I thought that after a month of not drinking, my relationship with alcohol would fix itself. I was wrong

Sober October, Dry January: they all sounded off a sort of melancholic hum of impending doom for me throughout my drinking days. I knew I would never last. I would fail at the first hurdle. I was a very unsuccessful drinker and a sober failure too. For the moderate drinker, Sober October is an opportunity for a temporary change to improve one’s life almost instantaneously, or so I am told. I am not a moderate drinker. In my experience, being an alcoholic means that when I initially quit drinking I feel terrible. Every time I tried to quit drinking it felt like the start of a prison sentence.
Both times I went to rehab, my first month of abstinence was brutal. I stared at the four walls all night long for the first two weeks. I did not sleep. Large plates of food made me dizzy and nauseous. At 24, my second time in rehab, I rattled around this big old building in east Cork with bags of popcorn and cups of coffee. I spent the evenings circling the garden in my welly boots listening to Tom Waits. I cried a lot. Often in silence late at night. I howled into the trees and got in trouble for going off on walks by myself. I itched and twitched. My skin was dry. My hair chaotic and unmanageable, as if a representation of the inner workings of my mind. I had a permanent dull pain in my fractured ankle. I went to the bathroom in the dark because I couldn’t bear my own reflection. My own shadow terrified me. I couldn’t live with the drink, but I certainly couldn’t live without it. I fantasised about a body of water taking my weary body out to sea never to return. I saw algebra equations on the wall that disappeared before I had time to solve them. I did crosswords with fury. I had my first drinking dream where I woke in a pool of sweat only to realise I was in a treatment centre. I was safe. Now I know I was right where I needed to be.
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Contrast this with Sober October, and a month of moderate drinkers gleefully opting for the cinema instead of the pub for an entire month, only to resume moderate drinking afterwards. Not only could I not understand it, I couldn’t cope with it. Social media plays a big part in this. Moderate drinkers often catalogue their Sober October – which I think is wonderful, for moderate drinkers. Anyone, anywhere giving up drinking for a period of time – I salute you, I encourage you. However, being an alcoholic distorts my view of reality. I used to think I could give up and start afresh and that, after a month, my increasingly concerning relationship with booze would mend itself into a perfectly stable partnership. How wrong I was.
The idea that a month of abstinence can help you regain control and become a “better drinker” is an utter myth for any alcoholic. In my drinking days, abstinence followed by re-engaging with the substance meant only one thing – further inevitable misery. It was like an elevator of despair that would go lower every time I started drinking again. The consequences would get worse and the pain more unbearable than we ever thought possible. I say “we” here, because alcoholics go on sober journeys with their family members and friends – all with renewed hope, but alcoholics can’t do Sober Octobers and run marathons; we need something more.
In my case, I was an alcoholic long before I picked up a drink at the age of 12 on a skiing holiday. My head told me I was not an alcoholic – despite countless hospitalisations. Don’t you have to be at least 45 to be an alcoholic? No, you don’t.
By the age of 24, every time I drank I would end up with severe withdrawals that either led me to prolonged stays in the hospital or days spent shaking like a leaf until one day, with enough Librium, I would be able to hold a cup again. I was physically and mentally hooked. It did not take me a month to become hooked and it would take more than a month to become unhooked.
Long before my frequent hospital stays and morning drinking, I would take breaks from alcohol. Usually these were post-embarrassing weekends where I could not remember much Friday through Sunday, or they preceded an almighty bender. I once gave up drinking for 13 weeks (an awfully long time for someone who didn’t think she had a drinking problem) only to spend four days in the same bar with the same acquaintances. I was a shell of my former self the following week at work. (This was at a time when I could work and drink.)
Moderate drinkers partaking in Sober October will no doubt sleep better, feel more energised, have better skin, be productive at work – and the list of benefits goes on. For alcoholics, I propose a perspective shift: if you can do one month you can do another one, but in order to do that you need to do it just for today.
If you are an alcoholic and your body aches out for a drink this Sober October, I know that feeling. The good news is feelings are temporary. You are not alone even if it feels like it as other people seem to put down the booze with very little trouble at all.
If you feel like a failure watching moderate drinkers effortlessly fill their Saturdays with nondrinking activities, I get it. I felt utterly pathetic. I found these movements incredibly isolating because I knew deep down I wasn’t going to be able to return to moderate drinking, no matter how long the period of abstinence was. In the early days, Sober October offered a false hope, to me and to many alcoholics I know. It fed my illness – until I admitted to myself that I had a disease that did not have an expiry date.
For an alcoholic of my kind, the only solution is staying sober. Really it is a miracle I am here at all, let alone writing this. You too can have all the glee that sobriety brings, and far beyond October.
Mary-Kate Harrington is a 25-year-old recovering alcoholic, writer, and recovery advocate who grew up in west Cork and now lives in London