I am an academic, and I spend my days reading, thinking, writing, and teaching. (That’s the ideal: I also spend a lot of time in meetings and on admin, as any academic will tell you.) Until 2016, I spent most evenings drinking, and many mornings and days hungover and incapable, crippled with guilt, or with speculation about what I might have done in the dark of a blackout. Stopping drinking was very hard; and learning to live without it was and still is even harder. But also fascinating: without clobbering myself on the head every night to numb and obliterate, my mind is full of information and ideas about sobriety, of gratitude to the resources that have helped me, of curiosity about the changes being sober brings, and of strategies for trying to live a full, awake, vivid life and cope without avoidance and self-sabotage. I also see connections between what I read or think about for work, and what I read and think about addiction.

This blog is an experiment: a space for me to think about these connections. I hope it might help people who recognise something of themselves in what I write; and maybe even interest those who don’t.