Sobriety Is Your Absolute Priority.

I moved to Tenerife the week of my 33rd birthday. Fast approaching five months without kneecapping the fuck out of myself with booze.

I'd needed to extract myself from Seville like a rotten tooth needs yanking. Somehow, I'd managed to prioritise sobriety in a city that bled Cruzcampo and had more bars per square kilometre than anywhere else in Europe.

Five months, if you commit fully and make sobriety your raison d'être, offers sufficient data to suggest your whole life was a car crash simply because of booze.

Because without the poison interfering with breakfast, you twig that every single facet of your existence improves. Almost without trying.

Work performance. On the up. Finances. Less harrowing with each account log-in. Sleep. Deeply regenerative. Skin. Smooth. Waistline. Slender. Cortisol spikes. Minimal.

Dick in shower. Visible.

"Who is this guy?" the mirror would say.

One Saturday, early into my Canarian teaching tenure, I took a hike up into the Anaga Mountains. A place so far removed from the drunken south of the island, you'd have no idea reggaeton was a thing.

I walked for hours. Alone, which by then I'd stopped being afraid of. The pounding river walks of Seville, when cravings hit like a freight train, had taken care of that.

Late afternoon, I found a huge hill, plonked my arse down on the grass and looked down at a homestead. Terracotta roof. A few chickens scratching around like they had somewhere to be.

Washing on a line. Somebody's whole quiet, contented, unremarkable life laid out below me, showing me exactly what peace can actually look like.

And I sat there and thought about the night before.

I'd slept with a colleague. Not the usual production. We'd been safe, at my insistence. No chaos. No fog. No forgotten information I'd have to go digging for like a man searching the fucking bin for his wallet.

I remembered all of it.

The morning after wasn't complicated either. I woke up. Looked her in the eye. We got through it together like two adults instead of two gin casualties.

Sitting on that hill, it all deeply penetrated me.

Booze had been the whole rotten engine wrecking my life. Not a part of it. All of it. Every woman, every morning, every man I never got round to becoming.

One thing. That's all it ever was. One filthy bug, poisoning every leaf.

This will piss the morning routine influencer bros right off.

You don't need a 14-step morning routine. You don't need the fucking red light mask, the apple cider vinegar, the 21 habits of highly effective knobheads. Not at first. Maybe not ever, depending on the person.

You just need to stop drinking. Properly. Completely. And keep not drinking for long enough to see what happens.

Because the body starts repairing itself the moment you get out of its way. The mind starts clearing like fog burning off a valley. You stop haemorrhaging money to William Hill and Billy The Dealer. Lovers stop being victims of your unreliability and immaturity. Mornings stop being crime scenes you have to investigate.

That's a result of the replacement drink, craving surfing, sober toolkit management, connection, exercise, proper, sensible grown-up bedtimes and having the courage to tell your drinking buddies that you no longer subscribe to their weekly debauchery.

You must find your non-negotiables that keep the poison at bay.

By simply eradicating buckets of wine, you realise that what was underneath the whole time was manageable and resembled sanity.

Who fucking knew?

Sobriety alone can solve most of your problems. Genuinely, most of them. It's not a slogan. It's just arithmetic.

If your life has a fresh, gaping, purpose-shaped hole in it, sobriety must become the purpose. Give not drinking everything you've got. The universe will guide you toward something meaningful in time.

You see, sobriety clears the wreckage. It doesn't build the house.

That part still takes graft.

I didn't sit on that hill by accident. I'd been doing the unglamorous work for five months by then. Meetings. Meditation. Andalusian streets walked at midnight when cravings reared their pig-ugly heads, with only the bats and the street hookers to witness my angst.

I'd had the brutal conversations with myself that I'd have paid good money to avoid a year prior.

I'd found the bollocks to stare down my shadow and do what Carl Jung told me.

I'd been for coffee with other humans. Maybe twice.

"No, I'm alright, I'm gonna go home. Thanks, though" had become my favourite sentence.

Sobriety is the ground. But you still have to build something on it.

Otherwise, you're just a sober person standing on a freshly purchased plot of land, admiring how tidy it all looks, wondering why nothing's actually changed beyond the drink itself.

Truth one: stopping drinking alone will fix an enormous amount of your life. More than you think. More than seems fair, honestly, given how little effort it takes compared to everything else.

Truth two: the rest, the deeper rest, the person you actually become, still requires you to show up and do the work.

Both are true at once. Not a contradiction. That's just how it goes.

The engine stops wrecking the car the moment you turn it off. But somebody still has to drive the bloody thing somewhere worth going.

If you're newly sober and overwhelmed by how much needs fixing, stop panicking about the whole list.

Fix the drinking first. Just that. Watch what happens without you lifting another finger.

Then, once the wreckage clears and you can actually see the ground beneath it, start building. Slowly. Deliberately. With the same stubbornness that got you sober in the first place.

The homestead was always down there beneath that hill. I just couldn't see the bastard thing clearly until I'd stopped drinking long enough, and done enough of the work, to actually look down and take it in properly.

If GET TO MIDNIGHT. GO AGAIN. means something to you, it's on a sticker and a mug now.

Stick it on your laptop. Drink your morning coffee out of it. Let it remind you every single day.

Grab yours here

What's one problem in your life right now that might just clear up on its own once the drinking stops?

Hit reply.

I've read every single email I've been sent since Beyond The Booze began. Replied to a tonne. Your messages shape the tone and body of all my content, so keep them coming.

You're doing your bit for the community by sending me these. They're not lost in the ether.

GET TO MIDNIGHT. GO AGAIN.

Big love,

Gary 🧡