Sunshine Warm Sober: The unexpected joy of being sober – forever

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All you can do is hand someone a torch and say, you know, here’s how I did it. Now you go find your way, you can give them a map of how you did it, give them an idea of the rough terrain, but you can’t walk that walk for them, and they have to be ready for it. I got quoted in this! I feel like such a celebrity! I was the Ava that talked about an unexpected drinking trigger being big event sex (yeah not on-brand for me at all) I mean, a lot of us will see the term childhood trauma and think oh, that doesn’t apply to me, that applies to people who’ve had a really rough time, you know, that’s not me. But if you actually do the test, the adverse childhood experience test, you might find that it does apply to you. It did apply to me. One thing I love that you wrote in sunshine, warm sober, was that instead of calling what you’re doing in life, where you are right now, instead of calling it recovery, you you call it discovery? Can you talk about that a little bit?

Sunshine Warm Sober: The unexpected joy of being sober Sunshine Warm Sober: The unexpected joy of being sober

But there are other things out there that I want to explore, hence, discovery, right. And I feel like if you if you feel like you’re always going to have to live in the non drinking space, then you don’t get to go off and do all those other cool things that you want to do, which was part of the whole reason why you got sober. Because I mean, when I was about four years sober I remember one of my best friends he’s a therapist saying to me, but you know, you’ve you’ve disentangled yourself from dependent drinking. So surely you can drink moderately, and you know, you’re happy now you’ve sorted everything out and your life. So surely you can drink again. Early to mid-term recovery is an absolute blast, but also a terrifying tightrope, whereas from year four on, you’ve totally gotten used to not feeling like an extra from Walking Dead on a Saturday morning, so the gleam of that wears off. Making 9am yoga class feels less like a revelation, and more routine. ‘So what?’ And so many of the books just ends when the when the day one comes along, or they maybe have one chapter or two chapters, about what sober living feels like. And so it feels like it’s all dark, there’s not enough light. So it just changes everything and you find that your life opens up rather than stays in this very small little circle where the only thing you really truly enjoy is drinking.

So I’m incredibly excited because my guest today is the author of The Unexpected Joy Of Being Sober , Catherine Gray. And so if you start thinking about is that, that you are just removing something that you’d added, rather than living without something that we should all do, it, rewires it a little bit. And this is I just don’t believe that, you know, teens should be treated as if they’re definitely going to grow up to be drinkers, because they’re not a lot of the time. But also you even in the first 30 days, you start to get the limits of what it’s going to be like later on, you get these kind of little surges of euphoria. Phenomenal; only a 14 per cent falter rate. But hang on, pipes up the negative-seeking drone inside me; that’s not zero, is it? That’s still 14 per cent. And the central theme of my last few years has been about that number, if I had to be a reductionist. About casting around for ways to feel as protected from it as humanly possible. Not living in fear, but being productive in protecting this rainforest from deforestation. Staying sober from year four on became, dare I say it, easy. But the less obvious yet more profound work began. I started finessing life skills that seemed like they were nothing to do with sobriety, yet they were totally related. I learned how to do things like say no (regularly), set boundaries (hate boundaries), ask for what I needed, preserve my energy for the parties I wanted to spend it on and learned how to open the chamber of shame (the things I’d done) in safe company. I’ll be frank, much of this was less fun, but ultimately more transformative.

Sunshine Warm Sober: Catherine Gray on sustaining long-term Sunshine Warm Sober: Catherine Gray on sustaining long-term

You know, there must have been hundreds of times when it didn’t work, but then they tweak it, they retry it, they learn something from each time, it doesn’t work. And eventually you have a light bulb at the end of it. And I knew all you guys I knew, because originally, we were all around the same time period. And I was hung over on my couch for the like, month three in a row. And I actually saw that picture of you and Jen on my phone (not to be stalkerish). And I was like, This is what I want. I met Catherine online in a secret non-drinking Facebook group 8 years ago, when she was first starting her life without alcohol and she has been an inspiration to me ever since.The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our No, it really wasn’t a narrative that I could find anywhere. I mean, apart from as we’ve talked about, at the very end of Quit Lit, where it was like, and then I quit, and everything was great by the end. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it did feel a lot like recovery for, I would say, the first four or so years, because my brain and body was been so bashed about my alcohol, and your brain literally has to recover.