Free High Sobriety by Jill Stark

Friends said that he was hilarious when drunk. But he soon found that he couldn’t socialise without it. He knew that he was drinking too much, but when he left school and enrolled at the University of Melbourne, where boozy parties and pub crawls were non-negotiable hallmarks of campus life, things began to escalate. It took 18 months of heavy drinking — his daily fix was a five-litre cask of wine and a six-pack of beer — before he could no longer cope and had to quit his studies. This perceived failure set off a chain of events that started with him crashing his car while five times over the limit, and ended with an overdose of antidepressants and sleeping pills.
    What shocked me most about Steve’s story was not the detail of his deterioration, but the fact that he started out just like me. ‘I was just a normal teenager playing football, having fun with my mates, and drinking a bit at parties,’ he told me. ‘There’s strong peer pressure; it’s socially expected. If you don’t drink, you feel a bit on the outer. It’s really hard to go out and socialise if everyone’s drinking and you’re not.’
    I’m not suggesting that every binge-drinking teenager is on a path to destruction, but as someone trying to stay sober in a world obsessed with booze, I just wonder if Steve’s story would have been different if the peer pressure to have another beer and be that fun guy at the party weren’t so great.
    As I try to redefine my place in my own social circles, what’s most surprising is that the friends I thought would pressure me the most — the hard-drinking boys who can knock back beers like a war’s coming — are the most supportive. My sobriety doesn’t seem to threaten our friendship in the same way that it does with some of my female friends. I hear around the traps that a few girlfriends are expressing concern that my break from booze is a judgement on their drinking habits. Until recently, these friends and I have all drunk in a similar fashion: we enjoyed getting pissed, and we did it regularly. By opting out, it seems that I’m implying there’s something wrong with their lifestyle. At first I find this a ludicrous argument — my decision not to drink is no more a judgement on them than a vegetarian friend’s preference not to eat meat is a moral statement on my carnivorous choices. And how could I, the binge-drinking reporter involved in a long and steamy romance with booze, ever retreat to the moral high ground about anyone’s alcohol consumption? The stakes were just getting too high for me. If others drink in the same way and don’t wake up feeling like a worn-out dishrag, good luck to them.
    It bothers me that I’ve offended some of my friends simply by choosing not to drink. More than that, it hurts that they don’t seem to comprehend how hard it is to stay sober when everyone else is hoeing into the red wine and beer. But then I see it from their point of view — in my bid to be unflinchingly honest, I’ve been telling the world about all the situations in which I no longer need alcohol, and how my life is being more richly lived sober. My words are sincere, but I can see how my enthusiasm could be construed as pompous. In less than two months, I’ve gone from a kind of ageing Lindsay Lohan to an alcohol-free, clean-living convert. So I try to be more understanding, and remember that it wasn’t too long ago I would have berated anyone who left a party before 2.00 a.m., and crossed the street to avoid someone spruiking the merits of life without booze.
    I gain more of an insight into the way my sobriety affects my friends when I’m invited to Government House, the Victorian governor’s residence, for a garden party. The event celebrates the 25th anniversary of a leading medical research institute. It’s a glorious 30-degree day with blue skies. I take my friend Kath