High Sobriety (8 page)

I'm not suggesting that every binge-drinking teenager is on a path to destruction, but as someone trying to stay sober in a world obsessed with booze, I just wonder if Steve's story would have been different if the peer pressure to have another beer and be that fun guy at the party weren't so great.

As I try to redefine my place in my own social circles, what's most surprising is that the friends I thought would pressure me the most — the hard-drinking boys who can knock back beers like a war's coming — are the most supportive. My sobriety doesn't seem to threaten our friendship in the same way that it does with some of my female friends. I hear around the traps that a few girlfriends are expressing concern that my break from booze is a judgement on their drinking habits. Until recently, these friends and I have all drunk in a similar fashion: we enjoyed getting pissed, and we did it regularly. By opting out, it seems that I'm implying there's something wrong with their lifestyle. At first I find this a ludicrous argument — my decision not to drink is no more a judgement on them than a vegetarian friend's preference not to eat meat is a moral statement on my carnivorous choices. And how could I, the binge-drinking reporter involved in a long and steamy romance with booze, ever retreat to the moral high ground about anyone's alcohol consumption? The stakes were just getting too high for me. If others drink in the same way and don't wake up feeling like a worn-out dishrag, good luck to them.

It bothers me that I've offended some of my friends simply by choosing not to drink. More than that, it hurts that they don't seem to comprehend how hard it is to stay sober when everyone else is hoeing into the red wine and beer. But then I see it from their point of view — in my bid to be unflinchingly honest, I've been telling the world about all the situations in which I no longer need alcohol, and how my life is being more richly lived sober. My words are sincere, but I can see how my enthusiasm could be construed as pompous. In less than two months, I've gone from a kind of ageing Lindsay Lohan to an alcohol-free, clean-living convert. So I try to be more understanding, and remember that it wasn't too long ago I would have berated anyone who left a party before 2.00 a.m., and crossed the street to avoid someone spruiking the merits of life without booze.

I gain more of an insight into the way my sobriety affects my friends when I'm invited to Government House, the Victorian governor's residence, for a garden party. The event celebrates the 25th anniversary of a leading medical research institute. It's a glorious 30-degree day with blue skies. I take my friend Kath along as my guest. As we walk out onto the manicured lawns in our heels and summer frocks, I feel as if perhaps I've made it in Melbourne. With the string quartet playing under the marquee, and waiters passing round canapés to suited and booted VIPs, it's a delightful scene. The lemon squash I have to settle for is somewhat less befitting the occasion than the expensive champagne filling Kath's glass, but once I resign myself to this, I quickly get over it and enjoy the afternoon.

As the proceedings draw to a close, I turn to Kath — the only person I know who's happy when the temperature tops 40 degrees — and suggest that we go to a rooftop bar in the city to enjoy the rest of the evening sunshine. She seems reluctant. When pressed, she says it would be weird because I'm not drinking. I can't get my head around it. I vowed, when I started this challenge, that while sober I would do all the things I would ordinarily do if I was drinking — and going to a rooftop bar with Kath is exactly what I'd do in this situation. Yet it's not me who's calling last drinks.

‘Am I different when I'm sober?' I ask her, genuinely puzzled by our predicament. ‘Am I not as much fun?'

She looks at the floor, saying something that makes me realise my sobriety is going to involve much more than simply not drinking for three months: ‘I just don't like the idea of being out of control when you're in control.'

I don't know what to say. I feel bad for both of us. But then I remember: it's that social contract. Her barriers are down; mine are still up. By not drinking while Kath is, I've upset the equilibrium. She feels unguarded and defenceless in the face of my sobriety. How could either of us relax, knowing that she feels uncomfortable and exposed?

In the end, we do go to a beer garden for more drinks. She has champagne, while I have ginger beer and lime. I think, at least I hope, she knows that I'm not scrutinising her every move, trying to detect a slurred word here or a stumbled step there. Still, despite going out of my way to adopt just the right level of nonchalance to obscure her discomfort, I don't think she fully relaxes until we meet up with a group of friends for dinner, several hours later. Watching her greet them in the restaurant is like seeing an exchange student return home to their family after months of living in a foreign land. Finally: people who speak her language.

I thought that not drinking was going to be hard for me. I never expected it to be hard for anyone else. But I can see that while being the only sober one in a group of drinkers has its challenges, it's even trickier when you're in a one-on-one situation. No matter how hard you try, it's like you can't tune into each other's frequency — it's as if you're trying to communicate underwater. In a group, that disconnection is dissipated by virtue of numbers. Yet when there are only two of you, it can be an immovable barrier.

It's only when I can no longer reach for a bottle that I realise how much my friendships rely on it. As another friend's world splinters into pieces with the end of her relationship, I feel as if I've let her down because I can't share her pain over a drink. Break-ups require expensive cocktails and soul-baring girls' nights out, but I can't even buy a glass of champagne and toast the start of a new chapter in her life. I feel useless. I begin to realise anew that there are few occasions, happy or otherwise, where I don't use alcohol to enhance my relationships.

A few days later, a colleague at work with whom I've recently become friendly tells me that she's leaving to take a job in Sydney. She remarks that she wishes she'd got to know me while I'd been drinking. What an odd statement, I think, but then have to admit that I feel the same: we've grown close, sharing pieces of our personal lives during tea breaks at work, but something is missing. I think back to previous friendships that graduated from work acquaintances to something more, and almost all of them took that next step in the pub or at a party, helped along by beers. There's something about that journey — the laughs, the silliness, the shared experience — that bonds you to each other. There it is again: that contract to be disinhibited, unsigned on my part, and blocking my path towards deeper friendships.

It's a disheartening thought, but perhaps some things are simply incompatible with sobriety.

March

AFTER TWO MONTHS
without alcohol, I barely recognise myself. The settings where I'd ordinarily reach for the wine bottle or head to the bar no longer trigger the Pavlovian response they once did. I can go to a gig and not worry about queuing for beers — and about missing the band in the process. At dinner with friends, I'm much more engaged in the conversation, listening in a way I might not have, had I let booze fill in the blanks. And to my great surprise, I've lost two kilograms without even trying. Getting to the gym is a lot easier when you don't wake up feeling as if you've been mowed down by a freight train. The sluggishness that convinced me I couldn't run has vanished, and I can now hit the treadmill for 45 minutes at a time — a previously unimaginable feat.

My eating habits haven't changed. If anything, I'm eating more of the things I shouldn't, as compensation for denying myself alcohol. I've become intimately acquainted with every dessert menu within a ten-kilometre radius of my flat. At the servo next door, the staff nod their heads and look at each other knowingly as I skulk in each evening for my after-work chocolate bar.

Yet still the weight falls off. There's only one explanation: I was carrying a two-kilogram beer baby. Those clever marketing folks may have tried to convince us that ‘low-carb' beer is the guilt-free alcoholic equivalent of Diet Coke, but clearly booze is a natural enemy to weight loss, whichever way you sell it. A big night of drinking, followed by a hangover that leaves you too sick to exercise, plus a day of stuffing your face with carbs and saturated fat, adds up to an unholy trinity of calories.

My stress levels have also dropped. My natural propensity to catastrophise about relatively insignificant events is diminishing. A bad day at work is now a mere blip on the radar, and I recover from setbacks much more quickly without hangovers, which tend to amplify insecurities and impair rational thinking. My emotions are no longer tossed around like a plastic bag in the wind. When I put the wine in my cupboard, my problems didn't go away, but they certainly became easier to manage.

I haven't felt this healthy for a long time. It makes me worry about what I was doing to my body before I took this break. Sometimes hangovers would bring not only a headache and a fuzzy brain, but also a stabbing pain in my side. My rudimentary understanding of these things, coupled with a quick Google search, suggests that it may have been a dehydrated kidney or a saturated liver working overtime to break down all the alcohol I'd poured into it. Whatever it was, it wasn't good. For a health reporter, it's staggering how little attention I've paid to my body's warning signals.

But I'm not sure that the average Australian would know much more than me about the health consequences of heavy drinking. Aussies might joke about their big nights out and say, ‘Thank God the liver's the only vital organ that can regenerate.' But the risks of a boozed-up lifestyle go way beyond a soggy liver. Australia's increasing number of alcohol-related health problems are part of a worldwide trend. As a planet, we're downing more booze than ever before. The World Health Organization is so concerned about the upturn in risky drinking that in February, delegates met to develop a global strategy to reduce alcohol harm. A report released at the Geneva summit showed that underage drinking increased in 71 per cent of countries over the five years to 2008, while 80 per cent of nations have seen drinking among 18- to 25-year-olds rise. The meeting heard that alcohol kills 2.5 million people a year — that's 4 per cent of deaths worldwide attributable to booze — and is the world's third-largest risk factor for disease and disability. It's a causal factor in 60 types of diseases and injuries, and a component in 200 others. More people die from alcohol-related disease or injury than from HIV/AIDS, violence, or tuberculosis.

Yet, despite alcohol being a group-one carcinogen — meaning that it's known to cause cancer in humans, putting it in the same category as tobacco, asbestos, and ultraviolet radiation — most Australians are oblivious to the risk. Cancer Council research in Victoria shows that only 9 per cent of people are aware of the link between drinking and cancer. Unlike the graphic Quit campaigns for smoking, which highlight the health risks and shock many of us into stubbing out the fags each year, the public education adverts about alcohol are predominantly focused on violence and injury. That's despite the fact that 5 per cent of all cancers in Australia — more than 5000 every year — are directly related to alcohol. I wonder if, had there been more publicity about the health risks, I would have cut my drinking down a long time ago.

To find out exactly how big a risk I was taking, I speak to Craig Sinclair, director of the cancer education unit at Cancer Council Victoria. For a man who has dedicated his working life to public-health prevention programs, he's frustrated that the message about cancer risk doesn't seem to penetrate a nation of drinkers. ‘Alcohol is very much engrained in the culture of our life. It's got a very high social acceptance. The vast majority of the population drink it and enjoy it in moderation, and there's a lot of positive associations when people think of alcohol. So unlike tobacco or other carcinogens like asbestos, where it's much easier to draw a line between positive and negative, it's far more difficult with alcohol because you're challenging enormous social norms,' he says.

Sinclair and his colleagues believe they've got a big task ahead in trying to make people realise it is not just their liver that's at risk from drinking. Cancers of the mouth, larynx, and oesophagus — areas with which alcohol makes direct contact — all have a strong link to drinking. Increasing evidence also shows a very strong link to bowel cancer in both men and women, and to breast cancer in women. In fact, I'm shocked by how strong that breast-cancer link is: an analysis that Sinclair co-authored, published this year in
The Medical Journal of Australia
, revealed that 2600 new cases of breast cancer in Australia every year are caused by drinking — that's one in five. Even one unit of alcohol a day increases a woman's risk of breast cancer by 10 per cent, and the combined effect of smoking and high alcohol consumption increases the cancer risk significantly. As an ex-smoker with a history of breast cancer on both sides of the family, I'm starting to view my two decades of binge drinking as a high-stakes game of poker. But how much does someone have to drink before they increase that risk? Are we talking a couple of glasses of wine a day, or a couple of bottles?

Sinclair says that while there's a direct dose–response connection between alcohol and cancer, the evidence around how much is too much is not as clear as it is with tobacco. ‘At low levels — less than two standard drinks a day — the risk is still there, but it's very low. If women are drinking heavy levels from a young age and continue to do so through their adult life, they're going to be putting themselves at far more significant risk.'