Never Again By Heidi A. Pledge 100 THOMOND 2022
As I embarked on Hola Sober’s Pledge 100, it started with Susan asking what are your “never agains.” Is your current reality good enough for you? No, I finally admitted: it wasn’t, and I made a brutally honest list. Never again will I wake up with shame and regret thinking: “God damnit, Heidi. Why did you do it again? You use your brain for a living. Why are you fucking sabotaging everything and tying one hand behind your back.” Never again will I settle for a life of merely existing in a semi-functional state. Never again will I fear I’m slowly killing myself. Never again will my kids say: “I don’t like it when you are half awake, half asleep,” before they could understand mommy was drunk, or “you’re drunk again” once they did understand as brutally honest teenagers. Never again will I cheat and lie my way through everything as I was either pretending not to be drunk or hungover. Never again will I have fake intimacy and false friends. Never again will I put my people-pleasing tendencies ahead of myself.
(One of the opening lessons of the Pledge 100 Program is centred on a poem 'Never Again' by Susan that provokes deep reflection across al areas of a woman's life beyond being alcohol-free.) Like many, I had hundreds of day ones and attempts to quit drinking, once and for all. I read all the books and tried all of the programs that flooded my social media feeds after googling how to quit drinking alcohol. They often read like infomercials, promising a value of more than $5,000 with bonus material – but wait there’s more - for the rock bottom price of $197. These programs often start with instructing you to make a list of your “whys.” Then we all go on to write a list of the obvious big reasons, our families and our health. Farther down the list are things that should be less serious but often prompt the attempts to quit drinking, lose weight and look younger. Take a Day One picture, they say, and save it to compare to how fabulous you will look on day 30. And, the promise: you don’t have to make a decision to quit drinking. If you do drink during this short challenge, it’s okay: it’s just a slip or data point to learn from. I don’t mean to diminish these programs; they work for many and were the gateway for me to finally get sober. The problem with these sanitized lists is that they offer things I already know: they were not enough for me to quit drinking alcohol. I already knew that alcohol was bad for my health and making me gain weight. I already knew that I was, as my kids painfully described me, “half asleep, half awake.” The problem with the permission to collect data points was that I already had thousands of blackouts and hangovers to learn from. The problem with a brief “challenge” in which it was okay if I failed was that I never had to fully commit to the idea of not drinking. For me, it set me up for failure from Day One. When I finally knew that I needed to make a firm commitment to save my life, it was like the Good Witch, who may be named Susan not Glenda, told me “YOU had the power all along.” But what she really said was: cut the bullshit. Are YOU truly committed to doing the one thing that will change all of that? Is your current reality good enough for you?
Never again will I be everyone’s doormat to avoid conflict or speak up for myself.
Never again will I avoid my own thoughts and feelings by disappearing into a bottle of wine, rotting away on my couch. I also had to address a different “why”: why had I not quit already. The fact is, I was scared. Scared that not drinking for my health as a why might mean discovering the damage I had done. I was two years overdue on my mammogram, despite being placed on breast cancer watch with the directive to have advanced imaging every six months. I knew that alcohol is a major risk factor for breast cancer. I had neurological symptoms when I tried to go to sleep that might be symptoms of MS or Parkinson’s, according to my late night, drunken sessions with Dr. Google. I dismissed these as “just” alcohol withdrawal.
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