I Was Afraid Sobriety Would Kill My Creativity But It Did The Opposite

When I hit my mid-teens, I grew fixated on the idea of living a “creative” life. I also had a specific idea of what a so-called creative person looked like in my head.

Like many women, the image was vivid and it was Carrie Bradshaw, sitting at her laptop with a glass of wine and a cigarette. It was also red wine and black turtlenecks in moody bars, and drinking whisky in a dim office, surrounded by piles of paper to edit. In my mind, these creative types lived by the phrase, “write drunk, edit sober”. 

The perceived intersection between creativity and alcohol has been written about countless times. Most people are familiar with the romantic, idealised notion of the artsy, bohemian lifestyle wherein free spirits have long, deep conversations shrouded in cigarette smoke and drinking glasses of wine. Like love and marriage, alcohol and the arts seemed to go together like a horse and carriage. 

Then, two years ago, I realised I needed to stop drinking.

This wasn’t the first time I’d thought about quitting drinking. I had two previous stints of sobriety under my belt, both of which ended within a year. During my first foray into sobriety, I found myself with an invitation to a premiere of a documentary. There I was, amongst journalists, filmmakers and the fashion elite of Perth; sober, awkward and shy, I tucked myself into a corner, made no connections and left immediately after the film ended. 

Right, I thought, there’s another example of how sobriety doesn’t belong in the art world.

Still, on my third attempt at sobriety, I was determined to make it stick. Only, I didn’t know how. On my first two attempts to go sober, I’d immersed myself in sober literature before I’d gone to therapy; I’d tried to grapple with the roots of my drinking problem and had done all the “right” things, so I wondered what more I could possibly do to make it stick this time.

The thing about sobriety that no one ever really talks about is how you spend your time now that you’re not drinking, and if people do, it’s only in a positive way, with statements like, “I have so much time now that I never have a hangover!”. And that’s great, maybe, when you’re five years sober and a much more fully realised person than a four-days-sober, uncertain, husk of a human. 

In those early days, vacant hours were scary. Suddenly, there were great big expanses of time stretching ahead of me filled with nothing. Where normally, there would be afternoon drinks or a hangover that snatched away an entire day in sleep and sickness, now, there was nothing.

The first two times I got sober, I spent a lot of that time napping. On the Saturdays and Sundays that I finished my chores by 10am and was left aimless in my apartment, I’d lay on the couch and with nothing better to do, I’d sleep.

This time, I knew that if I wanted to make it stick, I needed to make sure my sober life wasn’t, well, boring.

It started with writing short stories. I found prompts online and I wrote around specific themes to pass the time. They weren’t particularly good but I’ve always loved writing and I hadn’t done it in years. I’d been too busy drinking and being hungover, but now that I wasn’t doing that, I was finally able to prioritise writing. And I did! I wrote short story after short story and as I got better, I started writing a novel where I put 1,000 words or more onto paper every single day.

I bought clay from the shops, and I’d paint. I moulded earrings (16 pairs of terrible, terrible earrings) and I dried them in the sun before painting them and adding the hooks, and then promptly putting them away because they weren’t really fit for wearing in public. 

For the first time since I was a teenager, I felt filled with creativity and my passion for immersing myself in pretty words and complicated paragraphs, or swirls of colours and the clay beneath my fingers taking shape only spurred on my sobriety.

I’d always been worried that becoming sober would rob me of a creative life, but instead, it gave me one.

I can say with certainty that without the creative outlet I had during those first few months of sobriety, I’m not sure I would have made it to now. Exercising my imagination, and the meditative qualities of creation not only helped to fill the time, but also helped to fill my own cup. I was buoyed by the process of creating, and satisfied by the completion. I looked forward to weekends because I had things to do that brought me joy, to the point that even the thought of drinking and wasting a second of my newfound freedom to a hangover was terrifying.

In retrospect, all this isn’t surprising. If you’ve heard of art therapy then you already know that creativity is often used as a mindfulness method for the treatment of anxiety, depression and, yes, even addiction. 

A 2016 study examining the reduction of cortisol (stress) levels in participants following art-making indicated that “art-making resulted in statistically signification lowering of cortisol levels”. 

The benefits lie in the potential for expressing pent-up feelings and the way it encourages you to enter a flow-state, wherein time passes without you noticing. Kind of like what happened when I got started on the wine. 

I’m not the only one to notice an increase in creativity during sobriety. Chris Raine of Hello Sunday Morning (a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to helping people change their relationship with alcohol) told Arts Hub of his own enhanced creativity during sobriety. “The year I took off drinking, I wrote every Sunday morning, equating to almost a book of stories,” he said.

A recent study by Essex University and Berlin’s Humboldt University, worked to debunk the myth that drugs and alcohol make a person more creative, examining hundreds of papers. It concluded that, “It doesn’t do anything for creativity,” Dr Panel Hanel told The Guardian. “People don’t benefit from it — it just has no effect at all.”

Everyone is different and the decision to give up alcohol is an extremely personal one. But for me, I was afraid of losing that imaginative spark inside of me in sobriety and now that I’m 621 days sober, I know that I wasn’t creative because of wine, I was creative in spite of it.