Christmas Day, 2025. I’m lying on the couch at home in my town apartment, alone, feeling like absolute crap. At the family farm in my home village 15 minutes away, at least three of my brothers are setting up their computers in the living room to settle down for the annual seven day LAN party. And I have a bleeping COLD.
In Norway, we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve. So yesterday, we ate good food, opened presents, had a jolly good time with laughter and metal music. Some of us drank wine, as usual. I wasn’t one of them, for the first time since 2019.
I was very emotional yesterday. My brothers drank red wine at dinner. It didn’t bother me. But for some reason, I just felt… off.
Maybe it was the memory of last year’s Christmas dinner where I had a glass of wine and something bad happened, when one of my brothers out of the blue got really ugly with me and sent me running out crying.
I went out to have a cigarette, and my oldest brother came out to have one as well. He asked if I was okay. I told him that I got kinda sad and weird. The others came out for cigarettes and I went back inside, where I promptly started sobbing hysterically, out of the blue. The two brothers who were inside got startled, but started comforting me, asking if what happened last year happened again, if someone got mean with me. No, everyone was really nice. The situation was really bizarre. I was so full of emotions. At that point, I’d been 46 days sober.
I got home at around midnight, got dressed in pajamas and laid down on my couch to ease my brain. At that point last year I had been drunk, and my neighbor came over with another bottle of red wine. I missed the memory, but not the alcohol.
Then I started thinking about what happened on Wednesday two weeks ago.
I went to a bar just to socialize, and stupidly ended up taking this guy home with me. We’ve been friends for years, and he used to have a crush on me, back when I was skinny. I was sober, he was far from it. He got pushy, so I tuned in to a Discord voice chat with some of my brothers, so that if ‘something happened’ that I wasn’t comfortable with, my brothers would somehow back me up.
Stupid. Because all it did was make my brothers and the others on the chat listen to what happened in the background, and one of my brothers theorized that I was definitely drunk because of the way I was talking. And he told everyone. Mom, stepmom, grandma, the family members who weren’t there.
I didn’t know about that until three days later, when me, him and our SIL went to mom’s place to do some Christmas baking. Brother asked me in the car if I had been drinking. I told him no. He didn’t believe me, because he’d heard how I had been talking in the background on that Discord chat. I’d been sounding kinda sheepish.
I had sounded like that because I’d been trying to get control of the intense situation with the guy I brought home. He thought he was definitely getting some, even though I’d just stupidly invited him because I knew he’d been depressed lately and thought he just needed a friend. I kept telling him nicely that he had to go home, but he wouldn’t listen, he wanted to stay.
At some point I turned off the voice chat, and I was almost in tears when I begged him to leave. He finally got the point and left. I cried for a bit, then sat down to do some gaming, and went to sleep at 5 am.
In the car, when my brother told him he didn’t believe me, my SIL (and best friend) stepped in, telling him that frankly, it was none of his damn business whether I was sober or not. I felt so hurt by his disbelief, because I knew that I hadn’t been drinking… but nobody else had any reason to believe me. She noticed that I was getting emotional, so she veered the conversation on to something else. SIL believed me, though, and she was fully on my side.
When we got to the family farm, SIL and I went over to my moms’ house to pick up some baking equipment to take to my brother’s. I asked my mom if she’d heard that I had been drinking, and if she had believed it. She said yes, but said that it was okay and that it was fully my prerogative. That she, my stepmom, grandma or brothers can’t dictate what I do with my own life.
I teared up again and told her point-blank that it was just a rumor. That my brother had heard me talk like that on the Discord chat and jumped to unfair conclusions, and had then proceeded to tell everyone that I’d fallen off the wagon.
She apologized for having believed him, that she should have known better.
But how could she have known any better? I haven’t exactly been reliable before when it comes to alcohol. I could have been totally lying through my teeth to my mother right then. I could have been blackout drunk that Wednesday, and I could have lied about it, and everybody would have been none the wiser.
But I wasn’t lying, and I was the only one who could really trust that fact.
But everyone had only heard one side of the story, the false side. So my SIL and I went over to my brother’s house, and when the others that had been in that Discord chat showed up, one by one, I started feeling like I had something to prove. So I told them that I hadn’t been drinking. I was in tears. I needed them to know that. They all said, like my mom, that it was none of their business.
I ended up crying for a bit, and approached my brother who had started the rumor, begging him to tell everyone that he’d been wrong. But I guess he still didn’t believe me. And I couldn’t blame him for that, but I could blame him for spreading that rumor.
The only one who didn’t seem to believe him, was my 90 year old grandma. Maybe she hadn’t heard the rumor, or maybe she just believed in my willpower and integrity. Regardless, she gives all her grandkids homemade sausages every Christmas, and this year she attached a note to mine, telling me that “the greatest gift I could give, they’ve already received”; my sobriety. Not gonna lie, it had me in tears. She’s so supportive, and she really believes in me. If not for anyone else, I do it for her.
Well, I’m about 5,5 hours away from my 48 days. Just 12 more days, and it’ll be two months.
My family have no reason to believe me. You guys don’t. But as long as I know that I’m sticking to sobriety, then I have the moral high ground.
Merry Christmas to you guys, may it be filled with joy and happiness and sobriety! I am proud of each and every one of you. 
