Why I Haven’t Finished Alcohol Doesn’t Help, Dammit! Yet
· 5 min read
I honestly thought I would have finished this book by now, but I haven’t. I’m still working on Alcohol Doesn’t Help, Dammit! (ADHD) and its accompanying workbook, and the whole thing has become much bigger than I ever imagined when I started. This is my first attempt at taking everything in my head and turning it into a proper book and workbook. What began as one idea has grown into two substantial, closely connected books, each expected to be around 300 pages, approximately 600 pages altogether.
Alcohol Doesn’t Help, Dammit! (ADHD) is the main book. It combines my own experiences with research into the relationship between ADHD and alcohol, while also looking at self-medication in a much broader sense. The second book is a separate practical workbook containing exercises, reflection pages and tools that people can return to at different stages of questioning their drinking or protecting their sobriety. Both will be available in printed and digital formats.
There have been endless rewrites, chapters I thought were finished that suddenly didn’t feel right anymore, research rabbit holes, memories that made me reconsider entire sections and plenty of moments when I wondered why on earth I had decided to take this on.
Then there is the formatting, which has been an absolute mental nightmare for me. The devil really is in the detail, and apparently books contain a lot of details. Every margin, page break, heading, exercise, illustration and visual element needs attention. My ADHD brain can happily disappear into an interesting research rabbit hole for hours, but ask it to adjust the same piece of spacing repeatedly and it begins to threaten mutiny.
The main reason it is taking longer, however, is very simple:
I don’t want to rush something that matters this much to me. This is not really a book about alcohol alone. It is about what can sit underneath our relationship with it and why alcohol can feel so effective before it begins causing more harm than relief. It is also about the other things we might reach for when we are overwhelmed, anxious, overstimulated, emotionally flooded, numb, bored or simply desperate to make our brains quiet for a while.
For one person, that might be alcohol. For somebody else, it could be food, drugs, shopping, gambling, sex, scrolling, overworking or constantly chasing the next source of stimulation. The behaviour may look different from the outside, but the question beneath it can be very similar: What am I trying so hard not to feel, or what am I trying so desperately to regulate?
I also wanted to write honestly about shame because I believe it is one of the least useful and yet most powerful parts of this subject. There is the shame of knowing that something is no longer helping you and doing it anyway. There is the shame of breaking another promise to yourself and wondering why moderation appears manageable for other people but becomes an exhausting internal negotiation for you. Eventually, that shame can make you believe there must be something fundamentally wrong with you.
Masking is another important part of the book because so many people become incredibly good at looking fine. They go to work, care for other people, meet deadlines, make jokes, perform, achieve, socialise and keep everything moving, while privately relying on something every evening to bring themselves down, switch off, numb out or quiet the noise in their heads for a few hours. The distance between how somebody appears to the outside world and what is actually happening underneath can be enormous.
I don’t believe shame helps people change, but I do believe understanding can. I’m not interested in writing a book that points a finger at people or tells them they simply need more discipline. I want to explore why certain behaviours can become so compelling, especially when somebody is already dealing with impulsivity, emotional intensity, overwhelm, restlessness or a constant need for relief.
There were reasons I drank.
There were reasons alcohol worked for me for a while, and there were equally real reasons why, eventually, it didn’t. I want to be honest about all of those stages instead of rewriting my past into a neat recovery story in which every difficult experience conveniently becomes a lesson.
The workbook has almost become a second main book because I don’t want it to be filled with generic journal prompts that somebody completes once and never looks at again. I want it to be genuinely useful to the person who hasn’t stopped drinking but has quietly started wondering whether they need to; to the person standing at the edge of sobriety who is terrified of what life without alcohol might look like; and to the person who has already been sober for some time but suddenly hears that familiar thought: “Maybe this time I could control it.”
That last person matters to me just as much. If one exercise, one page or even one sentence interrupts a thought before it becomes a relapse, then all these rewrites will have been worth it.
Writing honestly is far more difficult than writing cleverly.
It would have been easy to make sobriety sound linear, tidy everything up in hindsight and wrap every painful experience in a convenient conclusion, but that is not how it happened and pretending otherwise would not help anyone. So I keep going back through both books, removing anything that feels too polished, adding the things I wish somebody had told me, questioning whether each section is genuinely useful or merely sounds good on the page, and trying to create what I wish I could have picked up when I was still questioning my own relationship with alcohol.
Somewhere right now, somebody is wondering why they keep doing something they know is no longer helping them. They may be asking why alcohol makes their brain feel quiet, why moderation requires so much effort, why they can hold everything together for everyone else but still feel completely out of control with this, or why they continue promising themselves that tomorrow will be different. Perhaps they are also beginning to ask the much bigger question: What if I actually stopped?
Those questions deserve something better than “try harder”, and that is why I am so determined to finish these books and get them out into the world. Alcohol Doesn’t Help, Dammit! (ADHD) and its companion workbook are coming in print and digital form. They are later than I expected, but I genuinely believe they will be more honest, more practical and far more useful because of it.
Obviously this book cover is still a work in progress