Describe one positive change you have made in your life.

This has been a journey. I’ve ditched alcohol a few times during my life. Sometimes for a few years or a few months or just drastically reducing the frequency with which I imbibe. I gave nicotine up fully for the first time last year. Unfortunately that was relatively short lived. In the midst of a chaotic and frightening experience with my son and the dawning that at the ripe old age of 19, he is a drug addict and alcoholic; I caved. I drank and I smoked. I leaned on those two old friends with a weight so heavy that my family and human friends could not tolerate. I drank in the afternoon lying on the grass behind the shed where no one could see or find me. I smoked and I cried whilst staring directly up at the sky. I drank and I smoked with intention. I don’t believe I had ever drank and smoked with intention before. I needed to numb myself. I simply couldn’t cope with the fear, anxiety and shame.

Of course I recognised I couldn’t continue that way. So the afternoon drinking was replaced by a more socially acceptable evening session, something more easily disguised as normal and unproblematic. Naturally, to keep up appearances, I had a couple of nights off every week. And because I was so terribly distressed under the facade of ‘I’m okay’, occasionally these drinking events would take a darker turn. When I lost all control, like when I drank more than 2 bottles of wine and wrote a suicide note, or when I threw up over our cream bedroom carpet, when I walked to edge of the loch in my nightdress and numbly considered wading in and staying in, or hungover and I used the private tab on my phone to find out how much paracetamol is required to see a person off, or the time I lay in an empty bath on a call to my dearest friend, bereft and unable to speak through my sobs. Oh yes. I used alcohol and nicotine intentionally last year and sometimes it served its purpose. Every now and then, it almost ended me. I’ll leave you to imagine how this impacted my lovely husband and our marriage.

By the turn of the year, I had begun to cut alcohol out and knew that after Christmas, it had to go completely. That’s exactly what I’ve done. The alcohol is gone and the nicotine is gone. I sleep well, eat well, exercise most days, have a sports goal, run my small business, care for my plants and garden, spend lots of time outdoors and with my husband and daughter. I go to Al-Anon meetings. I am still absolutely miserable and terrified. I never imagined that my boy might be an addict. That he wouldn’t even experience life and adulthood before grappling with the horror that is addiction. I never imagined that I wouldn’t get to know my son and feel proud watching him grow and become a man – just in the way I do watching his sister become a lovely young woman. No. I’m trying to live my life knowing that his life, for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever, will be hard and ugly. I’m grieving a child who’s still here.

But. I’m learning to do that without alcohol or nicotine. So yeah. That’s a win I suppose.