My Name Is — and I’m an Alcoholic

Today I vowed to begin a three-day detox. Nothing drastic, just simple foods like porridge, bananas, whoelmeal pitta and maybe a few vegetables. Just wanted to kick-start the process of feeling good (about myself) again. I have managed to stick to it just fine (I allowed coffee at the last minute, but it’s calorie-free, so what the hey).

But now it’s evening. Satuirday night, no friends to see or speak to, nowehere to go. Nothing on telly. I’ve spent a week online, almost exhausting my near-limitless capacity to learn useless facts from Wikipedia, and read up on wine. I am bored, though I feel guilty to say it. My natural reaction is to start drinking, and then aim to go out. But that’s rather against the spirit of a detox, wouldn’t you say?

Plus, rather than my week off work having been a time to rest, relax, and cleanse myself, it has been rather the opposite. I’ve slept a lot, sure – probably too much – but I have ruined it through a series of binges and hangovers. I drank excessivle every other day, as often as I can sustain it at the moment, on Friday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights – and only managing to make it into town on one of those. Each occasion entails a lot of alcohol (two bottles of wine, plus a couple of pints/double spirits), a nasty hangover (mainly due to exhaustion from sleep-deprivation), and over-eating to comfort myself the next day. The the day after that it begins again. It’s sad, sickening and terrible for my physical and mental health. I must have developed a dependency, whether chemical or psychological, because knwoing all that, I want to do it again. I know that it may lead to a far worse bout of cold-turkey in the future – because this level of drinking simply cannot be sustained.