Normal is relative, okay? We'll put it this way: How much effort would it take you to stop drinking alcohol for a season if you're someone who drinks "the normal"? Tom Holland's experiment - actor, 27 years old - has been, according to his words, the most difficult thing in his life.
He didn't get up one day and said he was giving up alcohol. What he explains is that he had a "normal" Christmas, let's say, the kind where he went out and drank a lot, that he has always had good endurance (his maternal genes, he points out) and that at the turn of the year he decided to spend a month sober. On the networks, many users share theirs at the beginning of the year
On that January climb he discovers that his head spends the day turning around the idea of taking something. He obsesses. And then he thinks: "Something happens to me with alcohol too". So he is "punished" with another month: "If I can stay sober for two months then I will prove to myself that I don't have a problem". Those four weeks were also spent regular. He lets loose a classic drinker's conversation about going out and not drinking: I felt like I couldn't socialize, I wouldn't go to the pub for a lemonade, I couldn't stay for dinner without alcohol in between.
He continued to push the test and set himself a goal of half a year, until his birthday. He was so well then that he now lives without drinking alcohol.
It's not moralin' - the writer has only spent a few months of her adult life without drinking due to force majeure of pregnancy or postpartum - but the viral clip of Holland's interview on the video podcast On Purpose gives a foothold to addressing the normalization of non-consumption. "For 13 years I have had to give explanations as to why I don't do it because simply saying 'I don't want' or 'I don't like' is not enough", writes one user. I accuse myself of having been that person who asks between surprise and admiration that string of "but you don't drink?, never?, never in life?, don't you like it?, not even a vignette from time to time?".
A bartender comments: "I see a lot of people who hate drinking who come to bars to socialize and feel the pressure to drink." "At Erasmus, everything was laughter and the students were very friendly until I said that I didn't drink alcohol", says another user. "But what a piece of English class activity for the third year of ESO onwards that comes out of here", points out a teacher. Of course.
