Free The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

hearts.
    I had never injected drugs, been a prostitute, smoked crack in front of my baby, spent eight years in a Russian prison, mugged an old man in the park, or been through six detoxes and four rehabs, painfully relapsing each time. My family still spoke to me and I had not turned yellow. I looked around the room and realised that everyone who had been married was either divorced or separated. I was glad I had stopped when I did. I didn’t want to break anyone else’s heart with my drinking.
    I also felt lucky that I’d had the luxury of taking three months out of the ‘real world’ to sort my life out, publicly funded, with the support of the excellent counsellors on the programme. With the coalition government making cuts to the public sector, the future for resource-heavy programmes such as this one was unclear. The prime minister was talking tough, picking out addicts and people with weight problems (there were apparently around80,000 addicts on incapacity benefits, including 42,360 alcoholics – my peers were surprised at how low this number was), saying that the public only wanted to pay taxes ‘for people incapacitated through no fault of their own’.
    I thought about drinking all the time. It was there at the back of my mind, like tinnitus, with regular intense cravings shooting through my mind and body. And then there were the dreams, the drinking dreams. I dropped a bottle of wine on kitchen tiles and was lapping the drink like a dog, along with dirt from the floor and broken glass. I woke so relieved that it wasn’t real.
    One afternoon we had acupuncture, awkwardly handling our imaginary glowing balls of
chi
, needles sticking out of our ears and third eyes, trying to take the pan-pipes music seriously. I rushed, all anti-Zen, for a cigarette, then to hoover the room (we had different ‘therapeutic duties’ each week), before jumping on my bike to power along the canal to a bench I’d found. Lightheaded, with sweet blossom swirling in the breeze around me, waving at mysterious officials in orange boats, an ice-cream van Yankee Doodling from an unknown location and aeroplane trails across east London’s sky, I thought, This is wild. I was finding that being sober could be kind of a trip and I was just riding it like a soldier.

 
    9
    DRIFTING
    AT MY BEDSIT IN HACKNEY WICK , six single people lived above the pub, on one floor divided by the landlord into the smallest individual living spaces possible so that he could squeeze the most rent from the building. The rooms were separated by thin walls but I heard very little noise from the other occupants, no conversation or laughter, just TVs. There was a shared washing-machine in the hallway but I never saw anyone else using it. We all waited until the hall was clear before scuttling into our rooms or out of the door. Migrant workers, divorcees or alcoholics, no one planning to be in that situation for very long, six lonely people so close but transient and unable to reach out to each other.
    I had chosen to be there because it was the cheapest place in east London I could find to live alone. I could not risk relying on or letting down other people again. My attempts at sobriety in the past had failed and I wasn’t confident enough to counton this one. I was just taking things day by day, sitting on the end of my bed, my possessions crammed around me, smoking out of the window, looking across the canal to the newly built Olympic stadium, anxious and frustrated.
    I’d left my job to go to rehab, so when my three months in the treatment centre came to an end, I found myself unemployed again. I was treating my sobriety with great care, as if I was a delicate, newly hatched chick and I was not going to let myself be shaken or squashed. I was trying to pay attention to my needs and emotions, anxious, tired, lonely, hungry, which previously I’d usually dealt with by an unsubtle and ultimately unhelpful application of booze. I was going to AA meetings and