"Is there no way out of the mind?" agonised the poet Sylvia Plath. As soon as I came of age legally I discovered what I thought was a perfectly satisfactory answer to that question: Yes. It's called alcohol.
I started drinking alcohol when I was 18, and for the next 16 years I pursued it with a passionate intensity. If you met me socially at any point during this period, chances are that I was drunk. Soz! For over a decade and a half, boozing was effectively my only hobby.
I calculate that I have spent roughly 9,984 hours drinking: about 12 hours a week times 16 years. Malcolm Gladwell's famous and wildly inaccurate thesis holds that it takes 10,000 hours' practice to get good at something. Let's pretend for a second that it's true.
If I had dedicated those 9,984 hours to anything else, by now I would be a champion at it. I could have three PhDs, or be fluent in Mandarin, or hold Springbok colours in a sport that few other people play.
The most frustrating part? Despite all that hard graft, I'm not even very good at drinking.
I am not the type of person about whom people say respectfully: "She can really hold her liquor."
In my head I am a charming, witty drunk, delivering priceless bons mots to a rapturous audience. The reality is less Oscar Wilde and more Girls Gone Wild.
I am that sloppy creature you see stumbling out of an Uber leaving all her possessions behind. I am the woman droopily lighting the wrong end of a cigarette in a no-smoking zone. I am the bore repeatedly slurring how much I love you, despite the fact that we met five minutes ago.
I knew that my drinking was a problem for at least 10 years out of the 16, but I didn't do anything to fix it for a number of reasons.
One was that I was a binge drinker rather than the more classy alcoholic of popular culture. I didn't drink every day. I didn't hide alcohol around the house. I didn't drink in the mornings, bar the odd Bloody Mary at brunch. I never smashed through a shower door like Meg Ryan in When A Man Loves A Woman.
I held down jobs and relationships. I was what they call "high functioning", though I feel a bit embarrassed typing that because it makes me sound like I should have been stalking around in a power suit bellowing instructions into a flip-phone. I lived what appeared to be a normal life, except that about three times a week I drank until I couldn't see.
In a moment of particular anxiety about my drinking, I attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a friend three years ago. We left in high spirits. "We have nothing to worry about!" I hissed with delight as we exited the church hall. "Those people are so much worse than us!"
We had listened to a succession of horrifying alcoholic war stories, culminating in details like "... And that's when I woke up cable-tied to a gurney in Groote Schuur".
I found it all comfortingly unrelatable. I felt like a nun by comparison.
At other points, though, I knew I was lying to myself.
I was a big fan of "Are You An Alcoholic?" online quizzes. In retrospect, I see now that the best way to tell if you have a drinking problem is if you are routinely googling "Do I have a drinking problem?"
By definition, the answer is "Afraid so".
But the main reason why I delayed facing up to my drinking problem was simple.
Alcohol is magic. It works as an alchemy turning boredom into play. Ordinary nights become madcap adventures. Sip by sip, it smothers your anxiety with a sense of warm wellbeing about your place in the world.
It gives you the confidence to talk to anyone. In a drunken haze I have buttonholed Constitutional Court judges, popstars and politicians, and ear-fucked them senseless. I'm sure the experience was less rewarding for them, but that's not the point. Like many heavy drinkers, I am naturally shy and quite introverted. Alcohol turned me into a social superhero.
I wish more addiction literature would be honest about this. Yes, alcohol is a devastating toxin which ruins - and takes - lives. But it is also very fun. Life is hard, and alcohol can make it more bearable, offering a brief escape from your endlessly disappointing self.
For a while I attempted to regulate my drinking, hoping to hit upon the "moderation" I'd heard so much about.
I experimented with restricting myself to three drinks at a time, but soon learnt the wisdom of James Thurber's maxim: "One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough."
What saved me, in the end, was love. It's corny, but it happens to be true. Ironically, I sort of owe my relationship to alcohol: I met my future wife at a nightclub, and in a fit of drunken bravado forced my number on to her phone.
But alcohol is described as a "cruel mistress" for a reason. As the addiction literature will tell you, alcohol wants your primary relationship to be with it. It goes all Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction when that's threatened.
When very drunk, I become cold and mean to the person I love the most. I pick fights. I react with red-hot rage to the suggestion I stop drinking, as if it is a fundamental violation of my most basic human rights. I am nobody you'd want to be friends with - let alone in love with.
My wife never gave me an ultimatum. It was unspoken, but obvious. Drinking was threatening to scupper something too precious to be squandered.
For the first time in my life, I'd found something that mattered more to me than alcohol. For the first time in my life, the decision seemed straightforward: the booze had to go.
• This is an edited extract from 'Self-Helpless: A Cynic's Search for Sanity' by Rebecca Davis, published by Pan Macmillan, R285...