Hi, I’m Josh, and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for 27 days. That’s a long time, considering the longest I ever managed without a drink before was 10 days. I came to the decision to give up drinking for good when I became sick and tired of being sick and tired all the time. It hasn’t been easy, not drinking. It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Most days I think about having a drink. Some days I’m so angry I can’t go out. It’s lonely, but I’m pushing through until I can learn to live with myself, because that’s something I never did when I was drinking.

 I believed a lot of things that were just untrue when I was drinking. I believed that I was confident, sociable, and fun to be around. That was a lie. Most of the time I had no control over my mouth or my actions. 9 times out of 10 I’d get so drunk I’d end up forgetting the entire evening. I’d then wake up in the morning wondering how the hell I got home (or wherever I happened to be at the time. Waking up in stranger’s beds was an infrequent, but nonetheless worrying experience).

 Before I drank I was a shy, quiet, hugely withdrawn individual with no friends. I never went out. I saw very little of life and for years thought it would probably always be that way. And then, at the age of 18, it was like being given the keys to the kingdom. I left home, went to Uni, made some friends, and the rest is history. I drank to become someone else, because I didn’t want to be myself any more. I hated myself, what I was. I couldn’t live with myself most days. Alcohol enabled me to relax, to feel normal around other people, to have fun for the first time. I fell in love with alcohol.

 My relationship with alcohol quickly became a dangerous one, but us alcoholics never realise that in the beginning. For six years I drank to oblivion every weekend and most week nights too. When I wasn’t drunk I was hungover. The pattern repeated itself endlessly, and I gradually got into more and more trouble. I was kicked out of bars, cautioned by the police, sent letters by the bank because I was spending so much on my social life. And I let it continue because as soon as I had one drink, I began to crave more, and I couldn’t stop. The craving was powerful, unstoppable, constant. It still is. I could never just go to the pub and have one or two drinks. Friends’ suggestions that I ‘try and control the drinking’ irritated and offended me. They didn’t know what it was like. I couldn’t understand the concept of stopping after one drink, why would anyone have just one drink? Why would anyone not want to get drunk, black out, wet themselves, end up in a prison cell, embarrass the family?

 The final straw came last month when I vomited in the street for the umpteenth time. I was at work, hungover, and when I want to be sick, I can’t keep it in, it doesn’t matter where I am. I puked in front of someone’s house and the humiliation was no less than it had been all the other times when the same thing had happened. For a while I’d known that I couldn’t carry on living this way. I was in so much debt, my life was stuck in a rut because I couldn’t progress in any job, being hungover and ill all the time. I’d lost so many friends over the years due to my embarrassing behaviour, and worst of all I knew that every time I went out drinking, the same things would happen all over again. Every time that I prepared to go out for a night of boozing I had no idea what was going to happen, I couldn’t promise myself that I’d stick to a limited amount of drinks, because I’d broken the promise so many, many times already.

 Living without drink has been at times exhilarating, fulfilling, crushing, and horrible. From one day to the next I don’t know where my head is going to be, my mood swings like a pendulum. I can’t do a lot of things that I used to do when I was drinking, because I no longer have that inner confidence that drink initially gave me. I find it difficult just having conversations with people. I feel just as embarrassed by myself as I did when I was a teenager. I drank to suppress these precise feelings of low self-worth. Every day I go from happy, to surprised, to lonely, to angry, to exhausted. Sobriety is intense and challenging, so much so that I regularly wonder whether it’s ever going to get better.

 Sober friends keep telling me that it will get better, and I believe them. I have a choice: I could pick up the drink again and let myself get into all sorts of trouble just as I did before, or I could sit here and deal with this new challenge in my life until I’ve seen it through. Whilst I may be feeling rough now, I can guarantee I’d be feeling a whole lot rougher if I was hungover, with the knowledge that I’d drank to black out last night, possibly pissing off a whole new set of friends. So I’m sticking with sobriety.