Lately I’ve needed to take things slow, and that’s something I haven’t always been good at. Chaos, on the other hand…

I used to love chaos. I grew up in chaos. For a long time, it was something I was intimately familiar with. Did I actually love it or was I just brainwashed into thinking that because it was what I knew? I was a frenzied evangelist for wild nights out: ones that ended different cities to where they started, with someone getting arrested, someone getting hospitalised. My relationships and friendships were tempestuous. Everyone knew me as argumentative; melodramatic; totally out of proportion in all my reactions to everything. Nights out were fight nights, and I was always the one instigating. I lived on adrenaline (and a ton of repressed rage and trauma, although I didn’t realise that then). I loved the rock’n’roll coding of anything extreme. If things went too long without chaos, I’d get restless and impatient and edgy. I couldn’t stay like for that long, so then I’d find another way to initiate more chaos. Pick an argument; sort a night out with the explicit intent of getting wrecked; implode in response to an innocent comment; get myself hurt; disappear. I had an entire selection box of strategies to rotate through, each one catalysing more chaos and more adrenaline.

This week, I reached a sobriety milestone: two entire years of no alcohol. And it’s had me thinking back about all that chaos, and all my attempts to claw some control over it, even when I was still pretending chaos was a natural and comfortable state. I lived on a council estate full of crime and violence; my mum was a single parent with C-PTSD, working several minimum-wage jobs at once to make ends meet. I was continually so convinced that disaster would strike overnight that for years I packed my school rucksack with my most treasured teddies and books every night before bed, sleeping snuggled around it so it wouldn’t be lost if we had to evacuate in an emergency.

When I got a scholarship to a private school and was suddenly in classes with millionaires’ kids, that was a different kind of chaos. I was always in trouble. I didn’t understand half the rules we were expected to obey; most of my classmates had been at the school since infants, while I’d crash-landed on their planet at age eleven, with the wrong accent, a bad haircut and an ill-fitting uniform, on a bumpy journey from being top of the class in my last school to decidedly average if not a downright dunce. Not living up to anyone’s expectations.

The thing that should be obvious but no one ever tells you about trying to be in control all the time: it’s exhausting. I did try: those first couple of years of secondary school, I got good grades. But I could never keep things under control for long. I was always half-buried under mountains of homework, skipping lunches to scribble last-minute essays in the library because home was too chaotic to get anything done.
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When I was fourteen I discovered music. Or more accurately: going to gigs and clubs. I fell in love with bands I heard on the free CDs in the cardboard sleeves that came glued to the front cover of Kerrang. From poring through the tour listings, I learnt where they were playing, researched how to get there on the crunchy internet in the IT labs. I could hide in the toilet for the train journey to town, then other cities when I got braver. I could hear music performed live, and the real-life experience of thundering drums and guitars and howling vocals, smoke and lights and moshpits and warm bodies all around you, moving in time and screaming the same words. I found a subculture, community. Friends that eventually became family.

And always in the mix was alcohol: drinking to relax, because here was another world where initially I didn’t have the right language, the right reference points, the right clothes or the right words. Drinking to seem older, and less hyper-conscious about not having ID. Drinking because it had become so connected with the adrenaline and excitement of live music; a different kind of adrenaline to the sort I lived with night and day. A fizzy-fingertips, starry-eyed, drum-solo-heartbeat shared experience. I could put what I now know to be hypervigilance on pause, for the length of a live set, and be in the moment. It sounds paradoxical and contradictory, but: by numbing myself with sweet cocktails and Coke bottles topped up with off-licence vodka, I could actually get closer to a sense of being present, to joy and connection and feeling alive. Escape and adventure and sweetness and relief; that well-kept-secret feeling of something magical happening, just for us, in this room. Bonded by it. An attraction to extremes: of glamour and noise and the ridiculous stories that came from the all-too-dangerous situations I’d often end up in. Then that poison cycle of shame and self-doubt in the aftermath. But a bizarre pride too, that I could be someone those things happened to. Someone separate from the teen girl so full of misplaced fear and fury, so stressed about school and everything else that she couldn’t sleep or do schoolwork or go a week without getting into fights.

These days, I’m middle-aged and live in suburbia. I’ve got a long-term partner and a cat. In the past decade, I’ve gone from living as far away from my family as I could get, to living a few minutes walk away from my grandparents — making me the first response unit for their numerous emergencies, surreal misadventures and odd always urgent requests — to then not having that be the case at all anymore. In the past few years, my local family members all died or moved away, and the ones that remain relatively nearby don’t turn up on my doorstep unannounced in the middle of the night. Definitely not to tell me their freezer urgently needs defrosting, that they can’t breathe but they’re not going to hospital, or that they need help hooking up their swanky new printer so they can mass-produce counterfeit money-off coupons to use at the supermarket (all of which my grandma did more than once). These days, there’s more peace to my day-to-day than there has been in a long while. It’s still something I don’t know if and how to trust. But I’m trying to cultivate a gratitude for slowness, for steadiness and quiet and peace.
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Because the thing is, all that chaos I surrounded myself with never did me any good. All the most challenging aspects of my mental health have their roots in my issues with control, with danger and safety and scarcity and fear. Even now I’m responsible and grown-up and boring, I still see it in my patterns of burnout and stress and overwork, which I recognise as a more socially acceptable and controlled form of adrenaline addiction. Just because something’s familiar doesn’t mean it’s what you need.

Like… drinking to lower your inhibitions. Drinking to numb a bad day, or celebrate a victory. Drinking to relax. Drinking to connect. Drinking as a ritual and relief. Just because something’s familiar doesn’t mean it’s what you need.

Doing my therapeutic training was my first time having models for sobriety. The people in recovery I met during my diploma weren’t trying to advocate or evangelise for sobriety. They were just being themselves; living their messy, imperfect and sometimes chaotic lives, facing their own challenges. There was no secret cheat-sheet they had, or any kind of immaculate protection from sobriety. But they seemed more present with it. More accepting of chaos. And in our group sessions, they’d call me on my shit: you know you can’t control everything, right? Sometimes things aren’t in your control, you know. Sometimes you can’t change things. All you can do is try to accept. I listened, but I didn’t like it.

And while this process was happening, I lost two family members within ten days of each other. A friend took their own life. My partner was ill and needed surgery. You know you can’t control everything, right?
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A week after finishing my diploma, I won a prize for my writing. I got the train to a fancy awards dinner in another city. Champagne on arrival, wine with the meal. I was anxious about getting onstage. I felt uncomfortable and insecure. I was talking to strangers and hiding my nerves, but I was humbled and full of imposter syndrome and stressed that there were so many elements of the entire night that were out of my control. What if, what if, what if. A few drinks had made my hypervigilance not better, but worse. Funny, that. And I knew the only way I’d get to the old comforting numbness would be to drink more. But this time, the stakes were too high. I didn’t trust myself to not do something terrible, to not somehow totally disgrace and sabotage myself.
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I got through the night, the wrong side of tipsy but without any drama. Afterwards, I didn’t sleep. I was too full of adrenaline and paranoia; convinced that even with my award sitting next to me on my hotel bedside table they’d somehow still made a mistake.
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That was two years ago, and I haven’t drunk alcohol since.
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I’m still working on my shit around wanting to be control. I’m still working on my social anxiety, on self-soothing strategies for the hyper-vigilance I’ve had since being a kid. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got it all figured out. It’s still a work-in-progress, probably the sort that always will be. In so many ways, this has been the lesson of my life, something I’ve come up against over and over again: letting go of the need for control and building self-trust in its place. And the thing about this past two years of sobriety is that I’ve had to confront myself so many times over, I’ve build enough self-trust that control isn’t always as important as it used to be. Chaos and adrenaline still feel like things I want to keep my distance from, but I can move through them when I need to, and experiment with embracing slowness and peace. Just because they’re unfamiliar doesn’t mean they’re not what I need.

Earlier version of the above first shared via my newsletter in June 2021