When I was younger, I was brought up on an ideology that any level of drinking was okay, as long as you hadn’t hit rock bottom. The frequency or volume didn’t matter, only hitting rock bottom did.

Drinking wasn’t just normalised, it was encouraged. MTV culture was huge, ‘the influencer’ hadn’t been born, and wellness wasn’t mainstream.

When someone had a problem with alcohol, I’d often hear, “Well they have a successful career, so it’s not a problem.” That logic always felt off to me.

Alcohol was a clear cut spectrum. Sobriety on one end (seen as a problem because you’d either failed with alcohol, or you were considered boring for doing something different), and alcoholism on the other (seen as bad). By this logic, the only place on the spectrum that wasn’t seen as problematic, and perceived as ‘normal’, was grey area drinking, where most people fall.

As a grey area drinker, I had to define my own problem with alcohol. I did that by asking myself a simple question “Can I drink without consequences?” The answer was always no. Next question “Are the consequences worth it”, the answer was always no.

The consequences weren’t losing my job, or ruining relationships. But they prevented me from being the best version of myself, and weren’t worth the trade off. Wasted money, low productivity, hangxiety, not being present ~ they stacked up.

Most people accept these consequences, because it’s the norm. We drink, we get drunk, and we suffer the consequences the next day. And if we don’t drink, we’re seen as boring, or as a failure. But I didn’t want that. Life was hard enough without a hangover, so why complicate it further.

If I hadn’t defined my own problem with alcohol, I would have stayed stuck in the grey area, because society’s definition of a problem didn’t align with mine. I was often peer pressured, sober shamed and asked “Why have you stopped drinking if you’re not dependent?”.

Alcohol is the only drug we have to justify not taking, and that’s why our mission with Arclett is to remind others that any level of drinking can carry consequences. If you are in the grey area, instead of relying on labels, just ask yourself, are the consequences worth it?