BY ANN DOWSETT JOHNSTON
Every season has its soundtrack. The first summer I tried to get sober—2007-- it was the defiant Amy Winehouse dominating the airwaves: “They tried to make me go to rehab. I said: No, no, no!” An earworm of a song if ever there was one. All summer long, I’d find myself humming along: “No, no, no.” For me, it was more than an earworm. It was a manifesto: no, no, no—I wasn’t going to rehab. No, no, no. (Privately, as it turned out, my loved ones were humming: yes, yes, yes.) Six months later, after several particularly frank talks with my son, my sweetheart, and my best friend, I sat in the back of a cab, headed to a tony treatment facility outside of Boston. Destined for a 30-day stint, I arrived 30 days sober. I had my own private room and a CD player with Bach on replay: Sleeper’s Awake. (It seemed appropriate.) Add another month of listening to this and I was certain to be cured, right? And that was just the beginning. It was sometime before the soundtrack in my head caught up with my sober behaviour. At first, I was convinced I was being deprived; that my life was the place where fun had gone to die: one long, sad song. I remember my first New Year’s Eve, all dressed up with my handsome boyfriend on my arm. When the champagne corks began to fly, I didn’t know where to look. I fumbled with my evening purse, reached for my Pellegrino, and mustered a smile. I remember this as one of the most awkward evenings of my life: bed has never looked so good. What took time to realize was there was a soundtrack in my head, one installed by an alcogenic culture. Alcohol was the key to fun, it said. Alcohol was the key to glamor, alcohol was the gateway to romance. Period.
Alcohol was how I had been acculturated to relax, celebrate or reward myself for a triple-shift day, for the complex job of adulting. Without alcohol, I felt quite lost. I could see the beckoning finger of a glass of white wine, promising to unhook my shoulders from my earlobes. I was sober, and bereft, kicked out of the dance party of life. Or so I felt. Less than a year into my sobriety, I knew I was going to have to learn to hum my own tune, and write my own recovery script. I immersed myself in whatever quit lit I could find. I read the wonderful Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly. The activist in me was born. I knew that if I, raised smack-dab in the middle of the baby boom, had trouble with alcohol, so too did legions of other women. Since I was a journalist, I began with a yellow plastic box, and filled it with every news article and alcohol ad that pertained to female drinking. By the end of three months, the box was full. I pitched Canada’s largest newspaper on a 14-part series on Women and Alcohol, focusing on the closing gender gap on risky drinking– and they awarded me $100,000 to travel the globe and report on the story. It seemed that the alcohol industry had taken aim at women, with products like Mummyjuice and berry-flavored vodka. This series formed the backbone of my book Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol. I went on to own this story in the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, The Guardian, and more. The year was 2013. That was the public reality. The private story? I learned that my personal soundtrack, the one playing between my ears, had been updated in the process of writing.
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