If you’re looking for a blog promoting the wonderful benefits of a hangoverless life once you kick alcohol to the curb, keep looking (they are a dime a dozen).
This blog is coming at hangovers from another angle altogether in the hope I find out I am not alone in what I now see was my totally insane line of thinking.
You see, since the birth of my daughter in 2016 when my life stress and therefore drinking really ramped up, I stopped getting hangovers. Now this wasn’t because I was drinking more responsibly, having a glass of water between drinks or anything sensible like that. The simple answer, the ‘funny’ one that I wore like a badge of honour…
”Oh I am just getting too good at drinking”
Got a hangover? “You need more practise”
Now this wasn’t just a story I was telling myself. This was a legitimate life skill that I believed I had, borne out of denial and sheer determination to prove that despite how much I’d drunk and how poorly I’d behaved, I didn’t have a problem. No matter what had happened the day/night before, I was without fail, always the first one up with our daughter. 6am? No problem, “I don’t have a hangover”. Always cleaning (because if the house felt in control, I was in control right?) and I was known to go for runs in a less than tidy state, actually believing that I was actually a better runner if still a little drunk.
Despite blacking out earlier and earlier, I was a very rare spewer and had not wasted a day lying in bed with crushing nausea and headaches for many, many years. Every time my husband asked me how I was feeling in the morning I was always “FINE! A little tired but totally fine”.
So hangovers weren’t the thing that finally got me to really examine my relationship with alcohol and finally draw up stumps. What did, was the crashing realisation that I no longer had control, and in fact I’d lost control some time ago. Alcohol had become too much a part of my identity and mattered more than how my family felt.
So what’s life like now that I have left alcohol behind and regained control over myself and my life? FAB-U-LOUS…I sleep in on the weekends, with no guilt or sense of having to prove myself pushing me out of bed. The house is a lot less clean, I am not longer trying to make up for what I did the night before by vacuuming and manically tidying. But this I can live with.
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