I’ve been thinking about alcohol a lot over the past month or so. About the role it has played and might continue to play my life and all of a sudden I’m not happy about it.

I started drinking at around the age of 16 at school. Going to the pub on once a week on Saturdays, drinking pints. It was great. As a child and teenager I was an inhibited kind of person. I didn’t mix with people well, and suddenly with the help of a few pints I started to make more friends and feel comfortable around people. Since then, alcohol has remained a big part of my life. It’s hard to think of a time where I haven’t consistently drunk at least some alcohol nearly every day. And binged on it on a regular basis too.

I always thought I’d never have a problem with booze. I was never a very big drinker. Drinking too fast (downing shots) almost always make me sick, and 3 or 4 pints would send me to sleep. That’s no longer true. As I get older (I’m 33) my body seems to be getting better at handling more of it, and there’s definitely a mixing effect with the antidepressants I take that is not good. The effect is to enable me to drink more without falling over or falling asleep, meaning that the stage of drunkenness I find myself getting to is much less controlled and probably more harmful – both mentally and physically.

So. Now that this revelation has occurred to me there is a decision to make. Do I want to keep this part of my life as it is? Is it making me happy? Is it helping me, and making life more fun? Has it ever done that? Is it currently a problem that I need to address?

How exactly would my life change if alcohol wasn’t a part of it? I’m going to find out. I’m going to try changing my drinking habits, and get an idea of how much I rely on the stuff. And for me, there’s only one way to do anything; All or nothing. I’ll let you know how it goes :)

I should also say at this point that although this might sound very much like a morning-after-too-much-booze kind of rant, that I actually wrote this blog post several days ago and shelved it, waiting to see if my feelings would change. So it’s 4 or 5 days now since I last drank any alcohol. Even going out for dinner for my birthday last night I didn’t drink at all (which yielded an interesting social response from my friends). So that’s the first test out of the way. I’m serious about trying this, and I want to write a lot about it here on this blog.

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