1000 Days Alcohol-Free: What Have I Learnt?

Today, I am 1000 days alcohol-free.

I started writing this at midnight last night, snuggled in bed next to my sleeping fiancé, watching a history documentary before getting some sleep ahead of work (from my home office setup) today.

Nothing too special, you might think. But, I can tell you now — it’s a thousand miles away from where I was a thousand nights ago. That’s a story for another time, but worth noting if we’re talking about my recovery journey!

I shared a 999 day milestone update on Threads yesterday, discussing how this would be the last day that I would ever be under 4 digits in my days sober from alcohol.

One user asked me a great question:

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned?”

I gave the first couple of things that came to mind.

Firstly, the fact that happiness can, in fact, become a baseline mood. Drinking life was a fight for survival, nevermind a life of peace and actual happiness.

I never really thought it was possible for me, and 1000 days without booze has proven to me that it absolutely is.

I had to quickly follow up with the next huge lesson that came to mind.

The last 1000 days have taught me a whole lot about ending destructive relationships and getting out of destructive environments.

As I’ve written about pretty extensively recently, healing trauma starts with safety. And my alcohol use was definitely a trauma-based coping mechanism.

While finally cutting ties to destructive environments wouldn’t have come without the decision to get myself dry to begin with and then building my sense of self-respect, it was probably the more poignant lesson in terms of realistically maintaining that booze-free life.

Having had a few hours to sit on it, there really is so much more to say in response to this question. Committing to this work—one day at a time—requires a surrender to thousands of lessons that life is going to offer you.

So, I thought I’d put a few more thoughts together on my personal experience of the first 1000 days of recovery from alcohol, what I’ve learnt, and how I’ve maintained and grown with that recovery over the last 3 years.

1000 days alcohol-free: the biggest lessons I’ve learnt

1. Abstinence alone is difficult to maintain

The same user that asked me this question of what I’ve learnt responded to my point about getting out of destructive situations with a wonderfully wise off-the-cuff quote:

“You don’t win a battle and then just camp out on the battlefield with the dead. You leave that place forever and only talk about it.”

@WordsOfWisdomByRome

This sparked the analogy I want to explore here.

If you were, say, living in a cult, you wouldn’t finally decide you didn’t want to drink the KoolAid and then just stick around, determined to stay abstinent and take care of your health.

You also wouldn’t leave and still maintain close relationships with all the cult members that still believe all of the beliefs you are trying to heal from.

It makes no sense.

Your circle affects everything. Discern carefully in early recovery.

It took me a long time to cut all of the ties I needed to in order to find true sobriety from alcohol in my life.

Some people will not make it through your journey into recovery. The grief is real, but the growth and transformation after shedding what needs to be shed are infinitely more powerful.

You simply can’t do the work for other people. Focus on yourself, what is necessary for maintaining your sobriety today, and what is really going to support the person you want to be.

This leads me nicely into my next lesson.

2. You’re not a villain for putting your recovery first

You’re going to have to make some decisions in recovery that other people might not like, especially if you have a heavily drink-based culture in your circle of friends, family, or even work colleagues.

A few examples for me:

• I (eventually) stopped setting a single foot in my long-time local or surrounding pubs, and stopped attending anything where heavy drinking or hard drug-use would be involved, which wiped out around 90% of my social circle.
• I said no to countless events (that I could likely navigate now) because I knew I wasn’t yet strong enough in my booze-free living to tackle them.
• I attended my great-grandmas funeral, but didn’t attend the wake, as I knew it would be too much for me at that time. I also missed a big family meal after we scattered her ashes, as I knew there would be heavy drinking and a lot of emotions involved.
• I stopped showing up as I had in the past, and as I knew people expected me to. I didn’t give up. I have, and continue to, put my recovery before everything.

You know your own triggers and your own limits. Honour them, and do what you need to maintain that freedom from alcohol. It’s okay that it needs to be a priority for a while, you can relearn the skills to navigate these events in your social life as things become less raw.

3. Drinking culture is f*cking pervasive

Now, this may not apply to all of my friends in various places across the pond, but here in the UK, as you might have heard, we have a bit of a nationwide drinking problem.

I acutely realised how pervasive this culture was once I went alcohol-free. From the horrible normalisation of drink-driving, the need for alcohol at any and all social events, and the saturation of media with romanticised drinking, to Mummy Wine culture, corporate team-building nights out and work happy hours; it’s really accepted, and encouraged, at seemingly every turn.

The lessons I’ve learnt for navigating this are pretty much the same as lesson 1 and 2. Focus on yourself and your recovery. Have a period of solitude if you need to while you get through the rough bit, and slowly re-enter the world one step at a time.

Remember: not all recovery milestones are days or numbers. In 1000 days I’ve had:

• My first, second and third alcohol-free Christmas & New Year
• My first and second alcohol-free birthday
• My first alcohol-free gig (this was a big one!)
• My first alcohol-free business trip
• An alcohol-free proposal and engagement!

So, a big lesson for me has been that yes, drinking culture is cruelly pervasive when you’re in recovery. But. yes, we can learn to navigate all of these things without alcohol, in time. It does get easier. Keep going.

4. There’s probably more work to be done…

As I wrote at the start of this blog, my drinking was massively a trauma-based coping mechanism.

Getting rid of the booze was eliminating one of my destructive coping mechanisms, but the core beliefs, sense of self and self-esteem, and underlying complex trauma still remained. That has been a bit of a longer, and tougher, journey.

Yes, the good far outweighs the bad, don’t get me wrong. But sobriety or abstinence from any substance is probably going to require more underlying work than just the initial “choice”.

It’s hard. And it’s beautiful. To get to know yourself again; who you are under the years of numbing, masking and self-destruction.

Some of you may know already that I am in recovery from BPD, so there has been a lot of overlap in my journey of recovery with that and with alcohol. Some of the issues that affected me and my drinking won’t be the same as you, but this is just my experience, so take what resonates and leave the rest.

For me, DBT helped me heal the urge to drink. The “hard part” was done, I.E. I had decided, announced and stuck to my alcohol sobriety for a while, but it was, to put it bluntly, torturous at times. And I was so used to using self-destructive coping mechanisms that the urge to self-destruct still remained, even if I was ignoring it.

In therapy, I learnt mindfulness. And not pop mindfulness. Mindfulness does not necessarily equal meditation.

I learnt real, present moment mindfulness. Where I could notice the sensations in my body, the emotions they were linked to, the judgments I was making, and the urges I felt; all as neutral observations. I spent months and months noticing the urge to drink, sitting with the sensations in my body as that was happening, journaling how it felt and the events leading up to the urge without judgment.

As part of therapy, I had to keep a daily mood diary, using mindfulness journal prompts and tracking the days where I would have any sort of self-destructive urge. Over the year that I was in DBT, it was beautiful to see those urges reduce from numerous times a day to few and far between.

Now, I can unpick a physical urge to drink (that gut-punch response to being offered an old favourite or seeing the perfect, romanticised “vibe” of drinking on the TV) from an actual want to drink. I can notice, describe it to myself, and consider whether I actually do want to drink. In fact, I don’t even get that far anymore. It’s a natural bypass to well obviously I don’t actually want to drink, it fits none of my wants or goals. It’s a sensation.

And as I sit with the sensation, it gets stronger, and it gets weaker, until it eventually passes.

That has been the real work for me.

5. Shame spirals are powerful – and escapable

Another big lesson for me over the last 3 years has been learning all about shame spirals.

We want to believe that the coping mechanisms that once kept us safe from shame are still necessary. And we want to believe that they are working.

It’s very hard to unlearn the very thing that has protected you, in a sense, for so long. Especially when shame feels so big.

I carried a lot of bullying wounds. I carried a lot of trauma I was unaware of. I carried a lot of misunderstood and misplaced grief. I carried a f*ck ton of anxiety and panic.

Booze took the edge off of all that, just to have it come back 1000 times harder once my impulses were a little too impaired. It was a painful, self-fulfilling cycle of shame and seeking any moment or opportunity for relief.

But the long and short of it is, I have that relief now. No alcohol needed.

6. Recovery really is possible

I suppose this is linked to all of the above, but really, at one point I could absolutely vehemently never imagined a life without alcohol at its core. And the last 1000 days have taught me that not only is that life possible, but it’s more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.

Yes, it takes a lot of hard work; a lot of inner work and a lot of shadow work that, let’s be honest, we’d all rather avoid. But it has led me to the life of my dreams.

I’m still recovering. Like everything I’ve discussed, it’s ongoing work. But looking back, I’ve come so far, and writing this felt incredibly surreal, and incredibly powerful.

When I reflect on every moment of this journey, I see just how far I’ve come in that time. Remember to do the same. Celebrate every little tiny win, one day at a time, and one day you’ll look back and realise you are a thousand miles away from where you started.

Recovery is absolutely possible.

Today, I am 1000 days alcohol-free. Here’s to another thousand, one day at a time.