How I Stopped Drinking

Quitting alcohol wasn’t as easy as I thought

Alcoholism is rife in my family. I come from a long line of big drinkers — my mother’s mother had a drinking problem and my father’s mother used to drink like a fish. Both were complex women who’d been through a bit, so their drinking was tolerated and the word alcoholic was never used.

But such was my denial, I didn’t even think I had a problem until a buddy who was in recovery himself said to me one day, ‘I think you’ve got a problem with alcohol; why don’t you try going without a drink for 90 days?’

I was perplexed. Problem? Me?

Back in the 80s, working on the Sydney Morning Herald, management left a questionnaire on each of our desks, designed to help a person figure out if she had a drinking problem.

‘How dare they?’ I remember thinking.

I was confronted and pissed off that someone even thought to inquire. Sure, we all drank like fish and took heaps of drugs, but so what? We were hard-working, hard-drinking journalists! We had a reputation to uphold.

I answered yes to most of the questions and threw the document in the bin, a bit annoyed at management’s temerity.

Sometimes a liquid lunch meant we simply carried on drinking for the rest of the day — we’d make the obligatory phone-call back to the office from whichever drinking establishment we were in — ‘We’re booting on, mate; see you tomorrow.’

And the reply would always be, ‘OK, fine — have fun.’ Or if a boozy lunch meant you were a bit sloppy back on the job, it was tolerated.

‘She’ll be right, mate.’ That great Aussie cover-all. It was the ’80s after all.

The drinking culture was so entrenched, editors bought us booze to drink in the short break between editions — we’d get the first edition of the paper off to the printers so it could be delivered out to the provinces and then we’d set about working on the second edition for the city. The kindly editor bought the beer and we’d drink at our desks, as well as smoking copious numbers of cigarettes, of course. The motivation behind this was presumably that at least we stayed in the office; if we went to the pub, we might not come back.

I was proud of my hard head — i.e. I could tolerate huge amounts of alcohol without seemingly being too badly affected.

I could write a book about my drinking exploits, but won’t bore you with the details. Here, though, are some edited highlights.

Belting out the song ‘Danny Boy’ in a local pub in County Kerry to a bunch of equally lubricated Irishmen and women after consuming way too much Guinness; swimming naked in the Hauraki Gulf (the body of water off Auckland, New Zealand) and slicing my Achilles tendon on the propellor of the boat I’d just drunkenly dived off (surgery was required); drinking countless long island teas in King’s Cross, Sydney, with a much larger, male, colleague who reckoned he could drink me under the table; he was right. I couldn’t walk straight. (Thanks, Henry E.)

I don’t want to glorify my drinking by any means. It was tragic and I often made a complete ass of myself. But I still didn’t think I had a problem.

Denial is not a river in Egypt . . .

Fast forward to 2006, when a friend suggested I try going without a drink for 90 days, and thought, ‘I’ll show you!’ and gritted my teeth and got on with the job.

I had no noticeable withdrawal symptoms but my cigarette intake went up.

I had a couple of wobbly moments on the job, though. Like one day, while working on the New Zealand Herald, again as a sub-editor, I was asked to do a job that I considered beneath me, and burst into tears and had to go and process my angry resentment in the ladies’ loo for a while.

Taking up the challenge of no drinking for 90 days, however, I got to 88 days and went down country to stay with my parents for a few days. It was a Friday and my father said, ‘For god’s sake — it’s the weekend! You’ve got to have a drink,’ and pushed a large gin and tonic into my hand.

Hard to say no to a father I’d been drinking with for years and years and who was probably a high-functioning alcoholic himself.

When I got back to Auckland, I told my friend I’d had a drink and he said to try again.

I’m a pretty determined person and thought, ‘I’ll show you!’ and off I went again, just not drinking and having no real skills to stay stopped. They say it’s easy enough to stop, but it’s hard to stay stopped.

That was the problem

So day 89 came up and somehow a drink found its way into my right hand and I was pretty bemused about this and thought, well why not drink it? It wasn’t as if I was hanging out for a drink or not coping without it, but I duly reported the fact to my friend who rolled his eyes and encouraged me to give it another shot.

This time I was super determined and held out despite being around lots of drinkers. In the last week of my third go at trying to get to 90 days, I was staying with some real party friends who were bemused. All week I’d been abstaining while hanging out with them drinking around me and gently ribbing me about my abstemiousness.

On the last night of my stay, we went out to a good restaurant and I could see that they were ordering up some very good wines.

‘For god’s sake, have a drink,’ said one. ‘You’ve done your 90 days!’ And I was so proud of myself, guess what? I had a drink.

So when I got back to Auckland, I said to my friend, ‘Well, I did the 90 days!’ and told him about having the drink.

And he said those immortal words, ‘Come to a meeting with me.’

It was July 1, 2006, when he took me took me to my first meeting.

And as they say, the rest is history.

Thanks for reading.

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