After 24 years of alcoholism – some of them fun, many of them dark and painful – SUZANNE HARRINGTONasked for help. In the week marking the 75th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous, she recalls her highs, her lows, and her 'intensely liberated' life after drink
ONE NIGHT in January 2006, I jolted awake at around 4am in a shaky, sweaty panic. I was dying of thirst, had a banging headache, and felt like all my nerve endings were about to snap like frayed rubber bands. I was consumed with fear, dread, terror, sickness. As I lay there, blurrily remembering all the drink from earlier – beer, sake, wine, cava, and finally a bottle of disgusting mulled wine left over from Christmas, gulped from a mug when everything else had run out – something inside me went “ping”. Something internal snapped. Enough was enough. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew I couldn’t do this anymore.
If you get hooked on drugs, your addiction is neither lawful nor socially acceptable. If you get hooked on drink, you have people jovially insisting that you’re being over-dramatic, while encouraging you to have another one. And that makes stopping all the more terrifying. So you keep drinking, to drown out the internal clamour.
You might even still believe that you can learn to drink like a normal person – you know, someone who can put a half-full bottle of wine back in the fridge without feeling the compulsion to finish it off and then want more, more, more, irrespective of consequences.
I was scared stiff of stopping drinking. Not because I was chemically addicted to alcohol – I wasn't at seizure levels of withdrawal, I didn't suffer from delirium tremens – but because I was convinced that without drinking, my life would be flat, barren and colourless. It would be awful. No champagne at celebrations, no cold beer in summer, no port at Christmas, no vodka, no rum, no more wine, ever again – the idea of not drinking was inconceivable. My life would flatline. It would be empty, bled dry of joie de vivre. No fun at all. Never mind that it was already no fun, and that was with all the wine in the world.
Obviously, when you’re young you don’t ever think: “When I grow up I want to be an alcoholic.” Growing up in Ireland, the expectation was that drinking would be part of my life the minute I was old enough; all the adults drank. It was as normal as going to Mass. I had my first ever pint of cider in a pub when I was 14. I remember how it melted away all my teenage awkwardness and angst, and made me feel like a better version of myself. Drinking, with its warmth and ease, made me feel like I had found the key to myself.
It’s tempting, but I can’t blame Ireland’s blind love affair with drink for my own alcoholism; had I been born on Mars, I would still be unable to drink normally. Alcoholics are born, not made. Otherwise everyone who has ever got drunk a few times would develop a drink problem, wouldn’t they?
But the Irish culture of collusion meant that in my teens, nobody ever questioned my drinking, not even the psychiatrists who treated me when I ended up on a psychiatric ward, self-harming and messed up. So I did what any alcoholic would do – I moved.
Everyone knows that an English problem drinker is an Irish social drinker. By the time I left Ireland for London in 1987 aged 19, I was an incredible social drinker. No occasion was ever too small not to celebrate, even when my drinking got me into scrapes that sounded funny but actually weren’t – like spending a night in the cells for being drunk in charge of a bicycle, or passing out at parties. My friends called me Boozy Suzy. I lived the London life I’d dreamed of – gigs, festivals, raves – but can’t remember half of it.
Actually, it was a lot of fun for a long time. That’s the bit people always skip over. For years, it was tremendous fun, externally at least – otherwise why would you do it? But even on beaches in Goa, or full moon parties in Thailand, or nightclubs in Barcelona, there was always this terrible restlessness and isolation – I couldn’t seem to connect with people properly, even when I was in the thick of it. And when I got bored or things went sour, I kept moving. I moved 23 times between 1987 and 2006, doing an economy class zig-zag like a bee in a jam jar — London, Barcelona, London, Brazil, London, Barcelona, Goa, London, Brighton. No matter where I went, my drinking came with me.
I believe I am still alive because I had some strict rules for myself.
No heroin or crack cocaine (I would have instantly loved it and wanted more, more, more). No drinking in the morning (unless I was still up from the night before, in which case vodka tonic for breakfast was fabulous). No junk food, ironically.
Within the 1990s rave scene, drinking was perceived as naff. Drunkness was for losers. But even fear of peer disapproval from my groovy rave mates didn’t put me off. When I overdid the dance drugs – resulting in frightening auditory hallucinations – I knocked chemicals on the head for good. Except alcohol of course. Drink was still my friend, comforting, reliable, and familiar.
Most people have a good old bash at hedonism in their 20s, and then calm down in their 30s and get on with big life stuff – work, relationships, kids. This seemed like a good idea, so I duly married a nice man and had two babies. They were lovely, my husband and babies, but I couldn’t quite seem to connect with them. I preferred when they were elsewhere, so that I could have some “me time”. But “me time” meant me and a vat of wine. My life, with its external appearance of settling down, seemed to be shrinking before my very eyes: drinking was the one bright spot on my increasingly limited horizon. I thought that being a mummy was driving me to drink. But it wasn’t. It was my alcoholism.
“Poor old me,” I used to think as I popped another cork, “where has my life gone? Still, at least I can have a nice glass of wine. Or a bottle. Or three.”
Because there were no park bench, no bottles hidden under the bed, no kids taken into care, no abusive relationship (other than with myself) – none of the cliches we associate with alcoholism – I resisted acknowledging that my drinking was ruining my life. My marriage fizzled out, I fell out with a beloved friend, I felt disconnected from everyone around me, I looked and felt terrible. And still I hung on to the booze.
I’d go for a week or two without drinking. Once, I managed a whole year just to spite the people who thought I couldn’t, a year I spent white-knuckling and feeling mad as a bag of snakes, fantasising about having a drink every single day until one day I thought, sod it, and had one. I began drinking alone. Other people just got in the way, because they’d see how much I drank – once I started, I couldn’t stop until I passed out. And during the gaps when I wasn’t drinking, the idea of it still obsessed me. I didn’t seem to have any physical or mental “off” button.
Until I woke up that January night full of fear and dread and sickness for the millionth time. Except that on this particular night, something happened where the balance tipped, and I realised two things very clearly: that giving up drinking could not feel worse than these 4am horrors, and that I couldn’t give up by myself. Right there, in the middle of the night, I finally admitted defeat. I needed help.
MY RECOVERY BEGAN when I picked up the phone the next morning. An addiction therapist gave me an emergency appointment, then pointed me squarely towards the 12 Steps. My contempt for the unknown and conviction that I knew best dissolved under the stark acknowledgement that I had no control over drink, and that for me, sensible drinking wasn’t an option. Only abstinence would work.
Over the years I’d tried everything – counselling, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, will power, controlled drinking, changing my drinking patterns, changing my drinks, avoiding certain people and places. You name it, I’d tried it, and none of it worked. Which is how I ended up, aged 38, finally throwing in the towel and asking for help.
This is the bit where you think your life is over, with nothing to look forward but a lifetime of tee-totalitarian tea-drinking. This is where you’d be wrong. The best thing about getting sober is that everything I thought about being sober was wrong. Completely, gloriously wrong.
Physically stopping drinking wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined, because I didn’t try to do it alone. The cravings passed relatively quickly, and the joy of waking up day after day feeling fresh and alive was – and is – fantastic. These days, I’d rather drink brake fluid than suffer another hangover.
And instead of moping through a boring black-and-white life, over time everything bloomed to full colour. I lost my sense of unease around others; my self-esteem, formerly low, and my ego, formerly over-inflated to compensate, levelled themselves out.
I stopped trying to control outcomes, and fitted in with what was happening around me. I stopped thinking about drinking, and got on with living. I had my first sober relationship, and it was amazing. I made up with the friends I’d lost. I got a social life, and connected with my surrounding community. I stopped worrying about what people thought of me, and just got on with things. Drink-obsession and self-obsession slowly faded as my neural pathways began rerouting.
Getting sober was intensely liberating. It was such a relief to finally acknowledge what I had always secretly known – that I am an alcoholic, that it’s nobody’s fault, and that although it can’t be cured, it can be managed, principally by not drinking.
I’m 42 now, and it’s been over four years since I made that first phone call. Big things have happened since I stopped drinking – bereavement, cancer, house moves, heartbreak – but hitting the bottle in response now seems preposterous.
Ironically, I have a better social life now than I ever did when I was drinking, and a lot more friends. My connections are more meaningful, and not reliant on bar-room bonhomie. I have more energy on all levels; physical, mental, emotional. And it’s not all po-faced and puritanical – I still hang out with normal drinkers, I still go to the pub, although not every night. My mornings are lovely, with no more feeling like death. And I am more emotionally connected with my children than I could have ever imagined.
But all of this happened in Brighton, where drinking is not the dominant social pastime – had I got sober in Ireland, I don’t know if I would have been so lucky. I imagine getting sober in Ireland, where everyone wants everyone else to drink, so that nobody has to look at their own drinking, would be a different experience.
But no matter where you are, there is no greater feeling than waking up every day feeling full of life for the day ahead. You just can’t beat it.
75 years of Alcoholics Anonymous
IN MAY 1935, a businessman named Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith met for the first time at the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Ohio. Wilson, on business from New York, hadn’t had a drink for five months after 17 years of alcoholism. His business deal collapsed, and he wanted to get drunk.
Instead, Wilson focused on the spiritual epipheny he had experienced in hospital in late 1934, and his realisation – influenced by Carl Jung – that only a conscious awakening could get him sober, but it was altruism that would keep him sober. He needed to reach out to another alcoholic to stay sober himself.
Wilson made some calls and Dr Bob Smith duly arrived at the hotel full of scepticism. The two men talked and talked, sharing their experiences.
This was how Alcoholics Anonymous – now a global fellowship in 150 countries with two million members that still use the two men’s recovery plan – began. On June 10th, 1935, Smith had his last ever drink, the date that AA marks as the day of its foundation.
