I'm not unique and that's the best part

some reflections on the film the outrun as someone who has a near identical story, and why our stories matter

I used to think that my story, woman from a sheep farm in the deep countryside of Scotland escapes the rural life, finds a near-deadly alcoholic rock bottom and gets sober under the age of 30, was so distinct that I would spend my life in a comfortable feeling of being unique. Yes I was a garden variety alcoholic, but you can’t take away the fact that that’s an unlikely origin story. You can only begin to imagine the ego-puncture I experienced when I picked up Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun. I almost didn’t want to admit I’d read it, because I felt so hurt and personally attacked that someone had an almost identical story, and wrote a poignantly powerful book about it. It was even harder to admit I loved it. 

There are no unique stories when it comes to addiction, and though I resented Amy Liptrot for crushing my sense of being special and different to dust, I soon came to realise that that’s the most powerful thing about people telling stories that in many ways are exactly the same. It is comforting to know that whilst you might not be as unique as you thought you were, a story of recovery that looks like yours means you’re not uniquely fucked. That’s why we tell our stories, adding in the particulars of our journey to reach people who share traits that make them feel alienated, to let them know that recovery is possible. 

Whilst on the surface me and Amy Liptrot share an identical story, I do want to outline a few differences. I did my drinking in Stranraer, Girvan, Ayr, Irvine and Glasgow (making my way up my beloved west coast) and I didn’t do any drinking in London. I got sober in the USA and moved to London at two years sober and have lived here for four years without taking a drink. Our early recovery looked very different, mine was completely surrounded by people, and hers was on a far flung island off of Orkney. These seem like minute details, but having a terminally unique mindset means that usually I see people being similar to me as a threat to what makes me special, and differences are usually the first things that jump out to me. The recovery comes in when I recognise these are differences but they don’t separate us. 

I grew up hating most things Scottish, I resented my diminishing hometown and wanted to be an it-girl in New York, I thought, in a very Trainspotting way, that it was shite being Scottish. It wasn’t cool to be Scottish when I grew up, I had a sense of embarrassment over my accent, the media depictions and that the butt of the joke was always that we were unintelligent, violent alcoholics, unless you could pass as wealthy or sophisticated. I liked being Scottish even less when I did, in fact, become a violent alcoholic. I didn’t acknowledge the preciousness of my heritage until I moved to the USA and saw how many people craved a connection to it, a connection I had always tried to deny. I had always felt stunted and dead inside on Scottish soil, and it was the place where Rona, the main character, came alive. 

I have since healed my relationship with Scotland and being Scottish, and seeing Scotland reflected in a film inspired by a woman who had found so much in the beauty of Scotland, sometimes fierce and sometimes soft, was quite vindicating. Over the years I’ve been sober, the poetry, nature and history has returned to me as something precious. Not prideful, simply mine, not perfect, simply itself. It’s a good thing to heal these things, because you can hide from many things but you can’t hide from your hometown. 

I never thought I’d sit in a cinema in Mile End and see the most accurate deception of the lambing shed of my childhood, and get a whiplash of nostalgia for the wooden troughs, the pens and pallets, the sounds of a sheep that had just given birth, poking a bit of straw in a lamb’s nose to help it breathe, swinging any fluid out of its lungs, I smelled the iodine as I watched it. It also captured the brutality, the strange relationship to life and death you develop when you grow up on a farm, that was the very reason I couldn’t continue the eight generations of tenant farming that came before me. It was an emotional experience to watch a film where I could hear curlews, pee-weeps and oyster catchers, when that part of my life feels so far from me now - but is so immediately available somewhere inside me. 

This is one of the few films where I will relax my ‘hire Scottish people for Scottish roles’ stance, I think that Saoirse Ronan did a great job with the accent. It is probably the first example of a non-Scottish person doing a Scottish accent that didn’t make me want to find a sharp object. 

One of me and Amy Liptrot’s similarities is that our accent isn’t stereotypically Scottish. Mine is unusual because I've manipulated it so much over the years, after living in America and realising no one understood what I was saying unless I toned it down, and going to music school where I was encouraged to change it, to the point I don’t recognise myself sometimes when I speak. Amy Liptrot's accent doesn’t quite fit in because she has English parents. We’re both used to hearing ‘but you don’t sound Scottish’ (something that to this day still infuriates me, because if I did speak with my original accent, one that few people in my life even know, then you wouldn’t fucking know what I was saying, and the conversation would undoubtedly be turned towards how I sound rather than what I’m saying). One of the characteristics of alcoholism is feeling separate and alien from those around you, because of the internal feeling of loneliness you’re born with. Sometimes that nerve gets touched and the feeling intensifies when people point out subtle ways that you are a little bit different by the nature of who you are. When the main character is not recognised as being from the town she grew up in because of her accent, I felt the subtle slap of non-belonging that can create. It was a small but significant part of the film for me. The disorientation of someone from the exact place you're from saying that you're not from here is one of the cornerstones of my alcoholism, that feeling of knowing that you’re not at home in your own home and you have to find something different for that sense of ease and comfort home is supposed to give you. 

No story of alcoholism is linear because the storyteller’s life exists in fragments. When a narrator tells a story of alcoholism they are telling a story where they themselves were very often simply not there. The storyteller has experienced their life as flashes, snapshots and stabs of memory, all happening in a brain that has a violent aversion to reality. When you retell any story there is what happened, and your version of it. When you retell a story of addiction, this is heightened. It is difficult to follow, hard to listen to, and makes little sense. It’s also exciting to listen to someone who looked behind the veil, where blackouts warped space and time, and mental health issues created an alternate universe. Audiences love people who have lost their mind, it gives them an idea of what it might be like to entirely let go of any tether and lose your fucking shit in a way that is socially unacceptable, without going through all the admin of actually doing it themselves. Alcoholics love it, because it makes us feel less alone and sometimes reminds us of where we came from, and how we don’t want to go back there, even if we think for a minute that we might. 

I live in Hackney now, where Rona did her most destructive drinking. I have been here for four years and have the romanticised attachment most freelance creatives at my age and stage do. I have only been sober here, engaging with the vibrant recovery community that exists here, but I am not too proud to admit that this film made me miss the life I never had, where I got to drink alcoholically in London. I didn’t want the glamour, I wanted the grime, the drama, the struggle or rotting in an uninhabitable flat before going out to buy a £7 pastry and do drugs with strangers in a park until your body reaches its physical limit and you go dark for four days and aren’t seen for a month. Only an alcoholic could say that. When I miss drinking I don’t miss it because of the fun I had, I miss the oblivion, the devastation, and taking a knife to my life because self-sabotage is the only way you can be certain of your future when you have a Master’s degree but can’t get a job, and you’re depressed but don’t have enough time or money to do anything about it. It just seemed like it would be so much better to do that in London.

But outside of the comfortable home of a dark fantasy is dark reality - and you can’t drink that shit away. You can try, but it only arrests it, never exorcises it. You can tell yourself you want the oblivion back, but one day someone’s hand is on you and it reminds you of the time you were dragged into a stranger’s car and assaulted and you’re going to have to find a way to live with that for the rest of your days. You can miss not caring whether you live or you die, but then you remember everyone you hurt because you were hurting was a person too, and that’s a lot to deal with before you forgive yourself. This film did not glamourise drinking, as much as the anti-glamour appealed to me and my brand of alcoholism, it actually handled parts of it in the most realistic ways I’ve seen so far. It was neither sanitised nor sensationalised. 

‘What did I do last night?’

‘You don’t remember.’

We’ve all been there. 

Someone leaving with ‘I’m sorry’ because they have to save themselves more than they want to save you.

Most of us have an example of that. 

When the voiceover said that drinking alcoholically scars your neural pathways in a way that that will never fully repair, I had an odd reaction. This is a fact I am well aware of and have been since day one of my recovery. I am aware that I cannot drink safely and never will be able to again, I am aware of the tremendous damage I have inflicted upon myself. We talk about this every day in recovery circles. But hearing it in a mainstream film, as a fact and not a judgement, was quite stark. It gave me the fear, because oh God, I’ve really got to stay sober don’t I, and it gave me a sense of awe, because holy fuck, I literally wrecked my brain and I’m sober today. 

I've been in recovery for six and a half years now. I still do the things I need to do, I go to my meetings, I do my meditation, I work on my spiritual practices. There is never a moment in my relationships where I’m not working at least one muscle of my recovery, and I simply do not think about drinking anymore. But there is a part of me that doesn't recognise that I'm sober sometimes, it's simply a part of my existence now. I forget how hard it was to get here, and how hard I had to fight to get to the moment of grace where it became a possibility. What this film offered me was a fresh recognition that getting sober is so fucking difficult and staying sober is even harder. I can take it for granted when I’m dealing with the struggles and dramas I have today, that they’re only possible because I did the impossible thing of getting sober when by all accounts I should be dead.

I couldn’t remember whether the book had a relapse or not, but it shocked me when she moved her nose closer to the abandoned glass of wine, and I was dragged into the endless memory-bank of moments where despite knowing what alcohol would take from me if I start again, there wasn’t any way I could tolerate the present moment without a drink in me. I don’t know why I was shocked, it’s my story, and that of thousands of others - but even as someone with years of recovery, I still want to will everyone’s story to be easy on them, that they get out of the ring with drink, and stay out. But then there's the split second decision, where you lose the power of choice, and before you know it something you’ve handled a hundred times before has you dipping a finger in a glass of wine for relief, because There's only so much weight a wave can sustain before it comes crashing down. 

Many of us need that part of our story, not for dramatic effect or as an example of us being stupid and weak, we need the moment where the load-bearing wall collapses, the wave crashes on top of us, and we’ve really had fucking enough of it and we need to try something different. That realisation can’t be taught to us, it must be experienced, and god we’re so lucky if we lived to tell the tale. Rather than shock it was maybe fear, because I know not everyone makes it out alive. 

But our character here does, and by the end of the film my feelings had transmuted into gratitude. I reflected on the difficulties of my own journey, and how grateful I am that everyone I’m recovering alongside has one just as complex, and we will be there for those who will hopefully make the same decision. I was also grateful that in the final montage, it had a recognition of the past and how the magical thinking and lunges to feel alive have now found steady ground - even if it is in the unpredictable savage movement of the sea. The elation that we looked for in every drink exists around us now in our engagement with life as it happens, and in unexpected places, if we look for them. It made me grateful for getting sober young, and how I used to only be able to hear my own laugh after taking secret drinks in social situations, and now it comes to me without my effort. 

I found myself at odds with the isolation of the main character’s early recovery, even though I wished it was how mine was. I wanted to be on a remote island, rather than have to do my recovery with a full-time education and part-time jobs and having to learn how to relate to and interact with people every day. That was the most challenging, and rewarding part of my recovery, even though I hated every second of it at first. But it reminded me that everyone’s needs are different, and of one of the most important principles of recovery, which is intimacy with yourself. If you can achieve intimacy for yourself without the validation of other people then you have done something absolutely extraordinary. It got me looking for ways I can implement that into my life today. 

I think the final thing that I want to mention was the image of the seal. I went to a Native American healer once because she told me the only two cultures in the world that have totem animals are Native Americans and Scottish people, and she wanted to work with me. She put me into a trance in which I found myself walking through a forest. Here I turned into a seed which grew into a tree which burned down. As I burned down, I found myself standing by a lake. I heard her voice telling me to look out for the animal that was going to appear to me. I got so excited, because I thought that it was going to be a whale. After a seal flopped out of the water I could hardly contain my disappointment. 

When I came out of my trance I expressed this disappointment, that the animal that appeared was something weak, almost silly. The woman told me that a seal contains boundless power, it moves between worlds, it doesn’t let things stick to it, it is the entertainer that knows itself. I suddenly perked up, I remembered the selkie story, one my grandmother had told me as a child, after it had passed down hundreds of years of storytelling. It was my favourite folk myth, alongside the kelpie and the fay folk, that there were seals who could transform into women, and dance on the shore. But if someone found and stole their skin they were bound to the land. I was a woman who had had her skin stolen in many ways, that has regained her autonomy and agency and has found where she belongs. I can move between the sea and land, the material and spiritual, the past and the present with great ease. 

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about the Selkie in Women Who Run With the Wolves. She says the selkie who is bound to land is a woman who is suffocating, drowning on dry land. Whether they have lost their creativity, their autonomy or their joy, they are slowly disintegrating in a life that is not theirs, and the call from within to return to the sea is a call to their spirit. We must find a way to listen to that longing, and find somewhere where we can have the freedom to exist as ourselves, and live around people who make us feel alive. She says:

“It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires.”

We might not even know where that kinship exists and where home may be, but we must continue, because on the other side is freedom. The need to listen to our spirit, find where we belong and live truthfully as ourselves is the root of every recovery story, whichever direction we go in and however long it takes. 

My only critique of the film is that there should have been more Diet Coke in it.