Today I have accepted everything and realised that until I did this I couldn’t move on.
Instagram: @never.too.late.girl
My name is Gail, my drug of choice was alcohol.
What’s your sobriety date? 10th May 2020. I was born and raised in Manchester, England and I currently work as a Functional Nutrition coach. My passions are to help other women see that life without alcohol is life changing.
I never class myself as an addict but more of a binge drinker or grey area drinker but more recently I have started to acknowledge that a problem wasn’t far away. I drank at the weekends and sometimes during the week and mostly at home with my husband. I had started to question the amount I drank a few years ago but never really thought of it as a problem as most people I know drank at home or to excess on nights out, that’s our culture in the UK. It’s really only after I chose to take alcohol out of my life that I realised how much I depended on it. I depended on it to socialise, to celebrate, to destress and pretty much any other excuse I could find. I would plan my weekends around alcohol. I wouldn’t arrange to meet up or doing anything on a Saturday or Sunday if I knew I would be hungover. Going on a night out would end in me being wasted and not knowing how I got home and the last night I did this was the moment I started to think that I relied on alcohol too much and looking back, I was becoming dependant more. I still feel a certain amount of shame in admitting this. One Sunday morning I got up hungover and went to the fridge. There in front of me was leftover wine in the bottle (I never left wine usually), I honestly cannot remember if I drank it or not but I know I seriously contemplated it and that was the straw that broke the camels back enough were enough. I see now how alcohol was slowly grabbing every single piece of me and at some point, there would have been no turning back. My drinking caused tension between myself and my daughter who could see alcohol wasn’t serving me and when one of her friends said ‘your mum and dad are always drunk!’ I knew I had to do something about it because it was true! It might have taken me years to get here but once I make a definite decision on anything there’s no turning back, my mindset had changed, I wanted to quit!
After a few weeks of no alcohol I realised that trauma I had suffered throughout life was rearing its ugly head. It was then I realised that I drowned my feelings, anxiety and depression with a substance that exasperated all this but this was my medicine to push it as far back as I could and not deal with any of it. You see I'm a child of the 70s and 80s and in Great Britain we have a stiff upper lip which basically means, don’t show how you feel, sweep it under the carpet, show no weakness and get on with it. I was told as a child that crying was weak and that I shouldn’t cry so when my sister was hit by a car, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t show weakness, crying was wrong so I bottled what I had seen deep inside. What did happen was a fear of the outside, a lifetime of fear on roads and anxiety that ruled my life. I have other trauma that happened later such as finding out my dad wasn’t my biological dad when I was 15 years old, sexual assault at 17 and losing a friend tragically when I was 21, my dad being seriously attacked also. All of which I didn’t deal with by talking, crying or therapy. It just wasn’t the done thing.
Today I have accepted everything and realised that until I did this I couldn’t move on. I accepted that these situations happened and no matter what I couldn’t change them. None of them were my fault. I believe that these experiences moulded me to the real person I am, the one you see today and after years of self-loathing and hatred toward myself, blaming myself for the things that happened. I believe they shaped me to be the kind, empathic, nurturing person I am. I love my life now, I'm happy, healthy and helping others to quit the demons of alcohol and how to get healthy through nutrition. I wake up every day thankful of the person I am and the person who I have always been deep down inside me, I just needed to accept that it’s ok to cry, it’s ok to tell people what has happened to me.
Maintaining sobriety for me is playing it forward always. What would I gain from drinking alcohol? What would I lose? I would lose everything I have worked so hard on and that is not an option for me.
I am so grateful for my sobriety and waking every single day without that dark cloud over me wishing I wasn’t here, wishing I hadn’t woken up. I’m grateful for my children whom without I probably wouldn’t be here, gosh that is tough to write.
If you are newly sober my advice would be to always play it forward. When you get a craving to cave in then pop that little monster on your shoulder and talk to it. That little monster is the old you telling you to drink or take drugs, it’s not you today. Tell your monster on your shoulder to F off, swipe it off your shoulder and find something to do. Remember cravings really only last for 5 to 10 minutes so take yourself out of that triggering situation and find something you enjoy and turn to that. Mine was putting on music and dancing around the kitchen like a mad women!