Day 12/28

How are you all doing? It’s Tuesday today which for me means a few meetings, probably a strength workout later and about 14 cups of coffee.

I’ll start back at the beginning, with what sparked the idea of Sober.FYI and what led me to launch this newsletter and Instagram page almost on a whim on the 31st of December. It was the last week of December and I was thinking back over the year that had just happened, what it meant to me and what I’d learnt. As we’re all heavily aware, last year was a tough one for basically everyone on the planet, whether you were young, old, rich or poor, life as you knew it became disrupted. It started with the horrendous bush fires in Australia, had a middle where we saw some glimmers of hope that the Black Lives Matter movement has started to take hold and ended almost as it began in political chaos, lead by an obese orange turtle throwing his toys out the pram. But overshadowing all of the year that was, was this sense of change, caused by the only virus we can picture, COVID-19.

Lockdown after lockdown, restriction after restriction meant that we had to get more comfortable with one main thing, spending more time at home, either by ourselves or with our loved ones. To many, myself included, this was a tough adjustment and took a lot to get me through and to be honest, I’m still adjusting to it right now. We had to almost become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

This rings true in many situations, but this is Sober.FYI and therefore I want to link this feeling of being uncomfortable to not drinking alcohol and how this manifested itself for me. Many people feel the biggest pressure to drink alcohol in social situations, whether that comes in the form of an after-work drink, a birthday party or whatever, if you live in Britain as I do, there will be a link back to drinking alcohol.

This means that if or when we’re choosing not to drink, we normally are asked questions like “Why aren’t you drinking?” or “Stop being so boring” or even “Go on, just have one”. Therefore if we turn alcohol down, we can find ourselves in an uncomfortable situation, having to explain our choices, which most of the time are deeply personal to random strangers or work colleagues.

However, I want to tell you that we can flip that on its head and instead realise that being sober is our choice and we all know that being sober is cool. We know that we can be in charge of our alcohol intake, we know we can thoroughly enjoy ourselves, we know we can have no post-drink blanks or hangovers but most importantly we know we have the power to open up the conversation and instead ask them “Why are you drinking?”.

I started Sober.FYI with that sole intention, to prove that being sober was cool, to prove that collectively we can help drive a more mindful drinking culture, one that cares for others as well as ourselves and ultimately one that will be better for us all in the long run.

Next time — we’ll chat what reaching 14 days alcohol-free means to us and what effects that will have had on our bodies.

Until then 👋