I bet I’m not the only person who knows exactly what ‘alcohol creep’ means.
It’s when you start off small, drinking just a glass or two of wine once or twice a week. Or perhaps you are not drinking at all.
With great effort or perhaps with no effort at all, you keep your drinking down to a very dull roar. Maybe it’s only a low hum, indeed, or a very deep growl.
Then days, weeks and months go by… too cocky, you start getting into old bad habits. It’s just the weekends to start… but then you’re out for a mid-week dinner so you have a glass. Then it’s two, and you would have had more but you’re driving home. The creep is slow, steady, stealthy even. And inevitable.
Then it’s getting a bottle of wine in as you need a splash of red for that spaghetti bolognaise recipe… which you then tipple night by night.
Then you start the mental torture and that hyper vigilance makes you stressed out so you start drinking more.
And then the alcohol creep has crept right back up to where it was when you made yourself stop the last time.
Some people don’t drink much ever; some people can always moderate.
Some of us are just not moderators with alcohol and never will be. Better to own it. Better to accept it. Better to work out what alcohol was doing for you, or what you thought it was doing for you. Take anything you felt was valuable and then find other ways to get it.
Things that do not creep and things that do not torture you.
I had hundreds of alcohol creep experiences over the 25 years from when I first decided to cut down my drinking, when I was 30, to my final acceptance that alcohol would never ben my friend at 55.
What a relief that is all over.
