High Sobriety: my year without booze

Scribe Publications

HIGH SOBRIETY

Jill Stark is a senior writer with The Sunday Age. She joined The Age in 2006, where she has predominantly covered health, specialising in alcohol and drug issues, mental health, and public-health policy. In 2008, she won the National Drug and Alcohol Award for excellence in media reporting with her ‘Alcohol Timebomb’ series, which investigated Australia’s binge-drinking problem. In 2011, she won again for a range of alcohol-related stories, including a first-person piece detailing her break from drinking.

Raised in Edinburgh, Jill began her journalism career in Scotland in the 1990s. She worked for newspapers such as the Daily Record, The Scotsman, and the Evening Times, before she moved to Melbourne, where she currently lives, in 2001.

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First published by Scribe 2013

Copyright © Jill Stark 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

While every care has been taken to trace and acknowledge copyright, we tender apologies for any accidental infringement where copyright has proved untraceable and we welcome information that would redress the situation.

Sections of this book appeared on the Hello Sunday Morning website between January and September 2011, and in The Sunday Age on 10 April 2011.

‘Caledonia’ reproduced with kind permission from Butterstone. Music and lyrics by Dougie MacLean; published by Limetree Arts and Music (PRS & MCPS UK).

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Stark, Jill.

High Sobriety: my year without booze.

9781922072160 (e-book)

1. Stark, Jill. 2. Drinking of alcoholic beverages–Australia. 3. Drinking of alcoholic beverages–Scotland. 4. Australia–Social life and customs. 5. Scotland–Social life and customs.

362.292

www.scribepublications.com.au

For Jude, who taught me

life’s too short to be wasted.

Prologue

THE ROAR IN my skull sounds like waves battering a shore. My head, planted facedown in a sticky pillow, feels as heavy as a waterlogged sandbag. My body is a dance floor for pain. Welcome to 2011, Starkers: a new year, a new start; same old stinking hangover.

Last night was huge. Dawn had broken by the time I staggered home. I remember cursing the light and the chirpy birds. It was, like so many before it, a night that had got away from me. It had been a ridiculously hot Melbourne New Year’s Eve: dry and oppressive, with a blasting northerly wind. I felt as if I was trapped inside a fan-forced oven. As I sipped my first drink — a stubby of beer — with friends in their backyard paddling pool, the mercury crept past 40 degrees. It was 6.00 p.m.

As the night wore on, there was champagne with strawberries, more beer, more champagne, and then even more beer. There were sparklers, dancing, and high-pitched phone calls to Scotland, where it was still the last day of the decade before. I vaguely remember a fiercely contested drawing competition with crayons, and, for reasons I can’t fathom, sitting atop a stepladder with a miner’s lamp strapped to my head.

Later, at another friend’s house, we had White Russians in tumblers, and tequila served in martini glasses. There was raucous laughter, and a Halloween mask, and Lemonheads songs played on a tiny pink guitar. I remember one of my friends vomiting in the kitchen sink, and the group blithely singing over it as if this was neither noteworthy nor unusual. I remember thinking, when’s this going to stop? Then having another beer for the road.

I roll over onto my side, releasing a deathbed groan. The alarm clock comes into view, its illuminated digits stabbing my eyes. It’s 2.00 p.m. Another groan; this one seems to come from my bones. My guts churn as a tribe of African drummers pounds out a rhythm in my brain, and I pay a grudging respect to a hangover that, having been almost a month in the making, has arrived with some fanfare.

Being conscious hurts. I gag as I think of all the booze I put away in December — one long party interspersed with stolen moments of sleep and tortured days at work.

But covering alcohol is my job. I’m the binge-drinking health reporter. During the week, I write about Australia’s booze-soaked culture. At the weekends, I write myself off. For five years I’ve documented the nation’s escalating toll of alcohol abuse as a health reporter for The Age and The Sunday Age, so I know, more than most, the consequences of risky drinking. I’ve even won awards for my ‘Alcohol Timebomb’ series, which highlighted the perilous state of our nation’s drinking habits. But it hasn’t deterred me. I’m always first on the dance floor and last to leave the party. At the 2010 staff Christmas bash, I won the inaugural Jill Stark Drinking Award. Bestowed upon me for recording the least amount of time between partying and turning up to work, I celebrated the honour with a beer. When colleagues remarked on the irony of my role as health reporter, I told them it was ‘gonzo journalism — just immersing myself in the story’. Then I danced into the next morning, breaking my own record by stumbling in to work after four hours’ sleep, my title safe for another year.

I stuck the beer-stained certificate on my fridge, ostensibly to show off to friends, but really to serve as a reminder that this was, or should have been, a line in the sand. Yet the festive season leaves little time for self-reflection. There’s always another party. I powered on, and on, and on, until the hangover of all hangovers brought me here.

An ungodly noise reverberates around the room. It’s impossibly loud. I wrestle with the doona, unearthing my mobile from a pile of clothes. It’s my friend and colleague Nat. I can’t talk to her. The inside of my head is a graveyard for brain cells. Those that survived last night are clinging to life, resting on the backs of their fallen comrades, too weak to help me form words. I turn the phone to silent, waiting for the message-bank alert to vibrate.

‘Hi darl, happy new year!’ Nat trills in her singsong voice. ‘So sorry to bother you on your day off, but I really need your help. Brendan Fevola’s been arrested for being drunk, and I have to do the story. I need to find some alcohol experts to talk about whether he should be in rehab, is his career over, where to next, that sort of thing. Was hoping you’d be able to put me on to some of your contacts. Anyway, hope you had a good night. If you can call me back, that would be great.’

It’s an hour before I recover the motor skills to send Nat the contacts. Scrolling through my phone, I find the mobile numbers of Australia’s leading authorities on alcohol abuse. The chief executive of the Australian Drug Foundation, the chairman of the National Health and Medical Research Council’s working committee on alcohol, the head of the prime minister’s National Preventative Health Taskforce: these are men who trust and respect me, men who will draw on their decades of expertise to speak eloquently on the best road to rehabilitation for a troubled star footballer who has had one big night too many. Fev will be in good hands.

But what about me? As I lie here, enveloped by a sense of shame and the stench of stale pale ale, the only thing louder than the thumping pain in my head is a noise I have tried to ignore for months: the tick, tick, tick of my own alcohol timebomb.

I’VE BEEN A binge drinker since I was a teenager. Growing up in Scotland, a place where whisky outsells milk, and teetotalism is a crime punishable by death, devotion to drinking is as much a part of my national identity as tartan, bagpipes, and arctic weather conditions.

I had my first drink at 13 — a can of lager that my best friend, Fiona, and I stole from my parents’ drinks cabinet. We laced it with sugar in a failed attempt to make it taste less revolting, and drank it through a straw because we’d heard this would get us pissed faster. It would take many years before I warmed to the taste of alcohol, but I immediately fell in love with being drunk. It felt freeing, exhilarating, and endlessly fun and hilarious. It opened up a world where life’s sharp corners were blunted, and worries melted like chocolate on a sunny dashboard. I couldn’t believe it was legal.

Since then, I’ve rarely questioned my big weekends. Getting drunk is the social norm, and as much a part of life as eating and sleeping. When I moved to Australia in my mid-twenties, I was delighted to discover that my adopted country had a similar affection for alcohol, and was even more excited to learn that not only could you drink beer at the football, but also that every year on the first Tuesday in November you got a day off to get pissed and watch a horse race. This was my kind of place.

Many times I’ve vowed ‘never again’, as what begins as a few quiet drinks invariably turns into a lost weekend. Then, when the hangover fades to a dull memory, I do it again. Alcohol accompanies almost every aspect of my social life: parties, gigs, dinners, birthdays, holidays, book club, work functions. Even my dance class is held in a pub. Drinking socially has become an act as automatic as breathing.

But something has changed in recent months. My 35th birthday looms, I have a grown-up job and a ridiculous mortgage, and my knees now make a cracking noise every time I stand up. I can no longer afford to drink as though I’m a teenager. The hangovers are hitting harder and lasting longer. A big night out can leave me feeling flat for days. It’s not until now, my New Year’s Day nightmare, that I realise just how big a price I’m paying.

After texting Nat the numbers, I doze off for an hour or so, not ready to deal with all that a new year represents. A bad dream wakes me up with a jolt, and I lie there motionless, staring at the ceiling — too tired to move, too jumpy to sleep.

Then I feel it: the slow creep of panic. It starts, as it always does, with a tingling sensation around my heart, rising feverishly until it feels as if my heart might shatter or burst right out of my chest. Pins and needles run through my fingers. My feet turn to slabs of stone. My breathing is so laboured that I have to remind myself to inhale and exhale.

I first began to suffer panic attacks as a teenager. Over time, I learned to control them to the point where they rarely bothered me, but recently they’ve crept back. Hangovers are often the trigger.

On this first day of 2011, the panic returns with a fury I’d forgotten. It comes in waves, racking my body and rising up to my brain with a rush of blood that makes my head sway. My heart, beating as fast as a champion racehorse, is so loud it’s all I can hear. I feel like I might pass out. Or die. Each surge brings more thoughts that trigger more waves of panic. What’s happening to me? Surge. I haven’t felt like this for years. Wave. Maybe I should eat something. Surge.

Even the idea of buttering toast is more than I can handle. But I’m light-headed and hungry. I throw on jeans and a T-shirt, and jump in the car to go to McDonald’s.

Big mistake.

I make it out of my garage, and I’m at the traffic lights when it comes: a wave of panic so powerful that it takes all my strength not to run screaming from the car. Traffic is behind me, pedestrians are on the crossing, and I’m facing a red light. To my right, a metallic-blue Mitsubishi Lancer with tinted windows is pulsating to music that could best be described as angry noise. As I turn the radio on to drown it out, the sight of my trembling hand triggers another wave of panic. The DJ bursts forth from the speakers, babbling about new year’s resolutions and hangover cures. I can’t cope. I mash the buttons with the palm of my hand like an elephant trying to master a typewriter. Breathe. Remember to breathe.

The lights turn green and I turn left. I’ve only travelled a few metres when another wave threatens to run me off the road. I pull over into a side street, head between my legs, willing myself to keep it together. ‘You can do this, Starkers,’ I incant, breathing slow and hard, in through my nose and out through my mouth, as I first learned when I was a petrified 16-year-old — half a lifetime ago.

I compose myself enough to continue the short drive. The panic seems to subside marginally when I’m moving; stationary, everything turns to custard. At the drive-through, I pray for a swift getaway. It’s not my day. The man in the Ford Falcon in front is ordering enough for a footy team. Fuck him and his four Quarter Pounders, six Big Macs, and three Happy Meals! Resting my forehead on the steering wheel, I manage a wry smile, wondering if Fev’s morning-after is filled with similar dramas. Anxiety doesn’t like this; it kicks me up the rear end with another surge of panic. Cars are backing up behind me — more New Year’s Eve casualties in search of just the right combination of fat, salt, and sugar to ease their pain.

Finally, the hungriest man in Melbourne finishes his order. When it’s my turn, I bristle at the sound of my voice. It’s distant and disembodied. The girl who takes my money is apprehensive. I wasn’t game enough to look in the mirror before I left the house, but I suspect it isn’t pretty.

Back home, I curl up on the couch, munching my foul-smelling meal like a rat gnawing on a bone. Still the panic comes, but the waves begin to lap more gently as exhaustion kicks in. I crawl back into bed around 9.00 p.m., the first day of a new year a complete write-off. I’m broken. No party is worth this much pain.

Before

FOR MONTHS, I’VE been thinking about taking a break from alcohol. When I say ‘thinking about it’, I mean toying with the idea for a few minutes in the depths of a raging hangover, before dismissing it as an exercise in planned insanity. But the thought hasn’t gone away. Each new morning-after brings another set of what-ifs. What if the Monday-morning condition I’ve come to think of as ‘wee bit fuzzy brain’ is something more sinister? What if those moments where I can’t articulate the words that seem to be bogged in a quagmire somewhere between my mind and my mouth are a warning that shit-faced shenanigans can’t be sustained as a lifetime sport? Is my body about to express its protest at two decades’ worth of abuse by rebelling against me in a way that can’t be cleansed with a Sunday-afternoon sleep-in?

My hangovers are no longer carefree retreats under a doona with the weekend papers. They’ve become fraught with anxiety, pain, and a hint of guilt — the root of which I can’t quite place. It pisses me off. All I want to do is wallow in my morning-after, park my arse on the couch, and eat a packet of Tim Tams in front of The Biggest Loser. But the thoughts won’t let me rest; they niggle and taunt. The loudest and most persistent reminds me with annoying frequency that my life can be summed up in two words: working and drinking. When I speak to my parents in Scotland and they ask what’s new, these are the things that most readily come to mind. I don’t drink alone, and rarely at home. But socially, I can’t remember the last time I turned down a beer or a glass of wine.

I’m not unique; I’m surrounded by people who drink in exactly the same way. I grew up in a country devoted to boozing, and I moved to a nation similarly enamoured with it. Just like Scotland, Australia’s default bonding-ritual is drinking. We use it to celebrate, commiserate, and commemorate. Getting plastered is a rite of passage for teenagers, and it’s also the accepted and expected way to mark any major celebration. Drinking is how we farewell the dead and welcome the newly arrived; we drink at the footy, we drink with workmates, we drink on public holidays and on weekends. Booze is the nation’s social lifeblood.

Against this backdrop, quitting seems impossible. I cannot and do not want to imagine a life without alcohol. If I have to pick one word to describe what it might be like, it would simply be ‘boring’. The drawbacks of not drinking far outweigh the unknown, and in no way guaranteed, advantages of abstinence; if I ditch alcohol I’ll be casting myself adrift into the social wilderness, a place from which there might be no return. Most of the non-drinkers I know are either pregnant or pensioners. As I’m neither, I’ve opted to keep drinking until whichever of those fates befalls me first.

But still, the niggling thoughts prevail. What would it take for me to stop drinking? Why does the idea of doing so scare the bejesus out of me?

Those thoughts were first planted in my mind almost a year ago, after meeting Chris Raine. This party-hardened young advertising professional from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast gave up drinking for a year — partly as a social experiment and partly because his friends told him he couldn’t — and documented the experience on a blog, Hello Sunday Morning. His insights into his relationship with alcohol inspired some of his friends to follow suit. Soon the site became home to a community of those taking a break from drinking. When I looked at it, I was struck by the potential of what he’d started. Here was a network of young people all enjoying life and achieving their goals, simply by cutting out booze for three, six, or 12 months, and blogging about their experiences. This public commitment was the key to the movement’s success, helping to keep people accountable, and therefore boosting their chances of making the distance. Posting links to their blogs on Twitter and Facebook had a ripple effect, encouraging others in each writer’s social network to take up the challenge.

There were fewer than 50 bloggers when I first visited the Hello Sunday Morning website, but the unflinching honesty in their posts was powerful. These were young people, largely in their twenties, drowning in a culture that implored them to drink at every juncture. What I found disarming was how dissatisfied they were with the culture they’d inherited — but they knew no other way. They drank to fit in; they drank for confidence; they drank to deal with difficult emotions. They drank because it would be social suicide not to. I realised that in all of the alcohol stories I’d written, I hadn’t come close to capturing what Chris had harnessed. He’d figured out what politicians, journalists, and health experts had failed to: why young people from Cairns to Castlemaine were regularly drinking themselves into oblivion.

Public-health experts have been telling me for years that, if we are to have a chance of reducing the enormous medical, social, and economic burden of alcohol misuse, we first have to change Australia’s entrenched binge-drinking culture. We can no longer debate that there is a problem. Every week, four Australians under the age of 25 die, and 60 teenagers are hospitalised, due to alcohol-related injuries. Between 1997 and 2007, the number of young people treated for alcohol-related brain damage grew five-fold.

But working out how to reach these drinkers has proved a tricky proposition. Governments have thrown money at campaigns demonising booze, and warning young people that drinking will see them arrested, maimed, raped, or killed. The testimonies of Chris and his fellow bloggers reveal that this approach has left young people feeling patronised and alienated. It’s given them no incentive to change their drinking habits, and may well have encouraged them to veer in the opposite direction in protest. While I’d be flattering myself to think I’m in the youth demographic these campaigns have been trying to reach, I’ve been equally turned off by messages which imply that drinking is inherently dangerous and unpleasant, when my own experiences tell quite a different story. I could see how what Chris had come up with might well be the road map to reach a disillusioned generation.

When I first interviewed him over the phone, where he spoke to me from his Caloundra home, I was astonished by his level of insight into the complex connections that Aussies have with alcohol. His ability to articulate his own motivations for drinking was even more impressive, especially for someone who was just 23. I remember wondering where I’d be now if I’d had that degree of clarity about my own relationship with alcohol at his age.

In early 2010, Chris and I met in person. Relentlessly upbeat and energetic, he had a passion for his work that coursed through him so violently he was practically luminous. Here was a man on a mission — to change our drinking culture and to unlock what he believed to be Australia’s greatest untapped resource: Sunday mornings. And his pitch was convincing. ‘We live in a country where we’re hung-over for a seventh of our lives. If you binge drink for two nights a week between the ages of 18 and 28, you’ll have drunk for 10,000 hours. We’re creating a culture of drinking experts,’ he told me. ‘The cost of that expertise is 3000 people a year dying from alcohol misuse. That’s 57 Australians every single week.’ Chris reckoned that three months off the booze was the minimum time it took to fundamentally shift a person’s relationship with alcohol.

I admired what he was trying to achieve, but I was also a little suspicious. Was Hello Sunday Morning a modern-day temperance movement? A slick front for God-bothering puritans?

But there was something about him. On some level, even then, I knew that meeting Chris was a game-changer. I quizzed him on his year without booze. Didn’t he get bored? How could he enjoy parties without a few beers? A whole year? Seriously? I accused him of being a lentil-loving tree hugger on a mission to change the world one booze-ravaged soul at a time. He would offer only a chuckle and the suggestion that I should try it for myself if I wanted to find out how it worked.

Gradually, as my doubts about Chris dissipated, I could see what I really doubted — my ability to forgo alcohol for what seemed like a preposterously long period. I’d given up booze before: prior to meeting Chris, I’d just finished Febfast, in which participants give up drinking during February to raise money for young people with drug and alcohol problems. But it was a white-knuckle ride. I put life on hold, waiting out my booze ban like a footballer pacing the sidelines, desperate to get back in the game. I struggled to imagine how, if I removed alcohol for an even longer period, life could be anything short of two-dimensional. Don’t the best nights out usually happen after a skinful? Hedonism rarely springs from soda water. I had more faith in the transcending power of beer than I did in myself.

The hangovers continued after meeting Chris, and the what-ifs lobbed into my mind with increasing regularity. I did my best to ignore them. That’s not easy when you spend your working life writing about the health consequences of a society sickening itself on a noxious diet of booze, fags, and fast food — the public-health world’s axis of evil. Health reporting can induce the sort of hypochondria that would make Woody Allen proud. But some health messages I chose to ignore; I had only stubbed my last cigarette out a couple of years before. It had taken several weeks of waking up in the middle of the night with coughing fits that made my abdominal muscles ache before I finally called it a day. Sometimes the only way you can change is when the future slaps you in the face so hard it leaves a handprint on your cheek.

But smoking’s not like drinking. These days, it’s almost more socially acceptable to marry your cousin than to light up in a public place. With alcohol, the opposite is true. If you want to be a social pariah, try refusing a drink in an Australian pub at six o’clock on a Friday evening. I’ve had no doomsday warning with booze — and even if there had been one, I’ve mastered the art of selective hearing. I paid scant attention to the implications of a story I wrote about research which warned that as little as eight drinks a week could shrink the size of your brain. But a study that found regular drinkers have above-average happiness and wellbeing scores, while non-drinkers are the most miserable, was digested in great detail and posted on my Facebook page.

For me, being drunk was not a fast track to ill health and calamity. I was binge drinking before the phrase was even invented, and so were most of my friends. We’re all still alive and healthy. We haven’t been in car accidents, been assaulted, or assaulted someone else. We haven’t woken up in hospitals, contracted communicable diseases, lost jobs, committed crimes (barring crimes against music in karaoke bars), ruined relationships, or gambled away our life savings on the pokies as a result of our drinking. For the most part, being drunk is fun for us. It brings texture to our lives, and leads to new friendships, dancing, romance, sex, belly laughs, and bonding. The stories I write for my newspaper about alcohol-induced carnage simply don’t resonate with my own experiences. The soaring rates of alcohol-related injuries and liver disease, the brain-damaged women, and their kids being born with foetal alcohol syndrome — I might as well be writing about life on another planet.

Reporting on alcohol might have become the defining issue of my journalistic career, but I merely convey facts. I can’t comfortably be likened to the politician who preaches family values while secretly committing acts of depravity with leather-clad call girls. In my mind, I’m no more obliged to drink responsibly than the transport reporter is obliged to ride his bike to work to ease Melbourne’s traffic congestion.

Still, I have to admit that my two worlds sometimes collide. A year or so into my coverage of Australia’s binge-drinking epidemic, I had a boozy Saturday-night dinner party with some girlfriends and got to bed around 2.30 a.m., waking up, with a scratchy throat and a sore head, around six hours later to go to work. I was hoping for a quiet Sunday shift, with something light and inoffensive that would glide its way inconspicuously onto page 12 — perhaps a colour piece on a charity fun-run, or a discussion on the best treatments for baldness. Instead, I learned that overnight the federal government had announced that taxes on pre-mixed spirits, colloquially known as ‘alcopops’, would be raised by 70 per cent, effective immediately. As I was the resident expert on all things binge drinking, and alcopops had been blamed for turning kids into drunken delinquents, I had approximately five hours to write a 1500-word feature on the ramifications of this war on lolly water.

My brain hurt as though I was hearing nails being scraped down a blackboard. I could barely keep my eyes open. The prospect of writing an intelligible treatise on Australia’s horribly convoluted alcohol-taxation system — and the effective ban on a product that, at that point, made me gag just to think about — was unpalatable, to say the least. But I did it. I pulled out stats, compiled tables, and rang up contacts to get their opinion on this watershed moment in Australia’s history of dependence on grog. I even quizzed the then health minister, Nicola Roxon, thankful that it was a telephone interview and she didn’t have to suffer the impertinence of my morning-after breath.

The article would go on to be showcased by my editors as part of The Age’s submission to the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association Newspaper of the Year Awards, with a blurb on how my reports had highlighted the devastating consequences of Australia’s binge-drinking culture. I read the piece again after the awards, and marvelled at how much sense it made, and how little evidence there was that I might still have been over the limit when I wrote it.

A few months later, I was shortlisted in the 2008 federal government–sponsored National Drug and Alcohol Awards. I ended up being a joint winner, along with reporters at the Geelong Advertiser, which had run a brilliant campaign against drunken violence. I took to the lectern at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre and made a brief speech, expressing my gratitude to the people in the sector who worked so tirelessly to turn around Australia’s alcohol problem: people without whom I’d have nothing to write about. As I spoke — squinting in the stage lights and looking out at the 500-strong audience as the screen behind me filled with a giant image of my face beside a headline that screamed ‘STOP THIS MADNESS’ — I felt it: the cold, wet wallop of hypocrisy. I might not be getting stretchered into the back of an ambulance or carted off in a police car every weekend, but I sure as hell wasn’t the poster child for the moderation movement.

But the only thing I knew with more certainty than the truth of my own hypocrisy was that as soon as I was off that stage I’d be diving headfirst into the nearest bottle of wine. I knew I’d get drunk; I knew I’d be hung-over the next day. It was a Friday night, and I’d just had a major win. When you win, you celebrate. And when you celebrate, you drink. Those are the rules. Who was I to argue with several centuries of tradition?

IT