Sobering E-Book

Melissa Rice

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A RAW, FUNNY, HELPING HAND OF A BOOK, BY THE CO-PRESENTER OF BBC RADIO 5 LIVE'S PODCAST HOOKED: THE UNEXPECTED ADDICTS. 'Unique, honest, witty, occasionally shocking, you need this uplifting, amazing book in your life.' Steve Bland, You, Me and the Big C 'I don't know if I was born with it, caught it or bought it; I just know that, at some point in my life, a line was crossed: I needed a drink to get through life, to calm the nerves and quiet the head, and I became reliant on alcohol to change how I felt.' Sobering is the story of an insecure teenager turned Liverpudlian party girl, schoolteacher turned alcoholic and now recovering alcoholic turned award-winning podcaster. Melissa's story is as dramatic as her unique voice, but her message is universal: mental health issues often drive vulnerable people to addiction and working on mental health and personal development can help recovery. Written with the expert help of rehab and addiction specialists, and with insights from other recovering alcoholics and addicts, Sobering covers everything from denial, isolation and shame to getting help and rebuilding relationships. This is a personal story with a mission: to help anyone worried about their drinking to understand themselves and move forward with wisdom to make that hardest decision of all – to stay sober. 'Melissa's unique combination of authenticity, personal experience and humour makes for an incredibly refreshing take on addiction and recovery. A much-needed book that will help individuals to find hope and society to rethink substance misuse.' Shahroo Izadi, author of The Kindness Method

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First published in 2021 by September Publishing

Copyright © Melissa Rice 2021

The right of Melissa Rice to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited. www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Denmark on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Nørhaven

ISBN 978-1-912836-67-3

September Publishing www.septemberpublishing.org


For The Rices

And, because having one of anything has always been a problem, including book dedications …

For everyone feeling frightened, alone and hopeless about their drinking, I get it, I really do. I hope you find the happiness and freedom you so deserve.


Contents

Author’s note

Introduction

Chapter 1Drinking won’t cure your thinking

Chapter 2Drop the act, it’s fooling no one

Chapter 3Trying to stop will reveal a lot

Chapter 4Rock bottom is a gift

Chapter 5Trust the process and hold on tight

Chapter 6Find yourself a support network

Chapter 7The firsts are awkward as f*ck

Chapter 8You are not your past – it’s time to forgive and move forward

Chapter 9Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries

Chapter 10Anything is possible in recovery, so what the hell are you waiting for?

Further support

Acknowledgements

About the author

Author’s note

I didn’t intend on being an alcoholic – who does? On the list of things I wanted to experience and achieve by the time I was thirty-two, I had never thought alcohol dependency, losing my marbles and my career as a teacher, getting locked in the family home for months on end, going to rehab, falling in love with recovery, sharing it all on a BBC podcast Hooked: The Unexpected Addicts and now writing a book would make the cut, but there we have it.

Please believe me when I say that I have no intention of convincing you that you are an alcoholic, and I am certainly not going to profess to have the answers on how best to get sober. I’m just a regular girl who swan dived from grace and hit every shameful branch along the way. I am not a professional in this stuff. I am a professional fuck-up at times, yes, but I am far from qualified to give you the answers. To be honest, I couldn’t think of a more ill-suited person if I tried. I just about have the capacity to deal with my own problems, and there are still days when getting a wash and changing my knickers is seen as a huge success. So please, if you are struggling with either your mental health or your drinking, do make an appointment with your GP or seek professional help (resources can be found at the back of the book). I wish I had taken those courageous steps sooner. Your head may tell you you’re the first (and worst): you’re not. You won’t be the first or the worst and you certainly won’t be the last. Addiction and mental health problems do not discriminate.

Finding yourself reliant on alcohol (or any substance) can be frightening and really bloody isolating. The personal shame, fear of being judged and anxieties around life without it brings just as much heartache as alcohol does. If these worries ring true for you, I get it, I really do. If this book helps just one person feel less alone, then – you know what? – it was worth reliving my darkest days and painfully cringing each time. There may be parts of this book that are a bit too close for home or trigger intense emotion and, if that is the case, I hope you have the safe space to process it and someone you trust to talk to.

I have learnt lessons the painful and shameful way, and I am sharing them with you for you to take what you can and leave the rest. My recovery is about connection and accepting that I can’t do this alone, and to capture this you will also hear of experiences and insights of others: counsellors, professors, my family, my friends and, of course, people in recovery.

Early in my sobriety a fellow recovering alcoholic suggested that I should ‘look for the similarities’ and not the differences. It never dawned on me that I had been going through life only looking for reasons that made me and my circumstances different to everyone else’s. So, I would ask (if I’m allowed to) that throughout these pages you look for those similarities and forget about our differences.

Sure, addiction dragged me to dark and dangerous places but recovery has brought out the best in life – and, dare I say it, it has brought out the best in me and the friends in recovery who feature in this book. I hope you are able to see that quitting the booze isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning. People do recover and there is a way out.

Introduction

Straight to it, no messing about and no pussyfooting around, we have to talk about mental health and alcohol. (I can hear my mum’s thoughts already: ‘Oh god, why is she starting this book with her mental health? She’ll never find a husband now.’) I was trying to think of a lighter subject to begin with, but when I think about my story, the fact is that the one constant that has stuck with me through thick and thin is my (poor) mental health; whether that be good old anxiety, bouts of depression, intrusive thoughts, self-destructive behaviours or self-defeating coping strategies – they all matter, and contributed to my reliance, and then dependence, on booze.

I don’t separate my mental health issues from my addiction, and I don’t favour or prioritise one over the other, because I can’t. They are two co-existing, nightmarish bedfellows: when one kicks off, the other rears its ugly head; they are a loyal tag-team who, if left to their own devices, would have me locked in the family home like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, pickled and batshit. To manage my mental health is to manage my addiction and, let me tell you, when there is the infrequent moment that I feel like I have a good grasp of both it is pure bliss.

We are fortunate to live in an age where mental illness and prioritising your head and well-being is commonplace – I’m pretty certain that if I had been born in the nineteenth century I would have been living the rest of my life in an asylum. (It still shocks me to the core what those suffering were subjected to in the name of ‘treatments’.) Society has progressed and evolved with respect to mental health. We are more aware, are becoming more tolerant, and people are less likely to change the subject when they hear words like ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’, ‘borderline personality disorder’, ‘bi-polar’ and ‘antidepressants’ (to name a few). Some workplaces have well-thought-out mental health and well-being policies and in-house counselling services, while Instagram is packed full of mental health accounts. There are podcasts upon podcasts on ‘how to cope’, multiple national campaigns to spread awareness, while phrases such as ‘It’s OK to not be OK’ are all the rage. I’m here for it all – the destigmatising of the mental health movement is a good thing. It is a great thing. I wish these resources and this level of human understanding had been around a decade ago when I was tying myself in knots, paralysed with fear, thinking I was the only person who thought and felt the way I did.

But as wonderful as this shift has been for us all, when I think about where addiction is placed in this well-being uprising, I feel somewhat dejected. Stigma around the topic, and unhealthy stereotypes, create a wall of shame, a barrier to seeking help, and form (perfectly ‘valid’) reasoning for keeping your struggle and even your success hidden until the time feels right and you feel safe enough to share your truth. During the height of my harmful drinking days, and even in my early days of sobriety, finding someone or something that really embraced addiction as part of the ‘mental health’ family was a struggle, and to a large part continues to be. The way I see it is that addiction is considered to be that embarrassing uncle at the wedding, the one you don’t want the new in-laws or guests to see. He is of course family, and by principle he should be attending the do, but he is not representative of your family and, by god, you don’t want pics of him in the wedding album. This may seem a little harsh but, believe me, I’m not the type to upset the apple cart or ruffle feathers (if anything, I’m the type of person who would go to any lengths to keep all the apples perfectly placed and those feathers silky smooth), but I know I’m not a lone ranger with this feeling that addiction is not considered, perceived or received like other mental illness ‘relatives’.

Living in a ‘recovery house’ for two years – a block of flats for women who are leaving rehab and in early recovery – meant that I had a focus group to hand. I asked the girls their opinions on addiction being detached from ‘mental health’, and all eight women shared their thoughts and experiences with me. What was wonderful about our impromptu chat was that we all experienced feeling shame or being shamed for suffering with addiction – that in having this affliction our other mental health issues were delegitimised. Unanimously, we agreed that putting ‘addiction’ and ‘mental illness’ in two separate boxes wasn’t helpful at all – the fact that to treat our mental health means we have to treat (and manage) our addiction to maintain good mental health shows just how grey this area is.

Basically, if Mental Illness and Addiction were on Facebook, their relationship status would definitely be ‘It’s complicated’.

And you know what? I’m yet to meet anyone in recovery from any addiction who, at some point in their life, hasn’t had difficulties with their mental health, or experienced some kind of trauma where a bit of talking therapy or psychological intervention wouldn’t have gone amiss. I’m sorry to bring Shrek into the mix (I’ve lost any hope of credibility, haven’t I?) but there’s a scene when the big green CGI ogre says, ‘I eat because I am unhappy and I’m unhappy because I eat.’ That sums up how I felt throughout my harmful drinking. There is a real need for a combined approach; in fact, a lot of psychiatrists, professors and doctors are crying out for changes in how we treat someone with existing mental health conditions and substance disorders.

When someone is diagnosed with both mental health issues and addiction it can be referred to as a ‘dual diagnosis’. I had a chat with Professor Julia Sinclair, a professor of addiction psychiatry at the University of Southampton and Honorary Consultant in Alcohol Liaison in the NHS, for an episode of our BBC Radio 5 Live podcast Hooked. She pointed out that ‘dual’ suggests that there are just two issues to deal with, when in fact there are many patients who have physical health conditions, like liver disease, and also have multiple mental health disorders – anxiety, depression, PTSD, to name just a few. To this end, ‘co-occurring’ or ‘co-existing’ or ‘co-morbid’ seem an appropriate fit as a way to describe this situation.

Sharing her views on the challenges of getting help for both mental health and substances, she said:

Many addiction services no longer have competencies in-house to deal with co-morbid mental ill health, and mental health services frequently refuse to work with people who have a co-morbid alcohol use disorder, such that patients wanting help with the depression that they see as causing them to use alcohol are often told they can’t be helped until they are alcohol-free. People in truly desperate states are bounced between addiction and mental health services, with many often falling through the gap.

Professor Julia Sinclair

For professionals to make these changes that are so desperately needed, funding is a huge factor. I’m not on the BBC with my podcast now, so I can be a bit more political … cuts to funding have devastated this sector and I am appalled, disgusted and incandescent with rage about this. Really, it’s a false economy: the ‘savings’ that are made in one area only lead to increased pressure on the NHS in another. If I think about my experience, I found myself in A&E multiple times, taking up general psychiatrists’ and doctors’ time. If there had been proper funding for me to access support or go to rehab when I needed it, then I wouldn’t have been taking up resources elsewhere.

If you’re a bit of a details person, like I am, you will want to know why cuts to addiction services have happened. Well …

The Health and Social Care Act changes of 2012 resulted in addiction services [being] taken out of NHS commissioning, and subject[ed] to frequent re-tendering and budget cuts. This has disproportionately affected people with co-occurring alcohol dependence and a mental health disorder. We need mental health services to reclaim alcohol use disorders as primarily a disease of the mind, and genuinely embrace person-centred care.

Professor Julia Sinclair

The Alcohol Health Alliance UK is a coalition of more than fifty organisations working together to reduce the harm caused by alcohol. Members include medical royal colleges, charities, patient representatives and alcohol health campaigners. I have had the pleasure of working with these guys as they fight for change to a problem that is so prevalent in the UK, yet so neglected. The AHA is chaired by Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, a leading professor of hepatology and special advisor on alcohol to the Royal College of Physicians. Speaking to me about the scale of alcohol harm, he shared:

As a liver specialist, I witness first-hand the devastating consequences of alcohol harm every day in my work. The damage that alcohol inflicts on the health of an individual ripples out into all areas of their own lives, the people around them and their communities. Despite this, alcohol remains a celebrated part of British culture and those who either try to give up or cut down on drinking are often stigmatised by their peers. We are very happy to talk about alcohol in this country until it comes to alcohol harm and what measures are needed to end it. Sadly, for all of us that is a necessary and urgent conversation that has to be had.

Deaths linked to liver disease have risen a staggering 400 per cent in fourteen years; alcohol harm costs our society at least £27 billion every year and 308,000 children currently live with at least one high-risk drinker over the age of eighteen. We are in the middle of a mounting health crisis which we cannot ignore.

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore

The latest AHA report, ‘It’s everywhere’ – alcohol’s public face and private harm, highlights a number of areas of alcohol harm that need a serious overhaul, including funding. Within the report was the startling reality of cuts: ‘There is insufficient treatment available to those who need it. Treatment provider Change, Grow, Live told us that services in England experienced real-term funding cuts of over £100 million, an average of 30% per service, since 2012.’

The next big issue I’d like to address: is alcoholism a disease? Addiction is no longer under the NHS remit. For a lot of folk, ‘the NHS shouldn’t be dealing with addiction as it’s not a disease’ is a relevant point. I know it’s divisive – it’s complex, and it’s a conversation that can lead to hurt, anger and maybe a ‘No bloody way’. Generally, those who have witnessed or been to the depths are on one side of the argument, and those who believe addiction/substance misuse is about choice are on the other.

The fact is, I understand the main thrust on both sides because I have been on both. I’ll never forget my mum’s words of: ‘Hold on, you were sober when you bought it, you knew what you were doing.’ She’s right: technically, I was chemically sober when I bought my half-litre of vodka and stuffed it down my baggy mom jeans (which, by the way, are rather snug these days) – but was I sober in the mind? Absolutely not. When I look back at my worst days, the peak of my alcohol insanity, I think: ‘My god, Melissa, you poor poppet.’ (It’s taken quite a lot of therapy to think that of myself.) Because I know that frightened girl was me, even if now I don’t really recognise her that much – such a lost and frightened soul. No ‘well’ person would have done the things I did, thought the way I felt, have made the choices I made … so do I think it is a disease or disorder? I do.

I wanted to chat with someone who works in the field, so who better than Michael Rawlinson, an addictions counsellor from Clouds House. He has known me from my time in rehab and we reconnected when I needed an expert for Hooked. He’s been a fixture and a friend ever since. For the purpose of this chapter, he told me about a book called DSM–5 (bear with me). For mere mortals like me, it is a sort of encyclopaedia for the diagnosis of mental health conditions. As the blurb says, ‘determining an accurate diagnosis is the first step toward being able to appropriately treat any medical condition, and mental disorders are no exception’. Within this manual there is a definition for alcohol use disorder: ‘AUD is a chronic relapsing brain disorder characterised by an impaired ability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences.’

Now, there is a list of symptoms that I was going to include, but I don’t think it’s responsible for me, a non-professional, to ‘encourage’ you to self-diagnose and potentially end up panicked. But I wanted to include this definition to help you see that excessive drinking, disordered drinking, problematical drinking, alcoholism, alcohol dependency, etc., is recognised as a disorder. It is a real thing, and you are not a bad person for suffering from it.

Further ‘proof’ that alcoholism is an illness comes from a funny old place – my bowels. Apart from a troublesome head, I also have a very troublesome bowel, as I have Crohn’s disease. I never questioned if Crohn’s was a real illness/disease: I have seen my ulcerated innards on a screen, while the blood tests, lubricated fingers up the bum, multiple operations, stoma bag and immunosuppressant injections are hard to refute. The evidence is clear and tangible that my guts are diseased, but my reliance on paint-stripper-style vodka? That was harder to accept as a real illness. My Crohn’s is a chronic condition; I have it for life, I have to make changes to my diet, understand my triggers (those things that could set my condition off, e.g. stress), have thorough plans in place and take daily action to keep it at bay. If I were to replace the word ‘Crohn’s’ with ‘alcoholism’, there isn’t much difference: to me, my alcoholism and my Crohn’s are both life-long chronic conditions.

These days, I tend not to go through the whole, ‘I’ve got this shit (literally and metaphorically) for the rest of my life … what’s the fucking point?’ thought process. One day at a time, folks. If I thought I would have to do anything for ever and live my days as if I had a life sentence, I’d be a miserable, self-pitying bugger. But, if I take both of them a day at a time, I have found that twenty-four hours is far more manageable than trying to live your entire life out in your head.

And then there’s the next big question: ‘Are you born an alcoholic?’ Although I think it is an important question to raise, my simple answer is – I have no bloody clue. I don’t know if I was born with it, caught it or bought it; I just know that, at some point in my life, a line was crossed: I needed a drink to get through life, to calm the nerves and quiet the head, and I became reliant on alcohol to change how I felt.

There are times when I read online articles and see discussions that make me wonder if every mental health symptom I have is just part of alcoholism, or if my alcoholism is a product of my poor mental health. Professor Julia again:

The same symptom may be either a cause or a consequence. For instance, symptoms of depression or anxiety may increase our alcohol use, which then is likely to worsen our mental state, worsening anxiety and depression symptoms, and fuelling further alcohol use, which people may regard as treating their anxiety or depression.

Professor Julia Sinclair

For my own sanity, I just accept what I am and what I suffer with and keep my focus on the solution: the things I do to stay well. (Dare I make reference to Love Island’s most-used quote? Sod it, why not: ‘It just is what it is.’)

Now, the final tricky subject to address before I get into my story: problematic language and the use of the words ‘alcoholic’ and ‘alcoholism’. For a lot of people, whether that be academics, workers in the field or those who have a difficult relationship with drink, it is felt that both these words reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma. I get it, I really do. I only have to look at my own perceptions prior to recovery to understand it. But you will be reading that word a lot in this book, so I thought it best acknowledge it. It took me a long time to accept or consider I was an alcoholic. But through the podcast, and especially with this book, I want people to feel that being an alcoholic is nothing to be ashamed of. To be honest, it’s just easier if I call myself an alcoholic – after all, if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck … you get the point. I really hope the word doesn’t isolate you or scare you, as that’s not my intention in the slightest and, please, feel free to replace the word ‘alcoholic’ with whatever you are most comfortable with. There is more that connects than divides us, and I really hope a label doesn’t get in the way of that.

I suppose now is a good time to get off my soapbox, away from the politics and the bigger picture, and to start sharing about my pre-drinking days – well, years. Those years of unhelpful and harmful thought processes, believing that I was a piece of shit and hobbling through life forever needing a crutch to get through it.

Before I delve into the nitty and gritty … I’m very aware that my struggle with mental health isn’t of an extreme nature. In the grand scheme of things, my experience isn’t uncommon, and my diagnoses are the timeless classics: generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), depression and a bit of PTSD for good measure – oh my GAD, what a threesome.

I suppose I want to make clear that while my own struggles are not out of the ordinary, I’m not minimising them in the slightest, either. There’s nothing worse than a dick-measuring competition. We all have our ‘stuff’ and we all have different scales of mental health. Not all of us have ‘issues’, mental illness, mental health diagnoses or whatever the correct phrase is to use, but me, Melissa, I’m not unique, my experiences aren’t special or different. That commonality is where I hope to offer some identification, for you to go: ‘Fucking hell, yeah, I have felt like that … I’ve done that … OK, I didn’t think or do that, but I have done that …’

We’ve established I swear – I apologise if I put foul words in your mouth.


Chapter 1

Drinking won’t cure your thinking

When I first got to rehab, I was under the impression that my anxiety and depression had started in my late teens or early twenties. I was wrong: they started way younger. I just didn’t know it.

I had a regular everything growing up: my childhood was regular – ‘dad stuff’ (i.e. sometimes there, sometimes not) wasn’t uncommon around our neck of the woods, but apart from that those younger years were just normal. Your run-of-the-mill, ten-a-penny childhood. I grew up in a well-presented home on the outskirts of Liverpool, in Kirkby. Just on the edge of town. It was green, it was quiet and it was a postcode lottery win for my gorgeous mum. We also fell under the catchment area for the convent high school, in a ‘posh’ area.

Kirkby is – how can I put this? – unique (as much as it pains me to admit it) in terms of prosperity and as for amenities, there isn’t much going on. We have the accolade of ranking sixth in the no doubt much-read Parliamentary report Deprivation in English Constituencies, 2019 – out of 533 entries I might add. Neglected as my hometown may be, it is thriving in areas that the government can’t measure: heart, character, humour and, above all else, pride. Particularly pride in appearance.

My friend Sam was spot on when he summed up my hometown: ‘A bubble, and the Essex of Liverpool.’ I couldn’t agree more. There is no expense spared for appearance and it’s safe to say I can let my people down on that front: I don’t dress particularly Scouse, but when the occasion is right, I’ll be there, tanned up, hair pruned to perfection, with my brows on, feeling a million bucks. It’s a town where everyone knows everyone; you cannot go to the ‘townie’ (town centre) without being stopped or having to pull a face that’s a half-smile, half-‘hiya’ at least five times. Six degrees of separation is more like two degrees, and many conversations go a little bit like this: ‘Oh, is your mum one of the Wilsons?’, ‘Did you used to work in X? My fella used to work there and said you were mad’, ‘My cousin used to go to that school, do you know [insert their cousin’s name]?’, ‘You know Y? Well, I seen her getting lecky, and she was saying that Z was having a terrible time with her daughter.’

As you can imagine, anonymity is non-existent and nothing is sacred or off-limits. In the age of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, news and ‘goss’ travel faster than ever – a body doesn’t even turn cold before you find out who and how someone has died. To this day, I still wonder how many group chats my downfall landed in, and each time every fibre of my being winces. To be clear, that’s not me thinking I am a hot commodity or even newsworthy; I just know that, in a small town like mine, someone ending up batshit and being carted off to rehab is a banqueting feast for a group chat.

When the shit really hit the fan in 2017, and my only chance at recovering was to be plucked out of Kirkby and start life over somewhere new, I had to take it. My heart still aches knowing that for me to do well – for me to be me – I had get away from my hometown, out of the bubble. But, like most Scouse people, I won’t have a bad word said about the place. I can call it, but you can’t. It’s in our DNA to protect and defend Liverpool at all costs. What can I say – we are a fiercely loyal and proud lot.

I never really felt like I truly fitted in in Kirkby. As I got older, I just thought that was a superiority complex of wanting more, and that I had a resistance to the ready-made life that was set out for me. But as I began to connect to people in recovery, the more I heard people sharing that they too had never felt a part of anything, coupled with a feeling of, ‘There’s something not quite right about me, I do not belong.’

I suppose being me has never felt right or comfortable. In saying this, I’m not attention-seeking or looking for a way for people to feel sorry for me, so the tiny violin can remain in its case, thank you. I have always believed that I am weird, a burden, and not good enough. In the psychotherapy world, these ‘truths’ are called my ‘core beliefs’. According to Michael from Clouds and reputable literature pushed my way, our core beliefs often stem from childhood and are shaped by our experiences, inferences and deductions, or come from accepting what others tell us to be true. But although no one ever told me I was not good enough, a burden or weird (well, my sister would call me tetchy, but I’ve forgiven her), to go all Sigmund Freud and spout the your-childhood-defines-you patter, this does ring true for me. Although I had a largely typical childhood, there was a lot of uncertainty when I was growing up: sometimes me (that’s not a typo, you’ll get used to the Scouse pronoun for ‘my’) dad was there, and sometimes he was not. He would leave, and we would be none the wiser of when or if he would return. And then, one day, he was gone for good. It was never really spoken about, there wasn’t a space to process it, it was just a matter of fact. I have no resentment against me dad today: he’s a loveable and funny man with a big heart, he holds court at any party, but he has his own story (and it’s his, so it’s not my place and not my right to share why he struggled to be a part of a family). Christ, reading that back, I’m thinking: ‘Oh, how tacky – daddy issues,’ but, yeah, abandonment and rejection are probably where these ‘core beliefs’ came from, and they have indeed played out in my adulthood: feeling desperate for people to stick around, and living in fear of being rejected.

It’s funny, as a kid, you don’t know any of this stuff; I didn’t have language like ‘belief system’, or have a clue about ‘processing emotions’. It was the early nineties in Kirkby, Liverpool, and if you were acting out you were simply being a pain in the arse – there was no real talk of ‘feelings’, and things like ‘Let’s talk this through’ were a bit too hippy-dippy.

Does this knowledge and insight about the relationship I have with me dad mean that I blame him for my warped thinking and lush ways? Absolutely not. I remember being pissed once, screaming at my mum: ‘This is all yours and me dad’s fault!’ I don’t feel that way today. Sure, there are certainly events in my life that contributed to my mental downfall, but I can’t play the blame game – it’s not good for me. Hindsight can be your friend or your foe. Each time I have set off on the quest hell-bent for the reasons why, I have become frustrated, angry and further away from any kind of solution. I suppose I wanted someone or something to blame; I wanted to be able to pinpoint the exact moment and have the definitive reason of when and why I crossed the line from sociable drinking to drinking to cope. But nothing good comes from this agonising search: you cannot change the past and time travel is yet to be discovered, so all it’s a complete waste of precious time and headspace. As a good friend in recovery once taught me, ‘If you keep one foot in the past and one in the future, you’re in a perfect position to piss all over the day.’

Apart from this warped opinion of myself, as a kid I thought I was a bit different to others, particularly in how I responded to things. I treated minor setbacks like a 999 emergency, resulting in huge meltdowns – expecting me to rationalise was like expecting me to be fluent in a language I’d never bloody learnt. And I didn’t have to go very far or get very old to experience feeling odd. It didn’t start on the playground, it began in the family home, comparing myself to my sister.

What are siblings for if we don’t compare ourselves and question why we are, or why we are not, like them? I am one of two daughters and you couldn’t get two more different girls if you tried. My sister, our Becca, isn’t a bit like me. Considering there’s only three years between us, you would think we would have been somewhat close as children, or even share similarities but, no, there were none. I liked learning about the Tudors, she liked penalty shootouts; she didn’t give a fuck and I gave all the fucks; and, further down the line, she didn’t hit the bottle and I ended up an alcoholic. I do feel for me mum (Ange): I bet when I popped out she thought Becca and I would be best friends who would share toys, clothes and values; that we would always have each other’s backs. Poor Ange: a full-time mother, referee and peacemaker.

The childhood nicknames we were given perfectly illustrate our characters: we are Kitten and Big Truck. I’m Kitten. For the record, there was no intentional malice in these names, and they couldn’t be more fitting or prophetic. You see, our Becca is strong willed, independent, stubborn, competitive, athletic and boisterous. She has always been able to handle her own and feels fine telling someone to ‘do one’. It’s also worth mentioning she has an almighty kick on her (believe me, I have felt that kick my whole life). Whereas me, Kitten, I emit a fragile frequency, a vibe that I’m somewhat vulnerable, that I need constant looking after, and am at times a royal pain in the arse. Out of interest and validation, I wanted to include my big sis’s memories of a young Kitten: ‘You were a brat, a crier and shit at sports.’ True to form – cheers, sis!

Unlike our Becca, crying has always been my default setting; whatever the occasion or emotion, my ugly cry face and whale noises are on display for all to see. And I feel no shame about it, which to many is even odder than my actual emotional diarrhoea. Apparently, this non-stop tittie-lip and ‘I want me mum’ routine was the reason why babysitters were so reluctant to take the gig, and why there are very few Kodak moments of me, in comparison to my sister. I have to confess it has taken three decades and a breakdown of sorts to finally cut the cord from Ange, and I do still have my moments of ‘I want me mum’. (You’ll hear more of that transition later on.)

As you can imagine, these two polar-opposite approaches have their own, very different reactions to life; we were never on each other’s team and as the years progressed and our personalities continued to follow the trajectories of Kitten and Big Truck, the divide between us widened more and more. Becca could never understand why I was the way I was; and rather than just accepting our differences and loving myself regardless, I automatically assumed that I was the ‘bad’ and the ‘broken’ one. For the record, she is my best mate and comrade these days.

Of course, as a kid, I didn’t know myself well enough to say: ‘Oh, Melissa, here we go, get a grip, calm down and look at the facts. This is all in your head,’ and my anxiety started to present itself physically. Without any real thought or motive, at the age of ten, I started to pull strands of my hair out. I didn’t know why I did it, I just did it. I would zone out, feeling for the right type of hair to pull out. The official word for this condition is trichotillomania, but in the same way ‘anxiety’ wasn’t a thing back in the nineties, trichotillomania wasn’t, either. I just got told to ‘Stop that!’ There were no conversations of, ‘So, why do you pull your hair out? What do you get out of it?’ I was just told to stop. By the age of eleven, I had a comb-over that could rival Donald Trump’s. I still pull at my hair in times of worry or boredom – and I still get told to stop. If you look on any of the BBC Radio 5 Live Hooked videos, you’ll be sure to see my weirdly large hands go to the back of my head.

Added to this, at around the age of fourteen, I began to scratch my arms. Again, I had no real understanding of the whys, but I would scratch and scratch until the skin went shiny, and then I would be left with a perfectly straight scab. People reacted more to the scratches: deep scratches and vertical scabs on your forearms are more shocking than a dodgy barnet. But to those who noticed the new additions to my arms, it just made for more confusion. It made absolutely no sense. Why? Because to most who knew me I was a confident kid who didn’t mind the spotlight. Who knew that you could be an extrovert with anxiety and low mood? I certainly didn’t.

Embodying both ends of the social spectrum is a nightmare when you are trying to communicate how you are feeling and trying to be understood. When I used to think of someone who suffered with anxiety, I would think of someone who was painfully shy. This stereotype is just as unhelpful as the stereotype I used to have of alcoholics. I wish that we could lash phrases like ‘classic’ and ‘textbook’ right in the bin, particularly when we are talking about mental health conditions. Of course, there are groups of symptoms that are commonly associated with anxiety and depression, for example, but this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t always work. The illusion of confidence I had was again a form of self-preservation: a front; a way for people to accept me. Even to this day, I am more confident speaking on a stage in front of two hundred strangers than I am at speaking in a one-to-one with someone I barely know. When there is a sea of bodies it’s impossible for me to try and read everyone; all I am thinking about is my own performance and delivering a bloody good show. One-to-one, I feel exposed, I am trying to figure out what they are thinking, I am more aware of what I am saying and begin to ramble; basically, I chat absolute bollocks and come away from the conversation mortified.

It’s safe to say that I was emotional and sensitive as a kid, and that even after copious amounts of talk therapy and a prescription for happy tablets, I still am. And you know what? I’m OK with it. I’m a Tiny Tears. (Funnily enough, Tiny Tears was a nickname given to me in rehab. I think my inmates – apologies, ‘fellow clients’ – thought this would taper off, but they were mistaken.)

Accepting that I am a sensitive soul has taken its time, and today I am able to discuss exactly what I am feeling and talk it through without bottling it up. But up until the age of twenty-nine, I was emotionally illiterate: I knew the words ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘fucking sad’ and ‘worried’. I didn’t know how to talk to about my feelings, and I certainly couldn’t process them, so they all ended up in a tightly wound mess living in the pit of my stomach. When I would try to communicate how I was feeling, the only words I could come up with were, ‘I don’t feel right’ and ‘There’s something wrong with me’ – these nondescript phrases would be repeated over and over again, hoping that someone would be able to tell me what it was that was wrong and, in turn, fix me.

I know now that the more I allow the pressure to build, the more chance there is of the contents of my mind exploding (a bit like a packet of crisps on an aeroplane). But leaving pain unresolved, persevering with uncomfortable feelings and allowing situations to reach crisis point was just how I operated. The concept of early intervention or ‘nipping it in the bud’ was lost on me, whether that was staying in a relationship too long hoping they would finish with me because the thought of ending it was just too much, waiting until I was passing blood before I went to the doctor, allowing a boss to treat me like crap until I fell to bits, or ending up completely pickled with my life burnt to the ground before I quit the booze. Not a great way to live one’s life, I know. My anxiety around having to speak up and having those difficult conversations would prevent me from doing anything, so I’d remain stuck in an unhappy situation with my resentments coming out sideways. But fear of letting others down, fear of judgement, fear of the facts and fear of the outcome were a part of my anxiety, were a part of me. And still can be, on bad days. The phrase ‘Melissa, can I have a quick word with you?’ still turns my knees to jelly and I automatically think that I have done something majorly wrong.

I always cared far too much what people think of me. It was all-consuming. I spent years trying to do other people’s thinking for them, creating a narrative that didn’t exist and always coming to the conclusion that people hated me. Here’s a prime example: ‘I can’t come tonight, I am not feeling well.’ Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? I was physically unwell – thanks to the Crohn’s, I was shitting past myself and my large intestine sounded like a Ferrari’s engine. I couldn’t go out, and no one would have minded. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy to ring and make your excuses … but no, not for me. Overthinking and overcomplicating go together like peas and carrots (insert Forrest Gump’s southern drawl). This thirty-second transaction would turn into six hours of procrastinating and deliberating, drafting and editing a text message, predicting the reply, assuming the person would think that I was lying about being ill … (and breathe). Finally, I would come to the awful conclusion that my friends would be finished with me for good. I would imagine the conversations they would have of me, of the friend fuming and removing me from their life; I’d think of the consequences of having no friends any more. This end-of-the-world thinking would be playing on loop. I couldn’t stop the song playing; I didn’t have a pause button, never mind the power button.

This entire saga would be happening in my head while I was crying, panicking and beating myself up for not feeling well enough in the first place. Then, as the event that I was no longer attending was going ahead, I would spend the time I allocated to nurse my actual illness feeling guilty and ashamed, refreshing social media every two minutes to see if they were having a better time without me.

This, my friends, is ‘catastrophising’, in all of its not-so-glorious glory. But this was my head, the only way I knew how to operate, and I never realised just how exhausting this all was. No wonder I wanted to escape my thoughts and take the edge off.

This panicked approach to life didn’t age well. The older I was getting and the more independent adulthood required me to be, the worse my thinking went. Or should I say overthinking. My thinking was obsessive, I could never ‘move on’ from anything; every situation was pulled apart piece by piece until I had no grasp of what was true or what was not. I was neurotic. By my mid-twenties I had been given yet another nickname: Jean Slater. If you love your soaps, you will know of Jean. She’s a fan-favourite EastEnders character who quite often looks like a deer caught in headlights. She suffers with mental illness and has a nervous disposition about her. If you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Bloody hell, fancy calling your mate that, that’s not kind or PC,’ don’t worry. Piss-taking and nicknames are how Scouse people operate – it was a term of endearment, really. Although there is something rather sad about your anxiety being normalised, personifying my anxiety has been quite helpful in recovery. There has been many a time in recovery when I say to my friends, ‘Guys, I’m having a Jean moment.’ I even have a safe word, well, phrase: if I am super-sensitive, and my ability to take a joke is nowhere to be seen, I am able to say, ‘Sausage surprise!’ (Jean’s signature dish) and the group will know that the joke or the conversation is causing me distress. Safe words aren’t just for the bedroom folks.

Decision-making ain’t my jam, either. I was adamant that I was unable to make any good decision. Trudging through life with this warped belief system and self-esteem lower than a snake’s belly often led to a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. I would somehow find myself in a position whereby I could say to myself, ‘See, I told you.’ I’ve always hated making decisions, as you can probably guess by what you’ve already read about me, but the process would be completely blown out of proportion, with a whole lot of unnecessary anguish. I do have to admit, by the age of twenty, I had made a lot of bad choices, and I hurt people with my lying and avoidance. The story of my life, really: ‘When you fuck up, Melissa, you fuck up big.’ People who knew me at this time would tell you I was a nightmare and I’ll be the first to say that I carried on something shocking. There was always a drama and I was always there, trying to think and lie my way out of it and wondering how or why I had found myself in this position. Ultimately, I lost friends by age twenty as a consequence of my actions. To them I was a lying, two-timing car crash.

I am not one for making excuses or pulling the mental health ticket, but me, then? I was gone, and was suffering with what I know now as ‘unresolved trauma’. At nineteen I had an abortion. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the whos, whys and the wherefores. But I want to share the impact this had on me and my mental health. That experience messed me up. Whether people around me knew the impact or didn’t, I don’t fully know; I downplayed it, I acted like everything was fine, I carried on like nothing was the matter. I couldn’t face reality so I made an alternate one.

Deep down, the decision didn’t feel right but, true to form, the fear of not going ahead with the abortion was too great. In the consultation room at the hospital, I began to sob – I used to think if I cried then people would know what I was thinking and know there was something wrong, and help me – and perhaps take the responsibility of making the choice away from me? The nurse said, ‘If you don’t stop crying, he won’t do it.’ So I did what I was told. (I’ve always responded to authority: doctors, teachers, nurses, bosses – I would never have dreamed of challenging someone in that type of position. What can I say, I am a wimp and a kiss arse.)

I woke up in that room and I don’t think I was ever the same after that.

I remember screaming, ‘What have you done?’ but by that point it was all too late. I left that hospital numb, and for years I would avoid having to go anywhere near it. That day haunted me, asleep and awake; each time a flashback took over my brain, I would slap my head as if to knock it out of my skull. I didn’t even tell me mum about it until eighteen months later and yet, truthfully, if I think about everything I have ever been through, that was a time when I probably needed my mum the most. I was a young girl with poor mental health in a situation she wasn’t able to manage. I didn’t get immediate help, I don’t recall even being asked if I needed to talk to someone afterwards. I didn’t think I had any right to feel sad so I just put up with it and, in a perverse way, I welcomed all the misery that came thereafter. I thought I deserved it.

I thought the bad things – bad bowels, gynaecological issues and unhappiness – were stuff I had brought on myself because of the abortion. I even thought I was being punished by god – which was really bloody odd, because I wasn’t particularly religious; but a convent high school education (complete with nuns) and a constant Catholic drip feed will do that to you. The darkness stayed with me. I was no longer just acutely anxious: I now had a shadow that was always with me.

I never really connected the dots; I never once thought that this darkest of moments was playing out in other areas of my life. I knew of other women who had been through the same and felt very little about it, so I thought I had no entitlement to feel any type of sadness.

Furthermore, I saw the abortion as the evidence as to why I should not be allowed to make any decisions.

If there are any women reading this who, like me, have struggled with an abortion, you are not alone, your feelings are valid, and you’re all in my heart. Please don’t suffer in silence.

Sorry, that got a bit dark, didn’t it? I was umming and ahhing whether it was important or not. You came here to read about drinking, not to find out about a nineteen-year-old having an abortion. I just want to say that I’m good today. I’ve processed it and I have come to accept that the timing wasn’t right and there was another path for me. The one I find myself on now. I had a good chat with me mum about whether I should include all this and, ever the protector, she wanted me to think long and hard about sharing this part of my story. She and I don’t often talk about it – it’s one of those topics that you have a code word for or just allude to, and you never say it out loud. But someone does need to talk about it: there are too many women in a similar position for me to not talk about it. My closest friends in recovery know how significant this experience was to my mental health and for me not to share it would mean I am omitting a significant part of my ‘journey’ (cringe – I hate that expression).