Authors: Amy Liptrot
In another new house, a flat in an ex-council block in Tower Hamlets, my flatmates began to understand that I was drinking alone in my room, then coming out in wildly different moods, and confronted me about it. I got a by-now-familiar ‘We need to talk’ email, followed by the sickening drop in my stomach. I’d let people down before and couldn’t bear to fuck up again. Broke and borrowing money to buy booze or convincing the local shopkeeper to give me some cans on tick, I avoided bumping into my flatmates and neighbours in the corridor because I knew they could hear me crying at night.
It was not the outer chaos – the problems with other people
and money, the lost and broken possessions – that was the worst thing. The worst thing was the state inside my head. The suicidal feelings were increasing in frequency and strength. I was not in control of my emotions. My thoughts and behaviour were swirling and unstoppable. He doesn’t love me any more. I miss him. I don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t see how I can go forward or how I can get over this. ‘You have to tackle the alcohol problem,’ they said, but how could I when I felt like that? I felt like a sheep stuck on its back: I knew I’d suffocate but it was easier just to stay lying in the hollow.
Months passed: a winter, a disastrous trip to Orkney, where I spent time in a police cell, another under-employed summer. I couldn’t believe the sadness had gone on for so long. The searing panic was something beyond me and I ignored all rules and safety measures to follow it, a slave to the habit of pain. Eyes always brimming with tears, I had fortnight-long headaches, bad dreams I couldn’t wake from. I had gone beyond and didn’t know how to get back. I saw the pattern from the curtains of my farmhouse bedroom. I could feel the tremors, and the wind of memory was flowing through me too fast to hang on.
Everything had been speeding up during the years I had been in London until I was out of control. The city required me to filter so much out – faces, advertisements, events, poverty – and my mind had been making the filter ever tighter until all that I was left with was whirring space. I was dumbfounded and unable to make decisions about where to go, whom to see or what opinion to hold, filling the void with alcohol and anxiety.
And I cried that I was adrift, helpless to the irrational need,
the desire. I was falling, swirling, trying to find a point to hold on to, but as I grasped, any target moved further away.
I was running out of options. Although there was lower I could fall – more trouble, further to be cast out – for me, this was enough. One night I had a moment, just a glimpse but it was expansive and ambitious, as if the blinkers were temporarily lifted and my view was flooded with the light, when I saw a sober life could be not only possible but full of hope, dazzling. I held on to that vision and told myself this was my last chance. If I didn’t change, there was nowhere else for me to go but into more pain.
8
TREATMENT
ON MY BELLY ON THE
floor, back arched, arms stretched behind, fingers locked, I was trying to hold my breath. The teacher, attempting to put us in touch with our primal selves, said, ‘You were born to do this,’ and my pose collapsed in laughter with everyone else.
Had all my life been leading up to doing Kundalini yoga with a bunch of pissheads and junkies in various states of physical disrepair and mental anguish on an institutional carpet? A particularly difficult move had to be repeated thirty times but the teacher promised, ‘By the end you’ll be flying.’ Addicts all, we chased that high.
In the catalogue of my hangovers it was not spectacular but one morning a month or so earlier I’d decided to accept whatever help was on offer to deal once and for all with my dipsomania. I was running late for work, desperately trying to claw myself together, dehydrated and panicky, as I was on so
many mornings, but that day my will just broke. I couldn’t do it any more. I remembered the sensation of the night I’d been struck by the dazzling glimpse of possible sobriety. I called my boss from the bus and said I needed to talk.
It had taken a long time to get there and to accept that this was my situation. When I was younger, it was not my plan to be in rehab when I turned thirty. The fact that I’d only just realised life did not work out how you expect or want showed I had been lucky until then.
I’d been reading some old diaries. Just before I’d left Orkney at eighteen, I’d written an arrogant list of all the things I wanted to achieve but also, perceptively: ‘This world of art/fashion/ literature/rock and roll that so attracts me could be my downfall.’ A decade later I’d had a lot of fun and had a lot of stories but had also, year by year, day by day, developed a damaging compulsion alongside dissatisfaction and loneliness.
For years, I had occasional insight into my problems but was somehow unable to take the action I needed to deal with them. Drunk, I’d talk fluently about my drinking problem. The day after a dreadful binge, I would resolve again and again to make a fresh start.
I made three serious attempts to stop drinking and managed about one month each time: once, in a failed attempt to stop my boyfriend leaving me; once, trying to keep my job, on Antabuse medication that provokes an allergic response to alcohol (didn’t work); and the previous summer, in a failed attempt to prevent my flatmates kicking me out. This time, I’d lost the boyfriend, the flat and the job and was faced with the reality of
doing it for myself, which is really the only way. This time I decided to put sobriety first. I quit my new job, saw my doctor and was referred to the council’s drugs and alcohol advisory service.
It wasn’t the out-of-the-way location, the tatty seats or the blank bureaucratic dealings that made me sob while I was in the waiting room at the addiction clinic: it was the smell. It was the same sour odour that had filled my London bedrooms, the smell from an ill sheep you are going to have to spray with a red X and send to the mart. Not the same as the smell of booze, it is a sickly fragrance emitted from the pores of a creature whose internal organs, liver and kidneys, are struggling to process toxins and push the poison out though the skin, fingernails and eyeballs.
I remembered that acetone smell from when I was a child and sheep lay dying. One morning Dad went into a field and found more than twenty ewes on their sides or backs, blown up like balloons, others stumbling around as if they were drunk. They had been put into a new field the night before and gorged on chickweed in the grass. Fungal blooms in the plants had produced froth, causing them to bloat and stopped them burping. Gases were building inside them and their tubes were blocked. In a desperate attempt to save them, Mum and Dad moved between the stricken animals, pouring vegetable oil into the throats of some to break down the froth, and plunging spiked tubes directly into the stomachs of others to release the gases. Tom and I watched in horror as they worked. Many sheep were saved but five died in the field and a couple more over the next few days.
* * *
I asked to be referred to a residential rehab – I wanted to be locked up – but instead the advisory service decided that as I was classified somewhere between a dependent and a harmful drinker it would be more suitable, and cheaper, for me to go to a ‘day programme’ and remain living at home, which was by this point a single bedsit above a pub in Hackney Wick. I drank heavily in the fortnight leading up to starting the programme – my last chance – and called my doubtful family while half cut to explain my plans. When I told Dad I was doing this for three months, he was sympathetic and said, ‘I’ve spent three years of my life in psychiatric care. I hope it’s less for you.’
After a week of ‘community detox’, in which I went each day to the centre and was given sedative Librium to help with any withdrawal symptoms, a breathalyser test and more tablets to take at home, I started the twelve-week programme. It was, and still is, 100 per cent local-authority-funded, staffed by full-time counsellors and admits up to twenty clients. When I joined, it had, despite a very high drop-out rate, produced more than a hundred ‘graduates’ – people completing the twelve weeks while remaining abstinent from all drugs and alcohol – since 2006.
The first day at the treatment centre was strange. I had to give a urine test, with the toilet door open. It didn’t take long to undo my shyness as we had to pass a piss and breathalyser test twice a week. There was no coffee allowed in the centre, and although I went home alone every night and cycled in every morning, for the first two weeks I had to be accompanied if I left the building at lunchtime in case I decided the group therapy
and handholding were just too much and ran off to the pub or coffee shop.
Out of the group of ten who were there when I started, only one or two others and I were there ‘simply’ for alcohol; the rest were also addicted to cocaine, heroin, crack or other drugs. They included older Cockneys, who genuinely used rhyming slang, and Muslim rude boys who spoke in patois I didn’t understand (phrases like ‘raggle fraggle’). But people were often not as they seemed at first. I’d noticed a little plaster on someone’s inner ear and all week I’d thought it was some sort of ‘gang thing’, until they explained that it was from the previous week’s acupuncture session.
We attended Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from nine thirty until four thirty. Apart from a weekly one-on-one counselling session, our days were spent as an intense group. The four daily sessions included group therapy, weekly updates of our ‘clean time’, talks on things like nutrition or blood-borne viruses, and workshops on topics like ‘relapse prevention’ and ‘self-esteem’.
Wednesday was our day off, when we were expected to have doctors’ appointments, sort out benefits, see probation officers, and otherwise unpick the messes that addicts tend to create. As part of the programme, we had to attend three AA or NA meetings a week outside the centre.
On my first afternoon we had a session with a brilliant nun who was in her seventies and had worked with addicts and in prisons for years. At one point she misplaced her red marker pen, even though it was right in front of her, and one of the ‘old timers’ (he’d been there about six weeks) whispered to me,
‘She’s pissed.’ This is a well-worn joke in rehab but it made me giggle and giggle.
We stood in a circle and held hands at least four times a day, reciting the ‘Serenity Prayer’, which, despite its strangeness at first and my distaste for religion, I soon began to enjoy. But I was shocked. I was often confused and upset about how I’d ended up there. I was a girl on a farm on an island and I’d woken up to find it was twelve years later and for some reason I was in a rehabilitation centre in London, or sitting in Salvation Army centres and church halls with groups of misfits, drinking tea from chipped mugs, listening to tales of people shitting the bed as we laughed our heads off.
We had written work, based on AA’s 12 Steps, which we read out to the group. We went into detail about our pasts and I shared dark and shameful things I had never told anyone else – we all did and it created trust and a bond between us unlike anything I’d experienced before. Unlike drunken confidences and late-night conversations, I could remember these the next day.
I worked hard, trying to answer honestly the questions the counsellors asked me and making an effort to listen to the others. I wanted to be the star pupil of rehab. The act of writing those lists of the unwanted effects of my drinking made it clear to me that I did have a problem and I was in the right place.
The decision to choose abstinence seemed extreme to me but I had found, through painful experience, that my attempts to control and limit my drinking always failed. Once I started I was unable to stop. AA’s basic principle is not to take the ‘first
drink’, after which the alcoholic is ‘powerless’, and to keep doing this ‘one day at a time’. The theory says I lived – and continue to live – with two things: the obsession and the craving. The obsession shows itself in the desire to drink, which pulses through me unexpectedly, like the tremors at the farm, an almost imperceptible rumbling that is always there, threatening, in the background. It will, I think, remain with me for the rest of my life. I need to stay vigilant and not have the first drink that triggers the craving – my inability to stop. If I let one trickle through, I’ll be flooded very quickly.
When we drink, alcohol, or more specifically ethanol, is absorbed into the stomach lining and enters the bloodstream. In the brain, alcohol confuses messages between neurotransmitters and acts as an intoxicant and a depressant or relaxant. For those of us susceptible to addiction, alcohol quickly becomes the default way of alleviating anxiety and dealing with stressful situations. Through repeated use of the drug, our neural pathways are scored so deeply they will never be repaired. I will always be vulnerable to relapse and other kinds of addiction.
All day we were encouraged by the counsellors to voice our ‘feelings’ about everything we said or that happened in the group. Addicts’ emotional responses have been warped and suppressed by substances and it was important for us to regain an understanding of our state of mind and what those feelings made us do. Pressed to find a ‘feeling’ to express about some drug-induced
criminal activity, one of my ‘peers’ (as we called each other) reached deep within himself and came up with ‘ride it like a soldier’. While this was not strictly a ‘feeling’ it made us laugh, releasing the tension in the room caused by repetition of ‘ashamed’ and ‘sad’, and became a catchphrase in the group.
Funny, revealing things happened every day. One lunchtime we were talking about vitamin supplements (most of us alchies had been prescribed various types of B vitamin), how useful they were, whether it is better to get vitamins through eating fruit and vegetables. ‘I mean, when you’ve had a salad, can you immediately feel it doing you good?’ I realised that, because we were all addicts, the conversation had quickly developed into how much of a buzz you could get off a carrot.
Another day, two uniformed police officers turned up at the centre and immediately most of the guys – I was the only woman for some time – were sweating and reaching for their coats. It turned out they were on a routine visit, not looking for an individual, but it gave me more of an idea about my new friends.