It’s no secret that the English drink like it’s a sport. According to the NHS, nearly 80% of people in the UK drink*. And if this drinking just involved a casual glass of wine with dinner, or a pint at the pub with friends on a Friday night, we wouldn’t have a problem – but binge drinking is a whole other story.

Excessive drinking has seemingly become part of our culture. The average age for someone to start is between 15 and 16, and with young adults in the UK going to university at 18 (and being exposed to unnatural, unaffordable and unnecessary drinking habits) it is no wonder we have a problem. In fact, studies have shown that 24% of adults in England binge drink, and for a long time I was one of them.

Alcohol and I have never got along. I would regularly wake up regretting (or completely forgetting) the night before, burying myself in my blankets and wishing the headache and nausea would go away. Trust me when I say I have lost weeks to hangovers, and have many hazy memories when it comes to alcohol (one of which includes meeting a boyfriends parents for the first time after being picked up on the side of the road crying inconsolably about how I would never get to see Elvis Presley perform live.)

*One of the* ***very few*** *acceptable photos of me drinking, complete with nose ring.*

In 2020, after a particularly embarrassing evening that involved running at, jumping on and nearly breaking my policeman friend, I decided I wanted out. Either I had to find a way of understanding and adhering to my limits, or I had to quit altogether. Then I realised I have very little willpower – so actually, quitting was my only option. So I quit, cold tofu (little vegetarian joke for you there).

You aren’t yourself when you’re drunk

I don’t believe in ‘letting someone off’ if they make poor decisions when they are drunk. I have made loads of poor choices under the influence that I would never do again, but I own them now. For a long time, I would beat myself up about it and hate myself for them. Now, I realise they were something I chose to do, yes, but they aren’t something I would do now.

When you drink (or at least, when I did), you lose all of your inhibitions and fear-of-consequences. You suddenly feel as though nothing matters, you aren’t scared of anything, and your actions won’t have any impact on anyone else but yourself. And boy oh boy is that wrong. I’ve hurt many people while consuming alcohol. I won’t pretend people haven’t hurt me, because that is also true. But I can’t ignore the mistakes and choices I have made too.

I have had to learn to live with those choices, and this can be a really tricky thing to do when giving up alcohol. Alcohol makes you feel good in the moment, helps you to relax, but if it turns you into someone you don’t like (or in my case, someone I wouldn’t even recognise) then it might be time to reevaluate your drinking habits.

Drinking is expensive

Something I hadn’t really registered while spending time drinking was how much it was costing me. The average pint of larger in the UK now is £4.69, according to the Office of National Statistics. And yes, this was much less when I was drinking, but I wasn’t even drinking larger. I was drinking rum – and let me tell you that isn’t cheap (no wonder pirates are always searching for treasure…)

**You aren’t just drinking alcohol**

If you are anything like me, chances are when you drink (or when you drank) you would mix it with something. That ‘something’ might have been Pepsi, lemonade, or even cranberry juice. These drinks all have something in common: they are unhealthy AF. Packed with sugar and toxic sweeteners, these drinks have their own side effects.

You learn who your friends are

I’ve never been someone to have lots of friends, and I’m okay with that. I much prefer my crowd of people to be close, personal and able to put up with my quirks. However, when I was drinking I would be under the impression certain people were my friends when they absolutely were not. ‘Best friends’ who I felt I had a lot in common with drifted away, particularly those who were some of the most influential people in my ‘drinking life.’ The people who often pushed me to ‘drink more’ or ‘go back to this random persons house because they had more booze,’ suddenly vanished. I’m sure that wasn’t just down to the alcohol, and people have their own demons when they start to evaluate their lives, but for me, my close friends stuck by me and the rest… well, they didn’t!

It doesn’t cure your anxiety or depression

One of the main reasons I drank was to numb the hollowness of depression. I went through quite a rough patch in 2018 that involved a lot of things I couldn’t control. But, being an OCD and anxiety sufferer, my mind found a way round it – and that was to drink to excess. I would drink to fill a void in my chest that otherwise I would have to face, and at the time that just felt too much for me. Instead, I found it much easier to drink and pretend everything was a-okay.

But, drinking won’t fill the emptiness. Drinking won’t fix your anxiety. It just shuts it away in a tiny cupboard for a couple of hours to rest, until it is fighting fit for the next day.

Nothing good comes of getting blind drunk

They call it getting ‘blind drunk’ for a reason. And ‘blind’ I so often was. I have periods of my life that are either patch-work stories other people have told me, or a whole lot of ‘nothing.’ The snippets and stories I do have make me cringe and want to hide in a hole for at least forever. In fact, just writing this is making me recoil. Let’s, like much of my early-20s, forget this part.

If drinking taught me anything else, it taught me a lot about who I don’t want to be. I don’t want to make lots of finite relationships, I didn’t want to spend money on a substance that is only hurting me, I don’t want to forget my life.

I want to live as much as I can, and remember every damn bit of it.

*This was a conducted study, with 79% of people in 2021 saying they had consumed alcohol in the past 12 months.

What I’ve learnt being 4 years sober