Alcohol
Okay for about as long as I can remember, I've been quite a heavy drinker. Probably since the age of 15 or 16 id be in a pub with a cool pint. This may seem pretty far fetched as the majority of teenagers drink cheap cider on street corners till their 18Th However the emphasis is really on the "a pub" as it wasn't pubs in general it was a single place of drinking.
Of course this is illegal and i was under no immature preconception that i looked older or any where near the legal age to be drinking here, however we were allowed so a large number of us youths flocked to this tiny pub almost everyday we could.
The point I'm trying to make here isn't that under age drinking should be acceptable, I'm just simply filling you in on the background.
I'm 20 now and i don't know about my liver but I have the lungs of a pensioner and the beer belly of a man steam train driver. All in all I'm a mess. So when my Doctor told me that i have to quite alcohol it was quite a relief too say the least, I had been looking for an excuse too stop the drinking and i knew it was doing me a lot more harm than good. Nevertheless i was still apprehensive of the coming changes this would bring and the adjustments i would no doubt have to undertake.
The first thing I noticed about being the "sober one" is that you do end up driving a lot lot more, before the big quit i thought this was a myth, that people expect/force you too drive when your not drinking. This is true, however you do slowly start to drive more simply because you can, and with taxi prices being a stupid amount it just makes sense?
Possibly the worst and most overwhelmingly prevalent aspect of being sober, apart from exploring the world before midday on a Saturday morning, is the boredom and having to learn all your basic social skills again.
With alcohol it is quite possible to enter a dingy night club with complete strangers and be perfectly content till the early hours, however looking at this situation through the eyes of the newly sobered you realise this is nothing more than a holding pen, playing repetitive music each week while people wait till the drink hits them then go home. There's nothing more too it, alcohol makes us sociable, that after all is the allure of this nectar and that's no great revelation but for some one who has socialised whilst drunk or semi inebriated since his mid teens, too enter in to this situation is nothing short of terrifying.
A few weeks down the line, and its becoming slowly easier to handle these situations without alcohol as a conversational lubricant but when I'm in those awkward situations where the average person may reach for a pint too calm there nerves, i simply cant and this does make things all the more arduous.
cheers
T.C.