skip to content

Don't want to drink today

DAVE: I remember waking up one day and I got out of bed and there was a big gash all on my forehead over there and my flatmate was there, well she was more like my sister really. We were real close, we still are. And she said to me, she goes, “What are you doing? Where have you been the last three days? I haven’t seen you for three days! We thought you were dead in the ditch. We thought something had happened to you. And you got thrown out of a moving car outside our house. Where have you been?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And that was three days and I lost my job because I didn’t turn up to work. To this day, I don’t know.

A lot of my drinking was characterised by that, just blackout after blackout after blackout. I mean, I was aware. It’s pretty hard when you’re waking up and you’re saying, “I’m not going to drink today,” and then hop back on it. You’re back on it again. It’s like, where was it? Where was the fight to not do this?

INTERVIEWER: So you had a thought, “I don’t want to drink today.”
DAVE: I don’t want to drink today. I want to have a sober day.
INTERVIEWER: Did you know when that thought started appearing in your mind?
DAVE: When I couldn’t hold a cup of coffee in the morning.
INTERVIEWER: So some of the things that were happening, you started thinking, “man, this is…”.
DAVE: Yeah. I couldn’t outrun it anymore. It was everywhere around me. And I didn’t want to know what happened in black out. I don’t want to know, but then people would tell me and stuff started coming to me, and not nice stuff either. It started coming to me and there was one point where I was just like…
INTERVIEWER: And somewhere in between all that, this thought started occurring, “I don’t want to drink.”
DAVE: Yeah, “I can’t do this anymore.”
INTERVIEWER: “I can’t do it.”
DAVE: Yeah. I was over it.