The longest hangover: My 23 years as an...
Rated • 1 review • alcohol, drugs, addiction, health • independent.co.uk
The most touching and strongest piece I have read about alcohol and drugs dependence.
From the page: "At 24, every day was the same. I would wake up at 4am with a head full of horror, and then fall asleep half an hour before it was time to get up.
Often I could barely remember my own name, let alone the name of the newspaper I was working for. I would sweat on to my silk shirt, and have to keep my leather jacket on to hide the patches. There was none of the sense of the sophistication that Caroline Knapp talks about in "Drinking: A Love Story", about being a career woman who comes home and has a glass of chilled white wine out of the fridge. When I left work, I was so stressed that I swore at people on the Tube, thumped car bonnets, grabbed the nearest bottle of red out of Oddbins, and swigged it straight out of the bottle.
I should stress that alcohol never turned me into another person. I did not become especially loud, hilarious, or violent. Instead, alcohol made me feel normal, OK to be with, as if I belonged. For much of my twenties I struggled with a mixture of suicidal misery and furious anger the moment I woke up in the morning. It left me drained, and failing miserably in everything I did, including getting help with what was an increasingly debilitating depression.
I became, taboo-busting though it is to admit, a victim. So-called friends became predators, and relationships were barely worth the name. Drink was my most loyal associate.
Then along came cocaine, and, a couple of years later, heroin.
There were good times â€" some really good times, so good that I have forgotten the details. Sometimes what started as fun ended up as tears. One night, a group of us had dinner, danced round the rug, and then started having sex with each other. Flatmate sex is really not a good idea. Four of us made it to my bed, where one friend copped off with a guy who'd just moved in, and I, to my great amusement, tried it on with the other male flatmate, who had been playing games with me for weeks. He was totally unable to perform, and slunk away to rant in the living room.
To my even greater delight, he crept up to me a few days later and actually apologised. Time proved that the joke was on me. Not only did I pick up Something Nasty, which they all denied giving me, but I ended up with a septic nipple. It was agonisingly painful, and kept getting stuck to the sheet. Finally it got so sore that I went to casualty, on a Saturday morning, for "proper" painkillers. It was a mark of my then remaining, and totally sincere, naivety that the hospital actually gave me some.
My 30th birthday came and went. I remember lying in a bath, in a gentle rush of ecstasy, watching the growing line of cigarette ash on my chest and then fending off a voracious German stripper who got very cross that I had spurned her embrace in favour of a huge fluffy dressing gown. My thirties was when I abandoned the mainstream and headed for south London. I actually had more fun with the Brixton crowd than any other. But, despite going out partying for hours, what I was really looking forward to was getting home afterwards, however late, for a "proper" session. Just me and my boyfriend, a pile of drugs, a couple of bottles, and 40 cigarettes. Nothing beat it."
From the page: "At 24, every day was the same. I would wake up at 4am with a head full of horror, and then fall asleep half an hour before it was time to get up.
Often I could barely remember my own name, let alone the name of the newspaper I was working for. I would sweat on to my silk shirt, and have to keep my leather jacket on to hide the patches. There was none of the sense of the sophistication that Caroline Knapp talks about in "Drinking: A Love Story", about being a career woman who comes home and has a glass of chilled white wine out of the fridge. When I left work, I was so stressed that I swore at people on the Tube, thumped car bonnets, grabbed the nearest bottle of red out of Oddbins, and swigged it straight out of the bottle.
I should stress that alcohol never turned me into another person. I did not become especially loud, hilarious, or violent. Instead, alcohol made me feel normal, OK to be with, as if I belonged. For much of my twenties I struggled with a mixture of suicidal misery and furious anger the moment I woke up in the morning. It left me drained, and failing miserably in everything I did, including getting help with what was an increasingly debilitating depression.
I became, taboo-busting though it is to admit, a victim. So-called friends became predators, and relationships were barely worth the name. Drink was my most loyal associate.
Then along came cocaine, and, a couple of years later, heroin.
There were good times â€" some really good times, so good that I have forgotten the details. Sometimes what started as fun ended up as tears. One night, a group of us had dinner, danced round the rug, and then started having sex with each other. Flatmate sex is really not a good idea. Four of us made it to my bed, where one friend copped off with a guy who'd just moved in, and I, to my great amusement, tried it on with the other male flatmate, who had been playing games with me for weeks. He was totally unable to perform, and slunk away to rant in the living room.
To my even greater delight, he crept up to me a few days later and actually apologised. Time proved that the joke was on me. Not only did I pick up Something Nasty, which they all denied giving me, but I ended up with a septic nipple. It was agonisingly painful, and kept getting stuck to the sheet. Finally it got so sore that I went to casualty, on a Saturday morning, for "proper" painkillers. It was a mark of my then remaining, and totally sincere, naivety that the hospital actually gave me some.
My 30th birthday came and went. I remember lying in a bath, in a gentle rush of ecstasy, watching the growing line of cigarette ash on my chest and then fending off a voracious German stripper who got very cross that I had spurned her embrace in favour of a huge fluffy dressing gown. My thirties was when I abandoned the mainstream and headed for south London. I actually had more fun with the Brixton crowd than any other. But, despite going out partying for hours, what I was really looking forward to was getting home afterwards, however late, for a "proper" session. Just me and my boyfriend, a pile of drugs, a couple of bottles, and 40 cigarettes. Nothing beat it."
