I Wasn't Drinking to Celebrate. I Was Drinking to Survive.

There comes a point when the very thing you've been using to escape your pain becomes the thing that's destroying you.

By twenty-five, I had a fiancé, my own business and a future that, from the outside, looked promising. I was also drinking a bottle of whisky a day and I was running out of reasons to keep living.

How do you explain that contradiction? How do you explain having someone who loves you, a business you're capable of running, and the prospect of marriage, yet feeling so desperately alone that you cannot bear another day inside your own head?

I couldn't explain it either.

For years, alcohol had been my solution. At fifteen, a couple of scotches could change how I felt about myself and the world around me. It gave me relief from feelings I didn't know how to understand, let alone manage.

But by twenty-five, the solution had become the problem.

And I still couldn't imagine living without it.

When coping becomes captivity

I had become remarkably good at arranging my life around my drinking.

I worked from home, managed my clients and kept the business running. I hid my debts, concealed how much I drank and became increasingly skilled at keeping the different parts of my life separate.

I wasn't managing my drinking. My drinking was managing me.

And here's something I've learned about destructive patterns: you can become incredibly resourceful at protecting the very thing that's harming you. You find explanations. You make adjustments. You convince yourself that because you're still functioning, things cannot be that bad.

But functioning and living are not the same thing.

I had confused the ability to keep going with the ability to cope.

Perhaps that's a question worth asking yourself.

What have you become so good at managing that you've stopped questioning whether it should still have a place in your life?

It doesn't have to be alcohol.

It could be the need to control everything, the habit of withdrawing when relationships become uncomfortable, or the relentless drive to achieve because you don't know how to feel valuable without proving yourself.

Not everything that helps you get through a difficult season is meant to accompany you into the next one.

The night I nearly lost everything

Two weeks before my wedding, my life reached a crisis. My drinking had caused painful conflict within the family. Depression had become unbearable, and one evening, while intoxicated, I made the decision to end my life. I won't recount every detail here. Those moments are part of the fuller story I tell in my book.

But I will tell you this.

The following morning, I woke with the usual hangover and remembered what I'd intended to do and something about that frightened me more than I can describe.

I realised how close I had come to dying.

I also recognised something else. When I was sober, I could question the decision I'd made. When I was drinking, that ability to step back had been dangerously compromised. For the first time, I could see the connection with terrifying clarity.

If I continued drinking, I might not survive.

And yet I didn't know how to stop.

Imagine that for a moment. Knowing that something is destroying you, knowing you cannot continue, and having absolutely no confidence in your ability to live without it.

That was where I found myself.

The beginning wasn't what I expected

I wish I could tell you that I woke up the following morning filled with confidence and determination.

I didn't.

I was frightened.

I had spent years depending on alcohol to regulate feelings I couldn't tolerate. The thought of facing those feelings without it was overwhelming. But for two days, the seriousness of what had happened kept me sober and during those two days, I contacted Alcoholics Anonymous.

I met an elderly gentleman called Terry. He told me something I had desperately needed to hear. I wasn't simply a bad person making bad choices. I was dealing with alcoholism, an illness for which help and a path towards recovery existed. For the first time, someone gave me an explanation that made sense of what was happening.

And with that explanation came something I hadn't experienced in a very long time.

Hope.

Terry didn't promise to change my life for me. He explained that there were tools available, people who understood, and a responsibility that belonged to me.

I had to choose whether I would accept the help being offered.

And I grabbed it with both hands.

You cannot change what you refuse to recognise

Looking back, one of the most significant turning points wasn't simply that I stopped drinking. It was that I began to understand what I was dealing with. Until then, I had spent years trying to manage the consequences of something I hadn't properly understood.

I had blamed myself, hidden my behaviour and attempted to control what was happening through sheer determination.

But determination alone couldn't solve a problem I hadn't accurately identified.

That experience taught me something that has remained central to my work with people ever since.

If you keep diagnosing the wrong problem, you'll keep reaching for solutions that cannot bring the change you need.

And I wonder whether there's something in your own life that deserves a more honest examination.

What have you been calling a weakness, a personality trait or simply the way you are, when there's something deeper that needs understanding?

What if the next step isn't another promise to try harder, but the courage to ask a different question?

For me, the dawn of a new day didn't begin with everything being fixed.

It began when I finally recognised that I needed help and became willing to receive it.

That decision didn't finish my story. It changed its direction.

And there was still so much more to discover.

From Chapter 5, “The Dawn of a New Day”, of my book, Standing on the Edge: A Fight for Freedom.

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