Drinking brought relief. It gave me a window of a few hours in which to feel ok. The mornings after were frequently dreadful but at least I had been able to breathe for a part of the previous day.
My life was functional. Fortunately, alcohol never brought me down into the proverbial gutter, though I sailed dangerously close on occasion. I say that if my journey towards alcoholism was the train from Belfast, symbolising sobriety, to Dublin, representing full-on addiction, I got off around Drogheda.
That’s not to say the booze didn’t cause me problems. My life was heading off the rails. That I managed to get it back on track with all the important pieces still in place is a credit to my family, friends and others who helped me.
There’s a very striking comparison made in the sitcom Till Death… in which the long-suffering Elsie Garnett lectures her husband, Alf, on his drunken behaviour. In terms of television, it’s a programme very much of its time, unbroadcastable today as society’s beliefs and standards have moved forward. As an excerpt though, it is strongly metaphoric.
“If I went out and bought some sausages, and cooked them for you, and after you’d eaten them, your voice started to get all slurred, you started bashing into the furniture, falling over, and you were up half the night being sick, and in the morning, you were sweating like you are now, and shaking and trembling, I’d call the doctor, and when I told him it was the sausages which had done that, he’d go to see the butcher, or somebody from the council would, and if that butcher went on selling sausages like that to people, they’d lock him up”.
She could have been talking to me.
There were reasons, though not excuses, for my drinking. Depression has been arguably my life’s most loyal companion. I’ve fallen out with it, professed my hatred towards it, it’s made me cry, it almost caused me to die, yet it has never abandoned me.
My depression, for now I own it rather than trying to repel it, also had an equally steadfast friend. A good pal whose effects were even more profound, though sneakier. Anxiety.
I knew I suffered with depression. I diagnosed myself even before it was first confirmed by a GP. The symptoms were evident.
Feelings of being a failure and neglecting things I had previously enjoyed. I even have vivid memories of walking past a supermarket in my local town and seeing everything as grey or black despite radiant sunshine. I don’t even know if that’s a recognised symptom but I recall it like it were yesterday.
So began my long years of treating depression. Or perhaps it started before that. Previous to taking the anti-depressants a doctor prescribed for me, I had been self-medicating with alcohol and this continued.
I said the anxiety was sneakier. It was so clever it even hid itself from a series of GPs. It was only when my drinking hit a make-or-break moment that it made its presence known.
One day, feeling especially low, I got exceedingly drunk. Arriving home legless, I apparently began to tell my wife exactly how I felt. I write “apparently” because I, myself, only have very vague memories.
To her eternal credit, she managed to decipher my slurred garble and recognised a serious problem. The next day she brought me to the local hospital. I was that ill I remember actually hoping that they would say I couldn’t go home.
They didn’t, and discharged me within an hour. However, in that 60 minutes, a bolt of lightning hit my life. I think it was because I discussed catatrophising that the medic caught the anxiety with its trousers down.
I will admit to being largely blessed in life. My parents have always been loving as too has my extended family. If push ever came to shove, there are people who will help me.
The key to understanding what I’m going to say next is that anxiety isn’t rational. For years I had been consumed by a fear I would end up homeless. The fact that my parents, brother, uncle, aunt and grandmother are there for me never dispelled this terror.
I count myself incredibly fortunate in being able to say the above. Many people aren’t so lucky. However, the fear was such that it drove me towards something that could have jeopardised all that support, addiction.
If I had stayed on the train all the way to Dublin, how would my family have been expected to help me? Over the long haul, it would be exceptionally difficult. They have their own lives to live and whilst their support would have been there, it eventually would have dissipated.
The key was the anxiety being caught in no-mans land by that attentive hospital doctor. From then on, my depression was treated as a secondary condition caused by struggling with being anxious. Precisely what was, in reality, happening.
That was the first day of the rest of my life. It took a long time, but I came to understand that alcohol was not my answer. It was making me feel ok for an evening but then worse, frequently horrendous, the next day which led to more drinking encouraging still more the pain of anxiety and depression.
The booze does this because it is, itself, a depressant. It also deepens anxiety because you tend to behave badly when drunk, in turn giving you more to worry about. Many people manage to enjoy alcohol as part of a healthy lifestyle, but I couldn’t.
Once I binned the drink, I was able to embark on the longer process of recovering my mental health. I would be lying if I said anxiety and depression aren’t still companions but I’m better able to deal with them now. A key part of that has been removing their chemical, physical, and mental encourager; alcohol.
My mental health needed other treatment. Medicine yes, but things like meditation, mindfulness, a change in life philosophy. Those things work in a way drink never did by providing a long-lasting, rather than an instantaneous, fleeting sense of relief.
That’s why when reflecting on my drunken past, I view booze as a sticking plaster on my broken leg of anxiety and depression. It provided some relief but the fracture in my mental wellbeing couldn’t begin reknitting until I started dealing with it properly. That, for me, meant removing alcohol from my life.
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