“No, I mean how do you feel that Mommy used to drink a lot, but doesn’t any more?”
She looks at me blankly.
“I feel good?”
It’s a question because she doesn’t know the answer. And I’m very grateful because it means that the idea is as foreign to her as another country.
“Well, that’s good,” I say.
“Yes. Now I am making a cave.”
And back to the world of Minecraft goes my daughter.
But there’s one more person.
“Martin, did you tell the kids I’m an alcoholic?”
He blinks at me over his glasses.
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Well, yes … They were going to find out sometime.”
And of course they were.
My name is Samantha and I am an alcoholic. At the time of writing, I have been sober for 13 years, 11 months and 16 days. And, yes, I still count. And I’m writing about it now because I promised myself that I would once my children understood what that meant, that Mommy was an alcoholic. I think they may have understood long before I did, even if all the details are the stuff of ancient history for them.
So this is the story of how I stopped drinking.
No, it’s not.
It’s how I stopped drinking, started eating, became clinically obese, stopped eating (everything that wasn’t nailed down) and swam my way to freedom.
No, it’s not.
It’s about addiction and learning and sadness and anxiety and love and drive. It’s about channelling the unchangeable into the miraculous. It’s about dragons and learning how to put them to sleep when you can’t slay them. It’s about being my own Daenerys.
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
Thinking
“You don’t drink like other people.”
That was the first time I ever really thought about it. About my drinking and whether or not it was a problem. It was in 1995, after a 702 concert at the zoo. I had had the mother of all fights with my flatmate Zev – I still don’t remember exactly why. We were sitting in my car at Zoo Lake, in a dark car park opposite the zoo, and let rip at each other. Was it because I’d forgotten where I’d parked the car and we’d had to walk forever? Maybe. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Or was it something he had done or not done? Possibly. He wasn’t always an angel either. But it didn’t matter because the fight ground to a halt when he said that.
“You don’t drink like other people.”
I hadn’t thought about my drinking before that. I did drink a lot and when I drank, I drank. But I was 21, didn’t everyone at that age? I worked in a pressured newsroom; I worked intense shifts. It was a crazy time in the country’s history – everybody drank. There was an honour bar at work every Friday and a lot of us would gather there, propping up the counter, drinking beer and wine and hard tack at ridiculously low prices. And it wasn’t unusual for us to take the party to one of the bars or clubs across the road or to the pub on the ground floor of the building next to us, an Australian-owned gastro-pub-type place called The Outback. That’s where we would go and have dinner and then more drinks and it was great. It really, really was. I was very shy before I joined 702. At university I flew under the radar as much as I could. I never left an impression; maybe more of a watermark. Everything made me nervous and anxious. But after a few drinks, the world got warmer and conversation got easier and it felt good.
“You don’t drink like other people.”
Didn’t I? How did other people drink? It’s not like I drank all day. I only drank when I was with other people. And, anyway, it was a fun day! It was meant to be a fun day. The wine was flowing freely – everyone was drinking. Even people with kids, although not as much, obviously. Those were the days before Uber and Good Fellas, but it was also a time where roadblocks were few and far between, so we didn’t really worry about them. And, besides, it wasn’t as if I was the biggest or the worst drinker that day. Someone else at the concert lost her car for real. She phoned me the next day to try to work out where she might have left it and, together with a few other people, we managed to piece together where it might have been. She found her car 24 hours later, nowhere near where she thought she had left it. And we all laughed! It was funny! And no one got hurt. It’s not as though there had been an accident or anything.
“You don’t drink like other people.”
So why did he say that? How was I different to other people? I didn’t understand. But it was the first time I wondered whether I was indeed different. Whether wine made other people feel as happy and confident and relaxed and … calm … as it made me. Whether, when other people drank a glass of wine, their fear centre shut down and their happy place rolled up the shutters and opened for business.
I asked Zev what he meant. I probably shouted. He shrugged with irritation.
“I don’t fucking get you, Sam. You’re just different. I don’t know this person. You just aren’t … you.”
But it was me. The process of flicking the switch from social drinker to heavy drinker to full-blown alcoholic had already started by then. I didn’t realise it that night. But someone else had.
CHAPTER 2
Why?
You know that feeling you get when there’s a letter from SARS in the post? And even though you know you’ve paid your tax and you’re up to date on submissions and IRP5s and estimates and provisional this and value-added that, your heart sinks and your stomach twists an involuntary kitka? That, although you know absolutely nothing could be wrong, you still anticipate the worst? Well, imagine feeling like that all the time. All. The. Time. That’s how I feel.
That’s an exaggeration of course. No one feels sick all the time. Or frightened. No one’s hands shake all the time. But that’s how it feels. And at night, when I wake up and my heart is thumping so loudly I can hear it and my head hurts to touch it and my ears roar, I comfort myself with that fact. That it’s not actually all the time. Not every minute. Or even every hour. Just most of them.
It comes when you least expect it, anxiety. It’s not like fear. Fear you can see on the horizon. It’s like a pirate ship – there’s always a chance you can avoid it or fight it. Fear is rational. It comes from somewhere. Or something. It’s based in reality. Panic is not. Panic is what you feel when your entire mental processing system is overridden. It’s when you know that if you were comforting someone else, you’d be able to rationalise and maybe even joke about it. You could tell them to calm down. Tell them, it’s never as bad as you think. You could say, this too shall pass. But not when it’s happening to you. Not me.
I panic a lot. I always have. When I was little I panicked that my mother would die, even though she was perfectly healthy. I panicked that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t win the US presidential election in 1984 and there would never be an end to the Cold War. I panicked that I wouldn’t be good enough to go to heaven if I died suddenly. Now that I’m an adult I worry about different things. Some days it starts with something real, like an inexplicably high electricity bill, and then settles into its own loop. Like an old car radio where the knob to change channels has snapped off and you’re permanently stuck on one station and it’s always on because, even if you hate it, you can’t turn it off until you turn off the ignition.
And at first I have the energy to deal with the angst. I’m an intelligent woman. I tell myself all the things I