I’ve been sober for 3 years however terribly miss ingesting at Christmas time. Then I remind myself of the profound concept that’s modified my life: There’s no such factor as ‘only a glass’: CLOVER STROUD

Sometimes I urgently miss drinking. It’s the week before Christmas and a few years ago, I’d have been feeling all warm and a bit drunk right now. 

Every year brings hard and beautiful new feelings with it, and until I gave up three years ago, alcohol was always the way to celebrate or forget them.

If I was much younger, say in my late twenties, I might have been going to see The Pogues play in London, since in my memory they always had a gig at this moment in December. My friend Patrick always seemed to have spare tickets, so we’d see them while consuming lots of lovely cheap wine and quite a few chemicals too. 

More recently, in my early thirties, I’d probably have been cooking a large piece of smoked meat at home in Oxford with my sister, Nell, while we cheerily sloshed bottles of red into a saucepan bobbing with a clove-studded orange to make mulled wine. It was pretty disgusting but got us wonderfully drunk. 

Even as little as a few years ago, I’d have maybe been meeting my husband Pete for dinner somewhere delicious and drinking quite expensive champagne – loads of it.

Tonight, though, I’m lighting some incense while trying to get excited about a hot shower. Incense helps me get into the ‘other’ state I’m craving, but we don’t have a proper bath in our house in America and I definitely feel deprived of missing the liquid Valium effects of an exceptionally hot soak. 

I don’t even live in England any more and Nell is dead. Look, life is hard, even when it’s good. And while I am evangelical about sobriety and the good it’s brought into my life, if I’m really honest (I am actually incapable of being anything but really honest) there are certain times I really do miss getting drunk.

When that happens I have to concentrate hard to keep sober. This is the moment in the year when you might be trying not to drink while everyone around you is fizzing with prosecco. You might at least be trying get a little bit less drunk after multiple mornings waking up feeling like a paranoid piece of old rope. Because of this, I wanted to share some of the things I tell myself in order to stay sober, and maybe they will help you.

Keeping sober while everyone else is losing their head in drink is difficult. I was reminded how hard it is last weekend, when Pete and I took the kids to a pizza restaurant in DC called 2 Amys. 

Now, I know ‘pizza restaurant’ isn’t a phrase that immediately conjures up an anticipatory feeling of culinary greatness – and instead probably makes you think of grease and carbohydrates and oily garlic dip – believe me that this pizza restaurant is an exceptional one. It’s cheerful and convivial, full of people swigging glasses of red wine while deep in conversation, as well as unsettlingly delicious pizza.

Anyway, last Saturday, I ordered a Diet Coke, as I always do, but when Pete bought a large, just warm glass of red wine, I almost burst into tears of jealousy. I didn’t want a sticky, carbonated, caffeinated glass of pop. I wanted to vanish into that velvety crimson drink; I wanted it to do its magic, to rub the sharp edges off my life and put a lens of soft focus over my life.

And damn, it was – is – Christmas! All around us people were lit up with that special Christmas colour brought on by fairy lights and alcohol everywhere. I wanted a glass of wine so badly.

And then I remembered.

There is no such thing as a glass of wine. There is no such thing as a glass of red with supper, just as there is no such thing as a golden tumbler of whiskey in front of a roaring fire, no such thing as a lovely crisp glass of cold white wine. 

Many times, I’ve told myself, go on, just a glass. And many times, other people have said to me, ‘Oh go on, just have a glass. What harm can a just a glass do?’

‘Just a glass’ doesn’t exist. If you really want to drink, there are only glasses, many, many glasses, and a single glass will never make you feel right.

I think Liam Gallagher said ‘I don’t want to go out for a quick pint, I want twenty fookin’ pints.’ I can’t really describe it better. The truth I remind myself is that ‘just a glass’ will make me feel relaxed and warm, yes, but if I stop there, I’ll almost immediately feel impatient, irritable and then tense. I’ll want to know where the next glass and glasses are coming from. So I remind myself that ‘just a glass’ leads to many glasses – and I don’t really want to go there.

Another thing I tell myself to help remain sober is that the craving will stop. That desire for the glass and then twenty fookin’ glasses won’t go on forever. It won’t even last for the evening. 

The chances are it will just be for a few moments, at specific flash points, which are hard to face, but they are just moments. That moment when someone pops a bottle of wine and sloshes it into a glass, the moment when a bottle of cold champagne is suddenly produced from a fridge, the moment of walking into a heaving pub and a friend says, ‘What are you having?’ The shared experience of alcohol brings people together, and that sense of togetherness is probably strongest in anticipation, at the start of an evening.

I really envy drinkers at around 6.45pm when the evening is just starting. At that point, a drink looks glamorous, exciting, enticing, but a lot less so a few hours later, when something much messier and sweatier has probably gone down. 

At that point I feel pleased and yeah, quite smug, that I chose the pop. I like to think of the alcohol cravings as like someone pinching my skin or pricking it with a pin. It hurts, just for a moment, but then then it passes and is totally gone.

Something I really like about remaining sober is also being able to remember everything that happens in an evening. Yesterday, I received an especially loving, exuberant and gushing message on Instagram from someone I’d never met, telling me how much my writing meant to them and had supported them through tough times. 

Wow! What a lovely thing to read, I thought, until the following morning, when they sent me another message reading ‘Sorry, I have no memory of sending you that. Time to stop drinking I think.’

An over-effusive message to someone on social media is one thing, but I remember that sinking sense of regret and anxiety that comes after a big night of drinking, when you wake up with a throbbing headache and a mouth like a drain basket, mentally pat yourself down and ask what did I say and, oh god, what did I do last night? 

Because I don’t drink, I am now totally liberated from drinkers’ remorse. There is no fuzziness, no regret, no sense of anxiety about what I may or may not have done. As I get older, I feel increasingly grateful for that.

And although I sometimes miss that f*** it feeling of losing control through alcohol, I know that I am a better person to around now I’m sober. Crucially, I am a better mother sober, too. 

I am going to be completely honest and say I am really pleased my kids don’t see me drunk. I don’t think that anything positive comes from being drunk, or heavily hung over, around your kids. It’s not funny or charming or cute. It just isn’t. It’s depressing and confusing and quite often a bit scary for kids. It might be fun for me but it’s not for them.

Curiously, I’ve found parties can actually be more fun sober. I enjoy conversations more now I know I will remember them and don’t feel blurry with drink by about 10.30pm. 

I recently made the startling revelation that I actually prefer dancing sober. Dancing totally sober requires a mental switch – but once you’ve made that switch, dancing suddenly becomes the ‘other’ state you are reaching for when you drink. The very fact of dancing itself is the high; you don’t need alcohol to enhance it.

And of course, there’s the morning after. Imagine a world in which hangovers are no longer part of life. No headaches, no all-day nausea, no paranoia. I wake up and feel ok, every day. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t have to process big emotions such as fear, anxiety, uncertainty, self loathing and so on, but I never do it through the prism of alcoholic chemicals. I like that emotional clarity, even if the emotions I have to face with totally clear, open eyes – rather than squint at through alcohol – are big, hard ones.

Without hangovers, mornings are genuinely beautiful. I love getting up early, having the house to myself before my family wakes up, drinking tea, lifting weights or just sitting in the silence. Getting sober is like gifting yourself a lifetime of pleasant mornings, and that’s a beautiful gift to open every single day.

Ok, two last things which also sometimes help me stay sober are money (because drinking is massively expensive) and vanity (sorry, but true. My skin as a non-drinker is much better than it was ten, even fifteen years ago).

And when I’m feeling tempted to drink, I also remind myself of the cumulative effect of sobriety, because I’m certain that sobriety gets better, easier, more profound and rewarding the longer I do it for. 

It sometimes makes me laugh when a friend complains about giving up drinking for a few days and not feeling that different. It took me months to truly notice big, meaningful changes in my life, beyond the fact that my hangovers were over once I stopped drinking. 

I think sobriety is almost like a practice, and that takes a certain amount of application and work. You have to concentrate on it. Craft it, even. I see my sobriety as directly linked to my creativity now and it’s something I value in my life so much, since it helps me fully inhabit my life, rather than simply existing inside my days.

So those are the things I remind myself, when sobriety feels a bit lonely and I am feeling tempted to join the gently swaying throngs of people enjoying their drunken conviviality. I remind myself the feeling will pass. It’s momentary, it’s shifting. And I cling on to my Diet Coke.

• This article originally appeared on Clover’s Substack (https://cloverstroud.substack.com/) as one of her weekly posts for paid subscribers.
• You can also follow Clover on Instagram @clover.stroud