“Everything I Learned After I Quit Drinking For a Year”

Like many who grew up with a drinking culture, by her 20s Jennifer Savin felt trapped in a cycle of nights-out and anxious mornings. So she took a break, reset, and became a mindful drinker...

It was a small piece of glass wedged into my shoulder that did it. Where did it come from? I could not remember. I’d spent the night downing shots and requesting to play Sophie Ellis-Bextor in a South London gay bar...but so much of it was still hazy. There were gaping holes in my memory that my hungover brain began to fill with a host of worst-case scenarios, a rush of anxiety that was starting to become all-too familiar.

The pattern back then went like this: hit the booze hard and then wake up hating myself (to the extent I’d physically pick at my skin), terrified of what I might have said or done the night before. I’d text my friends and most of the time the answer was, “Nothing! You are paranoid!”. But, as I sat shivering in the shower that one particularly bleak morning, picking the glass out (apparently I’d fallen out of a taxi), I made a vow to stop drinking. I decided on three months off the booze (one didn’t seem enough) and ended up embarking on a journey that changed my relationship with alcohol forever.

At 27, after a solid 13 years of drinking pretty much every week without fail (such is the culture we are born into in Britain—my teenage friends and I would regularly sneak alcohol from our parents to drink in fields), I was definitely a problematic binge drinker. Bizarrely, my university friends labelled me as ‘the one who always kept it together on a night-out’, but the older I got, the less accurate that title felt. Or maybe I’d always been a hot mess but never realised the extent of it. Over the past decade I have lost phones, thrown up in plant pots, and slept with people I shouldn’t have (and let’s not even discuss the drunk texts)—all things that became a lot less funny the older I got and that I would never do sober.