​More about me

Air Force years

 

Being in the Royal Australian Air Force was a dream come true. Something I had wanted since I was a small boy. We were sent to a country airbase, about 130 of us ranging from ages fifteen to seventeen. All under the legal drinking age and theoretically under the Air Force's watchful eye. In practice, boys being boys and far from home, obtaining beer on a Friday night through creative means became something of an art form.

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I remember my first proper beer clearly. A steel can with a textured finish, KB, nicknamed Kiddies Beer by those who knew better. It was great at first, though as I discovered later, not such a good idea when you're homesick and sixteen.

In a man's world we learned quickly. Work hard, drink hard. Through my career the drinking culture wasn't just accepted, it was expected. Non-drinkers were looked at sideways, considered non-team players or something worse. Being one of the boys meant being one of the drinking boys and I wore that identity without question for a long time.

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The highlights of my service drinking career, if you could call them that, included social outings that ended with someone losing their dinner down the side of a taxi, a car crash with DUI charges and a sobering night in a cell, a motorbike crash, and falling off a two storey roof in Darwin while attempting to liberate a twelve foot fibreglass crocodile. I became known for falling asleep in a chair or quietly disappearing to find a bed after too many, wherever we happened to be.

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Through all of it I progressed through the ranks, took on more responsibility and genuinely loved the work. Marriage and children slowed things down somewhat. Money was tighter and drinking settled into what passed for normal, weekends at barbecues, a beer on the porch watching an afternoon thunderstorm. I spent much of my career in training roles, instructing on aircraft and equipment courses, which I thoroughly enjoyed. But exercises and deployments away from home meant the old patterns were never far away.

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After twenty one years I left the service. It was hard to say goodbye to that life, the people and the camaraderie. But I was ready for something different.

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Corporate Life

 

I was officially out of the Air Force on a Friday and started work the following Monday. In the year before leaving I had prepared myself for a transition into IT training, becoming a certified instructor. One of the first things I discovered at the new company was that you could drink your fill on the company credit card. The only rule was to leave the minibar alone when travelling. I never did take them up on it. I needed to be sharp in the classroom the next day.

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The downside was being paid monthly and working long hours with no recompense. Balancing the budget was genuinely tough. Drinking continued at what I told myself were normal levels, maybe a carton of beer a week. We built a house in the country, our first real home after years of married quarters and rentals. The town we moved to had four pubs serving a population of about 1800. I thought that was remarkable at the time.

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Three years later I left the company and went out on my own as a training contractor. Work was good until the dot com collapse in 2000, then it dried up almost overnight. As the pressure mounted the drinking began to creep up quietly alongside it. If my wife went to bed early and left me to it, I would work through my beer and then start on her scotch. To cover my tracks I topped up the whisky bottle with water, just enough that it wasn't obvious. She didn't find out until I told her years later.

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Gradually the Monday hangovers became Monday and Tuesday hangovers. The drinking window expanded, Friday to Sunday, then Thursday to Sunday, then Wednesday to Sunday. Missed Mondays became missed Tuesdays. The designated alcohol free days at the start of the week weren't really alcohol free at all — my body was still processing the weekend.

When I did make it in on a Monday, tired and emotional was the polite version. Grumpy, shaky and anxious was closer to the truth. Eventually I secured longer term IT contractor work and some of the financial pressure eased, but the patterns had taken hold and they didn't ease with it.

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The internal questioning started somewhere in there. Why am I doing this to myself? Am I an alcoholic? Why can't I stop at two? Why can't I just stop when the beer runs out? Night sweats arrived. Three in the morning wake-ups, dry mouthed and full of recriminations. Gout arrived too, which was its own special kind of fun.

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I was building an aeroplane in the shed during this period, a hobby I loved. Doing it with a few beers on the go led to mistakes I wasn't happy with. I redid those parts when I was sober enough to see them clearly.

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The final straw was a night I found myself drinking a cleanskin wine I genuinely detested because the beer had run out and I couldn't stop. That and the hangover that followed it. Something had to change.

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White knuckling mindset and whiteants

 

In 2007 I knew I needed to stop. The question was how. Moderation hadn't worked. Every break I took seemed to be followed by an escalation, as if my brain needed to catch up on what it had missed. I read through a lot of the AA literature and felt genuine compassion for the people in those stories. I could see something of myself in them, but I didn't feel like one of them. I absolutely did not want to become one of them. AA in a small country town felt more like Alcoholics Almost Anonymous. The twelve steps scared the life out of me.

But I believed what the Big Book told me. That I had a disease. That I wasn't like normal people. That this was simply my cross to carry.

So I decided to go it alone. Cold turkey. White knuckling it, as they say.

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Each day I told myself I wouldn't drink. It was hard but I kept my focus on what I was gaining and pushed away any thought of what I was missing. I signed up for a real estate development course. I threw myself into building the aeroplane. I prayed a lot for help and felt that it was given. For about six months I stayed away from anywhere alcohol might be. No pubs, no restaurants, no social life to speak of, for me or my wife. I wasn't easy to live with when the deprivation built into something that came out sideways.

I would see people drinking, laughing, clearly enjoying themselves and quietly remind myself: you are not like them. You cannot drink. Ever.

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But I felt great. My health improved, my appearance improved and the milestones began to stack up. Anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas, my first New Year without drinking myself into a stupor. A highlight I still remember was flying my aeroplane on New Year's Day and sending everyone photos of me above the clouds in the early morning air. I counted the days, then the years. I felt the occasional pang of missing out but I kept to the path.

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The first time I remember feeling genuinely free was driving through a roadside breath test and realising I felt calm instead of afraid. No knot in the stomach, no rehearsed explanation. Just calm. It was a remarkable feeling.

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Several years in, I began to flirt with an idea I knew I shouldn't be entertaining. Just one. Just this once. I would mention it to my wife, we would talk it through and I wouldn't take that drink. But something had started shifting beneath the surface. Like white ants quietly working through the foundations of a house, old beliefs had begun to resurface. Questioning why I was so different. Questioning why I was depriving myself of something everyone else seemed to enjoy without a second thought. Slowly eating away at a resolve I thought was solid.

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In 2013 I regained my recreational pilot's licence and added new endorsements to fly cross country. Our Chief Flying Instructor mentored me through each phase of training and we celebrated the successful test flight of my aeroplane in 2014. I was part of a small community of pilots built around that school and I loved it. In December 2015 the CFI passed away suddenly. I knew they had been unwell but not how serious it was. Being a private person, they had told no one. I grieved quietly, internally and more painfully than I expected.

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The noise in my head got louder. You're broken. You have a disease. You're not like normal people. You may as well have one. For two weeks that internal argument grew until one night I couldn't hold it off any longer. I bought four 500ml cans of Stella, took myself out to the shed and opened the first one. I had done so much praying over the years that I half expected to be struck by lightning on the spot. Instead I just sobbed. At the stupidity of it, at the waste of it, at myself.

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I didn't tell my wife for months. The shame of drinking again made everything worse, not better, which somehow made me want to drink more. When I finally told her she was devastated. All the years, all the effort, all the quiet pride she had taken in what I had built and I had walked away from it, alone in a shed with four cans of Stella.

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Eight years and nine months

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Operation Catch Up

 

In 2016 what I privately called Operation Catch Up began. My second drinking career. Within a fairly short time I was back to roughly the same levels I had left behind nearly nine years earlier.

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We took a three week trip to Italy that year. I marvelled at the price of Peroni in the supermarkets, twenty seven Euro cents a can. My family's dissatisfaction with my drinking on that trip became hard to ignore. There were moments where the drinking became the focus rather than the remarkable country we were standing in. Peroni became my go-to beer back home, ostensibly for the taste but more honestly for the 5.8% alcohol content.

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Life was more comfortable by this point. Steady public service work, mortgages paid off, children long gone. Buying larger quantities of alcohol was no problem financially. Wednesday to Sunday was back on. Bingeing was back. I tried all the strategies, like shifting my alcohol free days around, starting later in the day, having a soft drink in between, leaving Sunday clear. None of it worked for long.

About a year after restarting I noticed a pain in my right side under the rib cage. We were on holiday in Bali. I googled cirrhosis and read things I didn't want to read. Surely not. Tests when we got home showed nothing definitive. I took medication for an ulcer for a month without improvement.

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I slowed down slightly but noticed something unsettling in the process, I needed more to get the same effect. Eight or nine cans had become the new six-pack. One carton a week became one and a half, sometimes two. At some point I sat down and calculated the actual ethanol content in a carton and a half of Peroni. The equivalent of more than a bottle and a half of whisky every week. I could never have drunk that much whisky. But in effect, I was.

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The Monday version of me was back. Grumpy, shaky, anxious, fatigued. Activities around the house had become means to an end, things to get through before drinking. Gardening, cleaning the pool, a short drive, watching the clock. By a certain point eleven in the morning had started to feel like a reasonable time to crack the first one.

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Outings to the pub for a meal almost always ended in a longer drinking session at home. And slowly, the thing I loved most began to lose its simple joy.

Flying my aeroplane had always been something that filled me up. I would pull it out of the hangar, preflight it, fly a few circuits, put it away again. But I had started hurrying to the bottle shop on the way home, grabbing a six pack, drinking the first one in the car park. The satisfaction of a good landing, the quiet joy of closing the hangar doors, it had gone. Alcohol had moved, in the old military phrase, to front and centre. Everything else had become something to get through before drinking.

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The days started blending into each other. And somewhere in that sameness a thought began to surface that I had been avoiding. How long before it was just the drinking and nothing else?

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Five beers in one night the internal argument got loud enough that I couldn't ignore it. Why am I doing this? Why can't I stop? The answer that came back was the one I had learned to fear most. Just give in. You're fine. Why bother. It settled over me like a grey blanket, warm and suffocating at the same time. It's just too hard. There's no hope.

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I pushed it away. But it frightened me more than I wanted to admit.

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This Naked Mind, the Book

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By late January 2021 I had reached the point where I told my wife that if I could just get back to the mindset I'd had in 2007, I thought I could do it again. I had to hope that was true. It might be hard, possibly very hard, but I had to try.

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So I started searching. I typed "alcohol free mindset" into Google and one of the first results was an ad for a book called This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. The reviews were compelling enough that I ordered it the same day.

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I started reading it on the bus to work and it made sense from the first pages in a way nothing else ever had. Annie's own story was part of it, but it was the explanations that stopped me. Page after page of things I had never understood before, finally making sense. The other passengers must have wondered about the middle aged man occasionally saying "oh, that's why" loud enough to hear. I read it five times, just to make sure it would stick. I was still drinking through this period but with noticeably less enthusiasm.

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After finishing the book I signed up for the thirty day Alcohol Experiment online, still holding onto the idea that moderation might be possible. I did the work, watched the videos, even journaled occasionally. Slowly something shifted. I began to realise I didn't want to moderate. What I wanted was the freedom I remembered from driving through that roadside breath test years earlier. The experiment is designed to give you a break from alcohol, help you understand what's been driving your drinking and from that place make a decision about what comes next. My experience had already shown me that moderation wasn't a realistic destination for me. I chose to stop.

I haven't looked back since.

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Some people suggest the years of sobriety before my relapse were wasted when I took that first drink. I don't see it that way. Those years taught me what it takes to get through anniversaries, Christmas, New Year's, births, deaths and weddings without drinking when every social expectation points in the other direction. Those experiences were harder than they needed to be but they were gold. They were still there when I needed them.

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I don't count the days this time. I didn't see the point in that after everything. I simply live them.

I wake up energised and ready each morning, which still doesn't feel like something I should take for granted. My wife and I have since completed two back to back house renovations, something that genuinely wouldn't have happened the same way if I had still been drinking. At the first major problem, and there were many, I would have found a reason to sit down with a beer or head to the pub and think about it rather than actually do anything about it. The hangovers alone would have cost days.

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What made the difference in the end wasn't effort or determination. It was understanding. Accumulating the right knowledge, building the emotional clarity that came with it and from that place taking action. Not forcing a behaviour change, but understanding alcohol clearly enough that the behaviour changed on its own.

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That same process is available to anyone. You don't need my story. You need your own version of that understanding.

Everyone's relationship with alcohol is different. No story is worse or better than another. But the desire to feel better, clearer and more in control of your own life is something most men share, whatever their particular version of the journey looks like.

If you're at the beginning of that question, the guide below is a good place to start.

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How This Experience Shaped My Work

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The work I do today grew directly out of this experience and the understanding that followed. Not from a qualification alone, but from living it, losing it and finding a way through that actually made sense.

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Today I work as an Alcohol Freedom Coach helping men understand their relationship with alcohol clearly enough that lasting change becomes possible, without white knuckling it and without needing to hit a rock bottom first.

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If alcohol has started to feel confusing in your own life, my free guide When Drinking Stops Making Sense is a good place to begin.

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