I raised my prices today – for my lessons. That’s not particularly interesting for you, probably, but it’s a milestone for me we’ve got to start somewhere. Actually we’ll start here: I’m two months sober. I don’t really like the phrasing of that, makes me sound like a crackhead, but well, maybe I was a bit, back in the day. Not crack but – plenty of other stuff. I stopped drinking after New Year’s Eve with the intention of going three months without. Since I was 14 I don’t think I’ve ever gone anywhere near that long – and I started to worry that my life was not as glorious as it might be and more tragic that it need be. I find myself underwhelmed by years of drinking and the knock-on effects it has on every little thing: that being discipline, money, body fat, anxiety, skin, hair, teeth, motivation and the great sapping-away of TIME. 

Time is the big one, the one thing I never have enough of – I am working on two novels right now and I am running my teaching business which counts as two full-time jobs; that is, A) advertising and finding students and B) actually teaching. I also go to the gym four times a week and try to keep in touch with my family and friends further afield, and as always I persevere with learning French (tres, tres lentement) and have recently gotten into sudoku (wow). All of this takes time, and each day barely seems to have started before it’s over. Not drinking has helped this enormously; none of it – especially not the two books in tandem – would have been possible if I was still on the sauce on the regular. I have a clear head.

I’ve packed in the ADHD meds too, for now. They started making me feel more anxious, more wired instead of less, so I’ve put them to one side; perhaps being so busy has me stimulated enough that I don’t need any boosters – they just push me too far the other way now and make me feel mentally crowded and vacant at the same time; I take them and I find myself staring through windows with my head all staticky as seven thousand thoughts loop around one another like fruit flies.

The pills make me less creative as well, I’ve realised. They zone me in too much, lock me onto one thing, one task, when creativity in my experience comes from combining things and jiggling things around to fit differently. Doing exactly what you need to do feels somehow opposed to creativity. I don’t know; I just can’t write well on the pills. When I take them I do nothing but work. I don’t draw, I don’t sing, I don’t make jokes, I don’t play piano, I don’t play guitar, I don’t stare at the ceiling and ponder things, I don’t goof – I just work, steadily and slowly and tirelessly, like an ant. Which is fine of course, but – there’s a reason we evolved and ants didn’t.

Not drinking is good – great, even. I read Big Sur by Jack Kerouac over Christmas and it made me dreadfully sad. He writes about his experiences with the DTs – delirium tremens – in great detail, and the anxious panicked insane episodes were uncannily close to my own; many times I might have had it, but one time definitely – in Portugal, visiting Seth and Blanche, awake in a tent by myself all night after 11 days straight on heavy red wine and beer and stopping cold-turkey without warning – rolling and groaning and quaking dreaming with eyes open and feeling as though I had bugs all over me.

Alcohol ruins people, makes a mockery, and I am worth more and have more to give that I don’t want to be dimmed or squashed or quenched in any way. Two months without a drop and I don’t miss it even slightly – apart from perhaps the taste on a hot day, and that’s easy because there are a million 0% beers these days. I feel happier sober. And that’s not just brave words – I mean it. I don’t feel happy in the sense of what I thought happiness was when I was in my deepest drinking periods – what that was was euphoria, pure naughty giddiness. Now, sober, the happiness comes not in sudden crashing waves but in a slow glug, like a warm sea lapping around your ankles. It might not come in big splashes so often, but there’s an endless, steady supply of it. What’s more, the effects seem to be compounding. Momentum at last.

I quit nicotine back in mid-December too – all forms. Since then, life has gotten richer. I have, as I mentioned, much more time – because I’m never hungover or worn-out. I have more money too, and in combination this frees me up for a host of new adventures. The first couple of sober weekends were hard – I didn’t know how to blow off steam, how to unwind after the week, how to get that giddy ‘teehee!’ feeling on a Friday that you get when you open a bottle of wine and forget everything. But by being sober for an extended period, it seems that I have less stress to blow off anyway – I get more done when I’m working and writing, and when it’s the evening I search for new activities to get stuck into.

I tried life drawing a month ago and then again two weeks ago: naked person sitting in middle of room, artists around (all ages), charcoal, pencil, paper and boards, calming jazz overhead or soul, two hours, ten positions — culminating in four to five pages of sketches, smudgy and beautiful. And I’m getting better at drawing too: I’ve figured out how to do noses and hands (but not feet). I thought the nudity might be strange, but it’s not – after ten minutes you’re so focussed on drawing that you stop noticing the model’s nakedness at all. At the end everyone compares drawings – some colour, some ink, some phenomenal, some merely fine compared (mine), and the model (newly dressed) walks between and looks at the portraits and marvels (verb).

I went to a poetry night too, two weeks ago (pushed myself to do one big, bold week of out every night – life drawing Mon, comedy night Weds, spoken word Thurs, house party Sat – tiring but vibrant). The poetry night warrants its own article – I’ve found the lunatics around here, at last. Not been in a room with such colourful nutcases since Berlin. Tomorrow it’s the poetry night again, and I’ve written a piece to read – nothing poetic, more just an article, but the point is I’m going alone and I’m going to stand up and read it, for no other reason than I want to – I think it’ll be good for me.