Sobriety Helped Me Recover From Sexual Violence

I decided to stop drinking on January 1, 2021.

The previous night, I’d celebrated the New Year with friends. I’d climbed the fence close to their house with a homemade fruit crumble under my arm. At midnight, we’d toasted to the end of 2020 with a glass of mediocre Prosecco. I’d recently finished writing my first novel and was feeling optimistic about the New Year. I woke up to a photograph on my phone. Linda had texted to say “Happy New Year” and included what she assumed was a happy, childhood photo.¹ What she didn’t know was that it was a photo of me as a young girl alongside the man who’d sexually abused me.

I didn’t get out of bed that day. The photo triggered the profound trauma that still lives between my cells. I hadn’t had much to drink but it was enough to make my body feel heavy and lethargic. Alcohol muted my body’s natural endorphins and gave my worst thoughts space to roam. I spent the day watching YouTube. When my brain wasn’t occupied, I cried without interruption. I cycled between feeling rage at Linda’s insensitivity and devastation at what that photograph depicted. I was haunted by the dichotomy the image captured, the agonizing contrast between the smile placed on my face Mr Potato-head style, and the deadness in my childhood eyes. It was a horrible start to the New Year.

Within a few days, my body recovered its equilibrium. As my mood evened out and the horrific memories began to settle, the same five words kept bubbling to the top of my consciousness: “I can’t do this anymore.” I can’t keep pouring poison into my body while also trying to recover from sexual violence. I can’t control what happened three decades ago, but I am responsible for how I treat my body today.

Many survivors of sexual harm use drugs, alcohol, or other mind-altering substances to numb their pain. One study found that almost 90 percent of alcoholic women were sexually abused or suffered severe violence in childhood. I was never a heavy drinker, but I still had a running list of alcohol-fuelled missteps. Sometimes, at 3 a.m., my brain would treat me to the “Greatest Hits” of my drinking years: the man I became entangled with after drinking a bottle of red wine, the friendships I wounded by being too honest, and the night in 2014, when I drank so much I slept through my alarm.

Shame gurgles up inside me when I think about that night. I was in Jordan, hosting a media visit for a handful of influential journalists who were visiting the Zaatari refugee camp. I had just started a new job running the communications department of an international NGO. At the time, the camp was home to 84,000 refugees who’d fled violence in Syria. Fifty-six percent of them were children.

On our first day, we met a 40-day-old baby and his shell-shocked mother. At a makeshift school, we met a young girl who tugged at our translator’s sleeve and said, quite plainly, “My mother is dead.” The girl’s father described shepherding his four young children across the border after his wife was killed in Syria. It was a hot day, and the dusty, dry air felt crunchy in my mouth. I was anxious that our branded vehicle might hit one of the children who came sprinting toward us. I was so out of my depth that I couldn’t be sure if the ground was still there.

At dinner that night, I drank. I drank to numb the heart-shattering trauma I’d witnessed. I remember a second bar, and darting across a busy street to get to the hotel. I remember collapsing into bed, and getting in trouble the next morning when I slept through my alarm. I remember the disgust on my colleague’s face. I was sure I’d be fired. The same colleague had threatened to make a formal complaint.

In the end, I wasn’t fired. My superiors forgave my mistake, though I never forgave myself. I kept the job and kept traveling. I captured other people’s trauma and converted it into media campaigns. I was good at it, and helped to raise a lot of money, but the work broke something essential in me.

Eventually, after a high-risk trip to Gaza in 2015, I was diagnosed with Complex-PTSD. I lived underneath an immovable feeling of worthlessness. My brain would instinctively loop around a handful of intrusive thoughts: “I hate myself. I want to die. I don’t deserve to live.” It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I can identify these as intrusive thoughts. At the time, they felt like facts.

After a few more years, my career collapsed around me and I decided to prioritize my recovery. I still drank alcohol occasionally, though it was harder to ignore the toll it took on my body. Alcohol is a depressant. It is toxic and addictive. It scrambled my body’s systems, impacting my brain, my digestion, my organs, and my body’s ability to eliminate toxins.

Drinking alcohol is normalized, but it is a potent psychoactive and one of the oldest recreational drugs. It’s the only drug which, when you stop taking it, you are seen as having a disease.

It’s also the drug with the most powerful PR machine behind it. Companies spend billions on alcohol promotion, including funding studies designed to show the supposed health benefits of small amounts of alcohol. Independent research has found that no amount of alcohol is good for your health. Alcohol is the leading risk factor for disease worldwide, accounting for almost 10 percent of deaths among those ages 15 to 49. Drinking alcohol is also a leading cause of cancer for people older than 50.

I don’t drink alcohol because it wreaks havoc on my sensitive system. It’s not something I want and deny myself. It doesn’t take any discipline to not drink. The only aspect of it that’s complicated is navigating the social dynamics of being a non-drinker in a culture saturated with alcohol. In vast swathes of society, being a non-drinker remains stigmatized. People will accept your choice to not drink if you’re pregnant or trying to become pregnant, on antibiotics, or an alcoholic. But there is still something suspicious about simply choosing not to drink.

Not drinking is a choice I make for myself. Some people can’t hear that without thinking it says something about them. To their ears, there’s a whiff of moralism to my choice, a sanctimonious undertone of “better than.”

But my choice is about me, not them. It’s about finding a way to live in my hyper-sensitive body. I quit drinking not because it was a problem for me, but because it is poison. When I stripped away the marketing language and the societal expectations and asked myself what I wanted for my body and life, it was clear that alcohol wasn’t it.

My life has changed a lot since I quit drinking alcohol. I’ve built a new career as a writer and social entrepreneur. I came out as gay. I met my partner. I’ve traveled, learned Italian, became a runner, and baked lots of delicious cakes. My life got bigger when I removed alcohol from it. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

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