to drink. Not going out drinking on the weekend would have been social suicide.
Even when I eventually stopped in my late twenties no one could quite understand what the hell I was doing. Why wasn’t I drinking? What was wrong with me?!
One night, before a work night out, I drank 4 cans before I even left the house. 10 years of drinking had reduced my confidence and increased my social anxiety to such a level that I now felt I could no longer go out without it. Sad but true.
I was on the verge of going to an AA meeting when I found Allen Carr’s ‘The Easyway to Control Alcohol’. I read it twice back to back and didn’t drink for the next 4 years.
Then after 4 years of social isolation and no dates to speak of, in desperation I decided to get back on the booze bus to see if I could moderately drink and socialise at the same time. ‘Drink sensibly’ as it were.
It worked! … for a while, but eventually I ended up right back where I started. Time to read Allen Carr again. This time for good.
Thankfully the age of anxiety has been met with the age of mindfulness and I embraced meditation like the Buddha himself. It helped, along with exercise, the outdoors and spending a lot of time in the self-help section of the book shop try to understand anxiety, stress, health and undoing my fixed mind-set and some limiting beliefs I thought were true.
Once the booze was gone I, like the Hothouse flowers, could see clearly now and before I knew it I was dating and dancing sober like a mad yoke.
For me, the booze had to go, I was using it for the drug that it was to dampen my spirits, and so it did.
It would have been nice if someone had mentioned to me that alcohol is an addictive depressant drug and should be avoided at all costs. That alcohol is in fact bad for your health.
But not a word, not so much as a whisper. Everyone was too busy drinking or profiting from all the drinking to stick a label on the bottle. Not so much as a mind yourself now, down with that sort of thing. Sure it’s only a bit of craic. The trollied on trollies, we do it to ourselves you know.
Sure at least the tax on alcohol can pay for all the liver transplants. Mad Ted. Oh look there’s a dog chasing its tail.
In fairness I was told to be careful not to end up an alcoholic. Okay …will do… I’ll keep that in mind. Eh, what exactly is an alcoholic? Someone who can’t stop drinking. Oh, okay, it could be you.
How did the alcohol industry ever convince us to pay for an addictive depressant, and since when can a depressant make you feel good? We do enjoy doing stuff that is bad for us, sure there’s no harm in it.
Surely it’s a little counter-productive for someone to drink whilst on anti- depressants. One cancelling out the other? I guess for many drink is no issue, they’d rather live with it than without it. That’s fair enough. However, my psyche and booze were not a good mix. Maybe I’m not really Irish after all. Or maybe the Irish aren’t really drinkers after all. Consumption is down a third in the last 8 years and the younger generation seem to realise the beer belly is not going to bolster their Instagram account.
Then again it is a slow subtle killer, chipping away at the auld psyche or liver slowly but surely over the years. Me, I just rushed my own demise. Crashed and burned but managed to crawl from the wreckage.
Sure getting drunk is only a bit of craic, one of the little pleasures in life, a bit like cocaine or valium only you can buy it in Tesco.
Every little helps.
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