I’ve always over-identified with Lindsay Lohan. Not just because we’re both ginger and have both faced scrutiny over whether or not our boobs are natural (although mine took place in the pub, not the tabloids) – but because we’ve both been known as ‘party girls’.
For me it started at university, which was about the same time that Lohan began her well-photographed drunken spiral. Seemingly like her, I drank most nights, and I drank a lot – never to the point of passing out, but often well past the point where I cared about my impending essays, or the fact that the same man had just dumped me for the fourth time, or that everyone else knew what they were doing after graduation and I had no idea. Alcohol was my friend, the nice, fuzzy-making beverage that rewarded me at the end of the day. Never mind that all the bar staff in my local pub knew my name and none of my tutors did; you’re meant to drink at uni, so I was doing it right…right?
Except, I realise now that I wasn’t. My drinking wasn’t the normal response of a 20 year old who’s away from home and surrounded by student nights. It was a shonky coping mechanism, and one that would only make my life more tricky as I moved through my 20s.
Because, as I got a bit older and apparently little wiser, the responsibilities piled up and my brain started to crack. What had begun at uni as feeling ‘a bit low’ every now and then turned into a feeling of worthlessness and impending doom. I was 23. I had a job, a rented flat and a great social life, but I felt like a fraud. I was a terrible, unloveable person and no-one should ever have hired me, let alone been friends with me. Soon they were all going to figure it out and I was going to be left miserable and alone – which was exactly what I deserved.
It was too much for me to cope with. So I didn’t. I drank.
My drinking didn’t resemble what many people think of when you say ‘alcoholic’ or ‘drink problem’. I was no lonely alcoholic, sat in a corner swigging from a bottle of wine. I was a sociable drinker. I’d go to anything I was invited to, regardless of whether I thought it sounded fun or whether I even liked the people who were inviting me. I’d go for boozy dinners on a Monday, clubbing on a Tuesday, and then to the pub on a Wednesday. I couldn’t bear to spend a Friday or Saturday night in my flat, so if nothing else turned up I’d convince my flatmate to come with me to Clapham to get as drunk as we could. My boss called me a ‘party girl’ and outright compared me to the Lohan. I took it as a compliment, refusing to accept that this wasn’t how it was meant.
From the outside, my life looked like one constant party, marred only by the occasional hangover. But on the inside, it was miserable. I was running away from things I didn’t want to face, quite literally trying to drown out my issues. Drinking to forget, drinking to feel better, drinking to avoid being alone with my thoughts.
Turns out it wasn’t the wisest plan, as the professionals have since told me.
‘Having a glass of wine after work does make us feel relaxed and better, and it does have a short-term positive impact’ Bliss Pidduck, a Psychological Wellbeing Practioner with Addaction explains. ‘But in the long run, it can cause bigger problems in your well-being. Our brains work with a very delicate level of chemicals to regulate our mood, and alcohol interferes with that – it’s actually a depressant.’
This means that alcohol actually exacerbates the very problem I was trying to run away from. The worse I felt, the more I drank – and the more I drank, the worse I felt. ‘People who are depressed drink, stay depressed, and then drink more – that’s the vicious cycle of alcohol’ Bliss says. On nights out I’d fall into what I called the ‘drunken pit of despair’, making a joke of just how bad I really felt. It happened time and again, yet I never stopped – I just drank more to forget.
Then I moved in with my boyfriend, and unable to resort to drinking through everything for fear that he’d judge me, I crashed. Hard. He convinced me to go to the doctor, who diagnosed me with anxiety and depression and prescribed anti-depressants. The leaflet said you shouldn’t drink with them.
I ignored what the leaflet said which, of course, was about the worst thing I could do – because it turns out that alcohol messes with your serotonin levels, the very thing anti-depressants are trying to correct. I was completely cancelling out the effects of my medication with a bottle of wine and then wondering why I wasn’t getting better.
So, after a year and finding myself at an all-time low, I finally took the decision to quit. It was only then I realised just how messed up my relationship with alcohol had been.
‘People need to think about the reason they’re drinking in the first place,’ Bliss says. ‘Is it a social thing, or is it to cope, forget or sleep? If it’s one of the latter, that may be a sign you have a problem.’
And alcohol, it turned out, was not only making my other problems worse but a problem in itself. For the year before I gave up drinking, I’d been suffering all-consuming panic attacks. My anxiety levels were so high that I spent most days thinking that I was about to die or that the world was about to end. It never once occurred to me that alcohol could be partly responsible.
It’s something Bliss has seen time and again in her work. ‘Anxiety can be a bully that tells you all the bad things going to happen,’ she says. ‘And that gets stronger with alcohol – it narrows your focus so all you can see is the negative.’
Without alcohol mucking up my brain chemistry, and with the medication actually able to do its job, my brain slowly came back into balance. And I came to realise that while I’d been hiding behind the cultural norms of binge-drinking, all I’d done was make myself more ill while trying to pretend I was well.
But still, alcohol had been a central part of my life, and cutting it out was hard. Friends who saw me as the ‘party girl’ couldn’t understand why I was stopping. They weren’t always willing to talk about why they were uncomfortable with my new-found sobriety – at least not without a bottle of wine – but I have my own theories. For years, I’d been the really big drinker and by comparison they’d not seemed so bad. And suddenly, I was sober, and they were questioning their own habits. ‘You weren’t that bad!’ they’d tell me, offering a glass of wine - even as I was pointing out that alcohol had hospitalised me more than once.
Other friends just weren’t sure how to interact with the ‘new me’. Should they invite me to the pub or not? Would I want to go to parties? Could they drink in front of me? I’d try to have sober dinner with some friends, and discover we had nothing in common when we weren’t rampaging around with a glass of wine in our hands. And slowly – and a bit awkwardly - some of my friends drifted away. But thankfully, a fair few stuck around, relieved that they no longer had to put up with the drunken sobbing wreck that I’d become.
It’s now five years since I gave up drinking. I’m still sober, and although I still have struggles with my mental health, I’m much healthier and happier than I was – even if the closest I get to mad dancing on a Saturday night is watching Strictly in my pyjamas.
If you are concerned that you or someone you care about has a problem with drinking you can find support here
You might also be interested in:
How Not To Be A Dick When Your Friend's A Recovering Alcoholic
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.