Your best days are ahead of you

When you leave alcohol behind.

Hello,

I’ve been very quiet on this platform recently. I’m popping up to say hello and welcome new subscribers to My Secret Sobriety and to thank you all for being here.

I’m here today to reinforce my number one belief about addiction:

I believe that every single person experiencing alcohol addiction has an alcohol-free future ahead of them. I believe it because I have lived it. You can beat your addiction. It can be done. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. Don’t listen to yourself when you say it can’t be done. You don’t know that. Just because you haven’t done it yet doesn’t make it impossible. As an alcoholic you are invariably your own worst enemy. Your best days are ahead of you. And you deserve this future. I’m not saying it will be simple or easy to stop drinking and maintain recovery. There will be roadblocks and hurdles and curveballs. There are multiple different factors effecting each individual’s recovery that will make it different from mine. But I was at absolute rock bottom and couldn’t not see a way out. And a lot of you will be feeling that same way too. There is a way out and you can find it. You will need support. You should accept support. You should utilise all the support you can get. Never give up on yourself. You only have one life, and you deserve to live a life free from addiction.

I am reproducing this short article that I wrote for UK magazine The Sober Edit, below to give you an insight into just how extraordinary getting sober really can be. I hope you find this inspiring.

Thank you for being here and thank you for reading My Secret Sobriety. Kate xoxo

---

In the novel Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver one character tells another, ‘There could be good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out’. My version of this quote would read, ‘There IS good shit up ahead, don’t rule it out”. This quote got me thinking about how so many of us can’t imagine that a life without alcohol will be ok, let alone better! And yet I have never heard a single sober person say they regret getting sober!

Alcohol lied to me and it’s lying to you too. Alcohol reinforced my fears and told me I was not good enough. Alcohol told me I needed it to make up for my shyness and lack of self-esteem. Yet the more I drank, the more my self-worth plummeted.

I know I am not alone in this experience. Although alcohol is a stimulant in the short term, drinking regularly acts as a depressant and increases anxiety. I thought the self-loathing, anxious, ‘not enough’ aspects of my personality were integral to who I was. But they weren’t. Turning to alcohol to cope with that inner critic was a bad decision. Drinking regularly through my teens and twenties only served to reinforce my negative self-image and told me that my dreams were not achievable. And I believed it.

Ten years into sobriety I am stunned when I compare how differently I approached life before and after I stopped drinking. During my twenties when my social drinking was ostensibly under control, my self-esteem was through the floor. I dismissed career paths because I had zero confidence in my abilities. I didn’t get a single job offer after interview because I was too nervous to answer the interviewers’ questions competently.

By comparison, I got the first job I went to interview for after getting sober! I felt a little anxious, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Sitting in an interview thinking to myself, ‘I can do this job just as well as the next person’ was an incredible feeling! I got this job just two months into sobriety. It took only two months of being alcohol free for my self-worth and confidence levels to improve so drastically!

When you think you can’t live without alcohol, you are so wrong! When you discount a future that you can’t even begin to visualise, you are making a terrible mistake. It can be scary at the beginning but please believe me when I say that sobriety will improve all aspects of your life infinitely!

A year into sobriety I moved from the UK to Australia. I sought work in the Fitness Industry and bought and ran a small gym. The members trusted and respected me. They called me a ‘leader’! I became a successful businesswoman a won awards including a National Australian Franchising Award! 

This life really is a ‘life beyond my wildest dreams’ because even my wildest dreams could not conjure this up! When I was drinking, I would never have believed this future for myself, or believed in this future version of myself. Removing alcohol allowed me to discover the real me and believe in myself. There’s no stopping me and there’ll be no stopping you either!