Hi friends,

This one was originally published last November on the wonderful ’s newsletter ‘Overthink Tank’. I highly recommend checking it out, Chelsey’s work is fantastic and she has a podcast coming out!

I’ve decided to publish it on my own newsletter to celebrate the fact that this weekend marks two years of sobriety for me. Wild. I’ve done a few little text amends and updated the mention of how long I have been sober for.

I hope you enjoy this one!

‘I prefer drunk you. Drunk you is more fun.’

I will never, ever forget these words as long as I live. I’ll never forget how they cut through any mask I had consciously or subconsciously tried to piece together like a child’s paper mache project. Drunk me is more fun, I thought, fucking brilliant. It crushed me.

Then I poured myself another glass of wine. Time to have more fun.

Like a lot of things, I was late to the party when it came to drinking. With the exception of a Christmas glass of Cava, I didn’t touch alcohol until I turned 18, living up to my brand as a Good Girl™. My friends had already gone through the whole swigging-cheap-cider-in-the-park initiation, a trope as British as apologising for something that isn’t your fault. I’d skipped the park phase, mainly because I was too busy reading Wikipedia recreationally. By 18, alcohol still had that enticing mystery vibe to it that my peers no longer felt.

I discovered wine while sat at someone’s 18th birthday party. More importantly, this was where I discovered the persona of Drunk Me. I loved that booze made me talk. It was probably a load of rubbish, but talk I did.

I suppose it must have been a bit weird for people to see this Cinderella-like transformation of the mute oddball from school (if Cinderella was Back to Black era Amy Winehouse). If Regular Me was a quiet, socially inept space cadet with the self-awareness of a plum, Drunk Me was, for roughly about two hours, P!nk rocking up to the house in her car to Get This Party Started.

I later discovered alcohol’s other uses. The unease I felt at living away from home without my familiar routines and any sort of external structure or consistency while at uni meant that alcohol became something to fall back on. The university I went to was a binge-drinking hothouse so we all blended in together.

Were you drinking to have a good time or were you drinking because you felt you had no other choice?

Hard to tell.

It’s difficult to think about that time without feeling awful for that kid struggling to make friends and get their head around the newness of everything, beating themselves up about being a misfit.

I graduated from uni into a world where it was normal to commune with alcohol at the end of the day. The days were a mess of office environments, small talk, unwritten rules and expectations, social situations, people’s motives, you name it. It was never drinking in the morning, hiding it or anything like that. But it became something I looked forward to. It became something that was part of the structure of my day. I realised that this had the potential to go extremely west if I left it unchecked.

After writing notes to myself in my phone whilst drunk that said ‘Please stop drinking’, I finally listened to myself. Quitting drinking felt easier to me than moderation, a binary yes/no switch firmly set to ‘no’, rather than a ‘maybe’ or an ‘I might have one’ (it was never just one). Communities like r/stopdrinking massively helped me to open my eyes and see how much worse it could potentially get if I didn’t stop now.

The first round of sobriety lasted for two years. I was very loud and very smug about it online. Insufferable. Then, having completed two years, I managed to convince myself that this arbitrary figure proved that I didn’t have an alcohol problem actually and I could in fact control my drinking with ease.

Nope. I’d fallen for my own bullshit. Typical.

In the liminal space between sobriety and ramping up again, I learned that I am in fact autistic and I have ADHD. All of a sudden it was blindingly obvious that my penchant for booze was related to how it helped me in social situations, and how it helped me recover from any kind of overstimulating environment. It settled the bees in my head and made them sleepy.

Bizarrely, alcohol did provide a little window into what life would be like as my unmasked AuDHD self. Drunk Me very happily recited internet-meme songs on video at uni parties in a way Sober Me could only dream of. (For what it’s worth, if I ever do find myself at karaoke nowadays, which is extremely rare, I am a sober, unmasked, karaoke queen).

Of course, Drunk Me wasn’t the Real Me. It was a superficial spark that died after a few hours to be replaced with a day or more’s worth of hangover. Gross.

Two years ago I swore Drunk Me off again. Hopefully for the last time, though I can never bank on it. The unmasking process, getting comfy walking around in this meat suit with this wavy brain, has slowly empowered me to be the weirdo I was born to be, no alcohol required. I’m lucky in that somewhere along the way I simply lost the last fucks I could give, truly. I’ll behave when I need to, I’m not completely un-self-aware. But I know that most of the time I need to be me, undistilled, desperately, authentically myself, sans any stimulant besides Pepsi Max, else my mental health tanks. I’m grateful for the privileges I was born with that make this unmasking possible, I’m acutely aware of how different this all could be had I had a life of different circumstances.

I don’t go to many parties now as a general rule.

I’m not much of a socialiser and have few friends.

It sounds sad but its not for me and it never has been. It’s frowned upon by society, sure. But that doesn’t bother me anymore.

I keep my world deliberately small - a small world means it’s easier to control, fewer surprises and more consistency. My fun is found in reading and writing mainly, as well as connecting with the large community of neurodivergent folks I have come into contact with through my newsletter.

I experience a peace now that I didn’t know was possible ten years ago. Drunk Me could never.

Thank you for reading!

If you want to support my writing, you can check out my Patreon and my Etsy shop. In particular, I’m still looking to see if anyone wants to be in my first ever Wavy Mail Club. I’ll fold it if no one signs up of course, and write this experiment off as an interesting experiment, but if you’d like to be sign up then do check it out (I also have a listing for pre-orders for my latest zine. I’ll be finishing the writing of it this week!)

Take it easy,

Ren