A reader has responded to an extract from Gemma Correll's book on her relationship with alcohol, sharing her own experience of using booze to manage anxiety and the costly consequences that followed.
A familiar story
Paula McInally, 37, from Wolverhampton, writes that she read the article with particular recognition as someone still in the middle of it. She has spent the past few weeks signed off work with burnout and depression. Like Correll, she found that alcohol was very good at taking the edge off until it was not.
What the piece captures well, she says, is the seduction of alcohol. The way it promises relief and delivers it just enough, just long enough. What it does not mention is the cost. For McInally, that cost included hurting herself on nights when the alcohol stopped working and the feelings became too big to contain.
It took her a long time to connect the two. The drinking made the dark nights darker. The dark nights made her reach for more.
Changing the relationship
McInally has not given up entirely, but she has stopped drinking alone and stopped using alcohol to go numb. One morning she poured every bottle in her flat down the sink and decided that if she was going to feel awful, she was at least going to feel it clearly.
She acknowledges that sounds simple, but it is not. Feelings that have been numbed for years do not arrive gently. They arrive all at once, at night, when you are alone and there is nothing left to hide behind. They are loud and frightening and completely real.
But she is learning that feeling them is the only way through. Not around. Not with something that promises to make them quieter. Through. It is hard. It is also, slowly, freeing.
Correll wrote that giving up alcohol did not solve all her problems. Neither has changing her relationship with it solved McInally's. But it has done something important. It has made her stop running long enough to start looking at what she has been running from. That is not a cure, but it feels like a beginning.
