I think one of the hardest things about not-drinking for an extended period is in abandoning the image of it all. And alcohol and drugs do tend to hold a rather glamorous image…

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years – long before I would even consider taking on a period of sobriety like this…Why would I choose to drink or do drugs? What provokes someone to take that leap of faith and try out a new substance despite the associated risks?

My conclusion?

Image.

Now bear with me,

In life, I think one’s purpose is not to find oneself; but to create oneself.

To do so, we look at the world around us for inspiration and we do live in such a beautiful and diverse world of possibilities!

From what we see, we may choose to adopt or reject certain attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours. And as naturally follows, we draw on these inspirations to build up our own unique “image” or “identity”. It’s our primary mode of expression as humans and this identity can stay static or change as often as we so choose.

As a teenager I subscribed to a few different identity influences –  most of which glamorised the use and abuse of alcohol and drugs. I was fascinated by characters like Edie Sedgwick in Factory girl, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the life of Basquiat.

I was also (and still am) in awe of the life and works of artists Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow, Ellen Von Unwerth and Nan Goldin. Their ability to document an alternate reality of shameless freedom and reckless abandon invites me to go beyond any societal limitations and see the world as a playground of opportunity.

To me, these inspirations were able to capture and document the life of freedom I’d been chasing, yet, only recently found .

In my former years, I dreamed of living like these art-gods and saw alcohol as an easy connecter to their world. After all, they were almost always under the influence of something! I wanted to share part of their warped reality and alcohol was right there, inviting me to join them – or so I thought.

For this reason, I never really got embarrassed for being drunk. I thought I was cool like them “not giving a shit” and “making the most of my youth”…Oh how wrong I was…

Looking back, for one reason or another, I was focusing on their ability to “get fucked up” - which facilitated their enchanting lifestyle - rather than the actual meaning of the works I so admired. I was young…still learning. I didn’t get the big picture. It was a phase. A journey…a trip…augmented by my insecurity as a teenager still deciding how to approach this game called life.

Now, two years on, I still appreciate what these inspirations stand for, but, I want to go one step further than them. Live a life of crazy freedom without relying on alcohol to facilitate the creation of such a reality.

As Chris says, confidence is our first nature yet we have trained our self to believe it is something we need to work at. Kids aren’t born feeling guilty, self conscious or shameful about anything – we teach them to care.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that little bit of  insight with you, knowing that image isn’t something us humans tend to talk about very openly and honestly. I think most of us are embarrassed to admit that we aspire to be like other people – perhaps some of us feel it’s not compatible with the motto “be yourself”, though, I beg to differ.

I think that through looking around us and being inspired by what we see, we can create only better and better versions of ourselves.

It’s not about wanting to be someone else, but rather, looking around you, learning from others and creating your own unique identity based on what you see and admire.

One thing I’ve been trying to get in touch with again recently is what life was like before alcohol came into the picture.

I remember early “teen-hood” events like school dances where I was, quite literally, intoxicated with the adventure of the night – meeting new people, the excitement of flirting with cute boys and dancing the night away to trashy 90′s classics.

Funny thing is I truly remember feeling ‘drunk’ on the atmosphere – disinhibited, confident and high on life!

But then it’s like once alcohol came into the picture and it was (more-than) socially acceptable to get drunk I forgot entirely how to be confident and have fun without it.

It reminds me of this little parable:

“Two thousand years after the birth of Nazism, in a bar in Tokyo, a city that has been inhabited for five centuries now by tall, blue-eyed people, Hans and Fritz are enjoying a beer. At one point, Hans looks at Fritz and asks:
“Fritz, do you think it was always like this?”
“What?” asks Fritz.
“The world.”
“Of course the world was always like this, isn’t that what we were taught?“
“Of course, I don’t know what made me ask such a stupid question,” says Hans.
They finish their beer, talk about other things and forget the question entirely.”

I think a lot changes with time and it’s easy to forget how things used to be, especially when everyone is talking about how great things are now, in this ‘modern world’.

What I am interested in now is the past – particularly the magic of childhood experiences. Where did that curious, carefree mindset go? Why did I let it go? How can I see the world like that again? Because God knows – I had fun!

I spent this last weekend at the coast, making sandcastles in the sand and dancing on the beach. Dancing … something I hope to become more confident in doing during this adventure…

One of my favorite books I’ve read recently is the Zahir, by Paulo Coelho. It’s a novel – though very much based on the author’s own experiences. One of the themes of this book that has really stuck with me is this idea of the Acomodador.

The Acomodador is South-American witchdoctor term used to describe an event in one’s life which prohibits further progress. Coelho explains in this blog entry that it could be “a trauma, a particularly bitter defeat, disappointment in love, even a victory that we fail to quite understand, ends up making us act cowardly and incapable of moving ahead. The witchdoctor finds and gets rid of this “accommodating point”. To do so, he has to review our life and discover where this point lies.”

I think that the accommodator is a pretty common thing for us humans to experience. It’s a label for those moments when you feel immobilized, sick of trying and ‘not getting there’, dreading the embarrassment of failure for one reason or another. I know that I have accommodating points in my life that have resulted in unnecessary inhibitions.

One personal example is this:

When I was in grade 8 at high school I thought dancing was fun. Of course I had no rhythm and no coordination, but just having that way of expressing one’s self through movement was so natural, energizing and fun.

Until, one day, some girl at school told me that I was a “BAD dancer.” And so, the naive little me stopped dancing. Embarrassed, I lost the confidence to ‘be myself’ – the me that danced confidently and freely as a mode of expression, for fun.

When people asked me to dance, I’d tell them ‘I didn’t know how to’, reinforcing this particular Acomodador as a part of my identity.

When alcohol came into the picture, I found that I could dance confidently enough once again after a couple of drinks on a Saturday night. In fact dancing and drinking tended to go hand in hand from that point on.

But, reflecting on this, I don’t want my ability to let loose be limited to those times I am inebriated.

When I lived in San Francisco, I would often see random people dancing in the streets and in the park (there were a lot of buskers around – it’s a musical city). And sure, some people would point and laugh – “check out that chick breaking it down on the street”. But secretly I admired those people, and that’s who I want to be now. That crazy stranger dancing on the street as they listen to their iPod.

From my travelling experiences, I know that one of the best things about being away from home is the opportunity to rebuild your identity and be who you want to be. Because no-one knows you, they don’t expect you to be anything in particular. You have a blank canvas to re-create yourself.

Back home, surrounded by old friends and family, I’ve often struggled to change – despite my best intentions, simply because I allowed myself to continue to live up to my old identity. Internally, I would lay out what I wanted to change, but I wouldn’t really declare it publicly. Thus, I wasn’t really committed to it. I had these identifying thoughts I held on to like “Jiv is a bad dancer” “Jiv doesn’t dance unless she’s drunk” which soon became beliefs (after all, a belief is only a thought that you keep thinking …).

In addition, alcohol would give me the courage to go out and be the new person I wanted to be. Yet when sober, something was holding me back. While I’ve found alcohol to be an effective temporary coping reaction to my “acomodadors”, for any progress to be made, I need to be comfortable changing my self for real. Time to try something else …

This year I’ve set forward my intentions to change publicly. When I found the courage to say to my friends and family “I’m not that kind of person anymore … I’m going to be this person” my family and most of my friends listened and genuinely wanted to support me. It makes the whole metamorphosis easier. And that’s what I have been doing this last week and a half.

While I know it is still early days – I have noticed some psychological changes already. I don’t feel so overwhelmed or held back and I’ve been dancing publicly – sometimes even without any music! And now that I’ve shown myself that I can do that – and enjoy it – I have no real reason to continue telling myself what I “can” and “can’t” do – sober or drunk.

My name is Jiveny. I am 19 years old, in my third year of creative industries at QUT.

I started drinking at the age of 14.

A moment of truth: for me, it was an act of rebellion and a means of escape. Being the eldest, I was the ‘experiment child’ and my parents kept me on a tight leash. To compensate, I was always going behind their backs creating and destroying a world outside their boundaries.

I remember around this age, coming home to an empty house – a rare opportunity.

I wasn’t feeling on top of the world that day and I’d heard this thing called alcohol was a good way to deal with negative emotions. Taking advantage of having the house to myself  I went straight to my parents liquor collection. I don’t know what I drank, but it was enough to make all my anger, sad thoughts and negativity go away. Enough to forget and feel free.

Of course that wasn’t a normal thing for me – to drink alone. More often as I grew up I drinking was done in social situations. Yet for one reason or another, I always seemed to end up drinking more than my peers – sometimes to dilute social awkwardness and sometimes simply out of boredom, but most often because that’s what people our age did.

Like a lot of people who abuse alcohol, I was very good at hiding it from my parents – I know they love and care for me deeply and would have been horrified to know the full extent of my drinking. After a while I got a reputation for being a heavy drinker and for a while I revelled in that title – challenging friends to drink more than me…And my teenage years of partying went just like that – a drunken haze of laughing off embarrassment and sleeping through Sunday’s hangover.

Since leaving school, I don’t tend get as drunk as I used to – that is I haven’t thrown up or blacked out in ages –but I do drink much more frequently. Now that I am of legal drinking age, during the week I often drink at meal times and enjoy catching up with friends over a drink or three after uni/work. And as for weekends…well we’ve all been to The Valley on a Friday or Saturday night and know how easily one can lose track…

Considering this I realize that to a large degree, drinking is often no longer a conscious choice, but a reaction or habit – something I just do in certain situations without much thought other than ‘it is time’.

For me, Hello Sunday Morning is a new story – a new adventure – of self exploration and personal development. It’s taken me a while to get to this point – to actually step out of my comfort zone and ask the question – ‘why is it that I drink so often, so ritualistically?’ And ‘why don’t I feel comfortable at a party, bar or club if I don’t have a drink in my hand?’ These are the questions I will be exploring and overcoming in the next three months and I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you.

In taking on this HSM challenge my main goals are to redefine my choice as an individual and live more consciously. That is, to actually think about the choices I make and choose what I want – not take the easy option of following what I have done in the past or what others around me are doing.

I also want to become more confident in social situations – have the courage to do everything I want to do shamelessly; release my inhibitions naturally and enjoy the ‘now’ moments of life more fully.

Finally, I want to inspire others to take a step back and consider their own relationship with alcohol. How is it serving you?

Before I sign off, I just want to get one thing clear:

I don’t think that drinking is bad. Nor do I think that alcohol itself is is the devil.

In fact, I really like alcohol!

But I think that it is important to consider why it is you like a particular thing, where it fits in your life and at which point does it move from a vice to an addiction?

So here I go, taking on the HSM challenge: 90 days without that liquid courage.

Now watch me grow : )