Resignation from Alcohol

Dear Alcohol






Yours in Sobriety



Five little words

Maria it’s a brain tumour.

Those 5 little words were said to me 5 ½ years ago and changed the course of my life.

Gut wrenching, is probably the best way I can describe the feeling I had when those 5 little words were said to me. If I survive this brain tumour (which we affectionately dubbed ‘the peanut’) I promise to be a better person. I promise to donate more to charity. I promise to stop watching reality tv. I promise to quit drinking. You make all sorts of mad promises when you’re lying in hospital with tubes and machines attached to you. I mean, how could I give up watching The Biggest Loser or MasterChef? Seriously, what was I thinking?

If I did survive this, the decision had been made to take some long service leave and travel around Australia. A few months later we did just that. We travelled 25,000 kilometres in 7 months and it was the best medicine for my recovery. I had to check in with the ‘ologists’ regularly while I was travelling and had to get different things checked to make sure I was doing ok.

The peanut and consequently the trip did some wonderful things for me and for the love of my life. It made us focus on what is important in life. It made us appreciate the little things. It forced us to make a decision on what we wanted to do when we grew up – we decided that we wanted to travel permanently. We got home from the trip, went back to work, and started the process of selling up and giving away all our worldly possessions. It took us 2 years to get ourselves organised and 2 ½ years ago we became permanent travellers.

Those 5 little words changed everything for us. We viewed it as a blessing in disguise, because if I hadn’t have been diagnosed with the peanut, we wouldn’t be living this wonderful life. I have become a better person to family and friends, I have done more community and charity work, I have given up alcohol, but I still haven’t given up watching reality tv!

I continue to improve and I constantly surprise the ologists. You can’t keep a good woman down, I always say! I just wish it didn’t take a brain tumour to make me realise that life is yours for the taking. You just have to grab on and go for it.

(posted on my HSM page 12 months ago)

My monster

The depression monster first dug its claws into me when I was 17 and from then on it was always there—dragging me away from a worthwhile life. I didn’t know my monster’s name until I was 20. Mixed and influential messages from various sources, amateur and professional, fell broadly into two categories:

a) depression is a choice; and

b) depression is a valid medical condition

Suggested plans of action accompanying A-type views could be summarised under the heading ‘HTFU’, whereas B-type advocates, also known as ‘soft cocks’, were more likely to encourage a blend of support and tablets.

For several years I went with the soft cocks. In retrospect, I can see that I made important progress in that time: I started leaving the house regularly; volunteered at an Oxfam shop; found a job that forced me to interact with other humans; and eventually started spending time with other humans just for fun.

But I couldn’t let go of the shame I felt over choosing support and tablets. I suppose I’d managed to synthesize all of the advice and information I’d received into one succinct and bitter line which I repeated incessantly to myself: I’m defective.

This broken record of self-loathing was reinforced by a CV that I imagined screamed underachiever. For years its most dazzling bullet points included my BA (minus the honours year I’d dropped out of because I was a quitter who never finished anything); my volunteer work at Oxfam; and 5 years as a Jenny Craig Weight Loss Consultant. By the time I’d reached the first phase of old age (my mid- twenties), I hadn’t changed the world at all. Ergo, I was a failure.

So I came up with a brilliant plan to improve myself: I’d start doing things that scared me—things like flying, applying for new jobs, further study. I’d quit medication cold turkey too because tough people do things cold turkey. Tough people never need help.

It took me four years to tick off all the dot points on my impressive to-do list. My achievement timeline looked like this:

2006: Quit medication cold turkey. (Very painful, possibly tough, definitely stupid. Wouldn’t recommend ‘achieving’ this to anyone.) Also enrolled part-time in a journalism degree.

2007: Started new job with emergency services.

2008: Ended long-term, safe but stifling relationship. Went to China and the US.

2009: Finished journalism degree.

Throughout all of this ‘progress’ I was drinking like Frank Sinatra. I’d started drinking when I was 17. I doubt my reasons for drinking were ever extraordinary. At first I drank because alcohol was new and fun—a magic potion that allowed me to shed my 17-year-old-awkward-girl suit.

While sands slipped through my hourglass, I learned that drinking buys a lot of great stuff—acceptance, escape from discomfort (minor and major, emotional and physical), escape from anything that ultimately requires facing up to, really. Hindsight can be terrifying, and I reckon the only thing that diminishes that terror is sharing lessons learned with others. If I had to plot my drinking timeline on a graph, it’d show a sharp and uninterrupted incline starting in 2006—the year of my first big achievement. Yes, Geri, connect those dots and suffer in your jocks as you reconsider the thing you were so proud of.

Tablets might have been shameful, but in my world drinkers were champions. My substitute medicine was always accessible and relatively cheap. And I could or would not see that I was digging an ever-widening trench between who I was and who I wanted to be. Why was it so hard to put down that shovel?

I think a key part of the answer is that my social world revolved around alcohol and in Australia that’s almost monotonously normal. This makes it very easy for problem drinkers to escape detection. At most social gatherings people who decline a drink are usually subjected to intensive interrogation that stops just short of a full-body cavity search. If you hang out with heavy drinkers you can expect to enjoy the kind of welcome ordinarily reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Abstinence can be thirsty work—much easier to go with the flow and forget where it’s carrying you.

I’d developed a taste for oblivion, too. It felt good, and if something feels good you don’t over think it, you just do it. Who cares if it’s only short-term gratification and bugger the consequences, yeah? Self-sacrifice is for masochistic losers, for example, Christians and vegetarians. I secretly believed that modern medicine would save me from any dire consequences anyway. As a faithless person, I had some truly wild beliefs about science.

At 31 I made another magical discovery as a result of persistent sleeplessness: calmative meds (Mersyndol then Restavit then Xanax). Curiously, I wasn’t ashamed of taking any of those tablets. It was what tough people sometimes had to do to get some well-earned Zs. It wasn’t long before I made a subsequent magical discovery: calmative meds plus alcohol equal a sleep only rivalled by anaesthetic or death. Pretty clever, I know, but apparently not clever enough to consider that the same combination in the correct quantities could actually produce death. Oh well, everyone makes mistakes.

After a couple of years, the rickety support structure I’d set up for myself collapsed. Predictable maybe, but I was still pretty shocked. Under the influence of a broken toe and a 2-litre goon-bag hangover, I committed to a 12-month dry spell on Hello Sunday Morning (HSM). At 33, I finally noticed the ‘terms and conditions’ asterisk on the bottle’s price tag.

I could perhaps best describe HSM as an online support community for problem drinkers even though I’m pretty sure that’s not the target audience its founder, Chris Raine, had in mind. When you sign up you can set goals to motivate yourself—most people’s checklists include saving money, weight loss, fitness, improving mental health and other self-renovation projects.

I did save money and I lost 8kg eventually, but my mental health didn’t improve simply by omitting alcohol. Life without anaesthetic was challenging and often uncomfortable. I learned that getting older isn’t the same as growing up, just as being smart isn’t the same as being wise. In short, there was a bunch of stuff I had to face.  I had to admit that I needed support… and tablets. Hahaha. Sigh.

But I’ve generally found that admitting errors sucks much less than the outcomes of concealing them. Toward the end of my 12 months I posted this on my HSM blog:

“When I consider how I was before I’m so glad I decided to change despite all of the discomfort it’s involved. My robot life, in some ways, was easier—going through the motions, sticking to my precious routine, disconnected from feelings. It was an operating system I developed in response to a deep sense of worthlessness (horrible to think that the operating system and the worthlessness that inspired it were perpetuated by the same fuel) and an inability to face all the sadness I saw in the world. I suppose the aim of my game was self-preservation. I now believe that aim was flawed. (Can a life spent in cotton wool and ether be thought of as lived?)

HSM has given me the time and clarity I needed to work out what matters to me. It’s taken a while, but now that I’ve done it, I’m no longer willing to make choices that support comfort and convenience at the expense of what I hold dear.”

I’m 34 now, and I still feel the jab of those claws every so often. It’s OK to feel things though—that’s how we grow.

'Depression' from Toby Allen's Mental Illness Monsters series.

‘Depression’ from Toby Allen’s Mental Illness Monsters series.

The addicted Brain

The addicted Brain

This is a free course about addiction.

Click on the link just there, up there to your left, yep you got it.


About the Course
The course will cover many aspects of addiction, mainly to drugs, but also to the Internet, gambling and other behaviors. Questions that will be addressed include:

  • What is addiction?
  • How do we study it and what have we learned?
  • What makes a drug or activity addicting and what are its problems and toxicities?
  • What happens in the brain when someone becomes addicted?
  • Who can be an addict, and what are the vulnerability and risk factors?
  • How do we treat addicts?
  • How does government policy affect addicts?

821 bottles sitting on a wall….

Tomorrow is a big day for me.

It marks my 18-months of sobriety, and I am so fucking proud of myself, I feel like shouting to the world, I DID IT!

Being the stats nut that I am, here are my vital statistics, based on my daily average consumption of 1.5 bottles of white wine per day (pre HSM, of course), and based on $10 per bottle:

18 months = 547 days
547 days x 1.5 bottles of wine = 821 bottles not consumed
821 bottles x 630 calories = 517,230 calories not consumed
821 bottles x $10 per bottle = $8210 saved

Breathtaking, isn’t it. 1 and a half bottles of wine doesn’t sound like much, but if you lined them up end to end, it would probably reach the fucking moon! It has been a journey that has seen many changes in me and my health. The biggest, most notable change is my weight loss. I have now lost 20 kgs, and I am fitter, stronger and healthier than I have ever been. Oh, and happier! The absolute joy that I feel is palpable!

To quote Jill Stark “Sobriety has never been so intoxicating”.