Why didn't I do this sooner? Or, why I didn't do this sooner.

Does it really matter how old you are when you give up a bad habit or take up a really good one?

One thousand five hundred and one days ago, at the age of 58, I had my last drink containing alcohol. There have been no return to Day 1, or blips, or lapses, during that time, and I say this without judgement of others whose paths may have met some diversions. The road to sobriety is rarely linear.

My previous sober streak had been in 2018, when I decided to take 3 months off from alcohol prior to going on a month long trip to India. I told my husband and others that I was doing this for health reasons, and I almost convinced myself of this. When we are resisting a permanent change, we can tell ourselves stories that we try hard to believe.

During that trip to India, I had reintroduced alcohol back into my life, and whilst it didn’t immediately return to previous levels of consumption, I do recall a 16 hour overnight train journey where I sipped vodka and juice to ‘help me sleep’. Of course, we know that drinking alcohol does the reverse; it may knock you out in the first instance, but it is not real sleep, and waking up from an alcohol induced sedation, is rarely a refreshing experience!

So often, in the sober community, I hear people express regret at not getting sober earlier in their life. I understand this, but don’t necessarily subscribe to that view. I became sober when I had reached saturation point, when I got tired of my own bullshit, when I had reached my own personal ‘rock bottom’, and thankfully before I was physically addicted.

The thing is, I don’t think I could have stopped drinking sooner than I did. Yes, I experienced a wretched time of cognitive dissonance that blighted me for some years. But, I feel that my life had to become as miserable as it did, in order to give me the incentive to stop. I had to get to the stage of isolating myself from others (including my husband), feeling utterly dejected, unmotivated, and afflicted by anhedonia, before I finally concluded that I was at a crossroads, and one road led to oblivion, the other to a path of uncertainty with a hope of possible freedom from the shackles of alcohol.

Becoming sober at 58 was a gift, because it gave me the impetus to start to grab life by the balls. I had spent a long time down a deep well of sadness and grief, and suddenly (after an experience where I was convinced my dead brother had spoken to me), I could see that I didn’t need to continue down this path.

Elizabeth Gilbert said in her book ‘Eat, Love, Pray’, “when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.”

I was staring down the barrel of what felt like the most significant birthday of my life, and realising that I couldn’t re-live my 40s and 50s, but I could re-write my future and make my 60s the best decade ever! There were no feelings of anxiety, or cravings, or fear of missing out, because there was only one direction of travel: forward into the consequences of my choice to begin again.

Oliver Burkeman’s book ‘Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals’ tells us that “The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (About 4,000 weeks, on average; thus the title.) I honestly do not think that this estimate would have impacted upon me if I had been any younger, and there is something about facing the decade in which your age starts with the number six, that suddenly wakes you up!

Of course, if the realisation, or ‘rock bottom’ moment happens to a person when they are in their 20s to 50s, then that is excellent for them, and they will have the benefit of experiencing so much more in their lives than I can possibly hope to do. There is definitely something that is telling me that I can no longer allow myself the luxury of procrastination (although I’m not at all sure that this is a luxury, but a human tendency, and I’m not at all sure I have fully managed to eradicate it either).

The present bias phenomenon in our behaviour means that we tend to be motivated more by immediate gratification or rewards, than we are by long-term rewards. This is why it feels good in the moment to procrastinate (by scrolling, watching TV, sitting in the sun with a cold drink etc), than to get on with pressing matters. My substack writing was well overdue as a result of my tendency to procrastinate (as discussed in my last post).

But here I am now, finally writing 2 substack posts within a month! Good grief, who am I?! I am still not fully sure where I am going with my posts, other than just reflecting upon what comes to mind when I sit down to write. Perhaps I should consider them as a personal blog, a newsletter, a diary, or just a load of words which I hope will land in someone’s inbox and resonate with them. A throwing spagetti at the wall technique 😁

The thing that has surprised me the most about my last 4 years of sobriety is the fact that I seem to have found an ‘F it!’ button. Not the Big Red ‘Fcuk it’ button that can lead to a lapse/relapse, but the good ‘F it!’ button, the one that leads us to doing things that we would never previously have believed we were capable.

• Fear of water? - ‘F it!’, I’ll book a sea kayaking expedition!

• Never pitched a tent before? - ‘F it!’, I’ll book a solo camping trip!

• Fear of flying? - ‘F it!’, I’ll travel solo to the other side of the world!

• Intimidated by yoga classes? - ‘F it!’, I’ll join a yoga community, practice daily, and learn as much as I can so that I can train to teach. Good grief, what’s next?

Perhaps that is the purpose of my substack, to share my ‘F it!’ moments, and invite you to consider yours while coming along for the ride with me.

I’ll share my views on the above bullet point of feeling intimidated by yoga in a future post, but I am outraged that a poorly taught yoga class I attended in my 40s led to me mistakenly thinking that yoga was for thin flexible people, and not for people like me! I missed the opportunity of benefitting from this beautiful practice and philosophy for over a decade, and I regret that more than the fact that I continued to drink alcohol until just after my 58th birthday.

Yoga can be an excellent tool for recovery, and has helped me in so many ways, both with the changing of my self-destructive behaviour, but also through times of deepest grief, and despair. The philosophy has helped improve my relationships with others, and helped heal my marriage. Bold statements I know, but I am not being hyperbolic, I really feel it. Yoga makes me very happy!!

I am almost at the end of my 100-hour studies into Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, and the joy of learning about yoga philosophy has led to me signing up for a further advanced study on Pranyama and Meditation starting on 10th February. If you would like to join this advanced 100-hour programme at Mindful Life Practice and wish to benefit from a 10% discount, use the code ‘carolynplans’ when booking.

I can not wait to share my learning with all of the students who attend my weekly Monday evening class at Ucheldre Centre, Holyhead. The people who attend give me more joy than they will ever realise. I can clearly recall telling my yoga teacher that I felt a deep desire to introduce others to the healing that can take place by practicing asana (the poses), and also, crucially, by learning and adopting the wisdom of this beautiful ancient philosophy.

I led last week’s class by introducing the class to Patangali’s Yoga Sutra 1.2 (written in Sanskrit), ‘yogas chitta vritti nirodha’ - yoga is the stilling or controlling of the modifications or fluctuations of the mind. The smiling students are either humouring my eccentricities, or they find joy in the teachings, either way I am utterly delighted and feel so honoured that they keep attending to learn along with me, because I too am a student of Yoga, and always will be.