What do these women
Daily Express Saturday August 4 2018
I WAS AN ALCOHOLIC
Life coach and author Jojo Bailey, 57, lives in Stamford, Lincolnshire. She stopped drinking in 2014.
SHE SAYS:
“MY BIGGEST problem was I didn’t realise I had a problem with drink. I’d spent 40 years living in denial, always laughing off the embarrassing situations I found myself in or pretending nothing was wrong.
My love affair with alcohol first began when I was 15, at an end-ofterm party; I didn’t feel like I fitted in so I sipped on a Babycham nervously. From then on drinking helped me through many of the challenges I faced during my adolescence.
At 23, I landed my dream job as a personal assistant for a global music company, which involved lots of socialising and drinks after work. Then, in 1989 when I relocated to Singapore I quickly fell in love and within a few months of meeting we were planning our wedding. For a time I couldn’t have been happier.
But then my world came crashing down when my fiancé left me for his ex-girlfriend. For three days solid all I did was drink to numb the pain. Whenever I found myself having a bad day I reached for the wine bottle and even after the pain subsided I threw myself into the glamorous expatriate whirl of champagne brunches, boozy golf games and endless happy hours.
The cycle of heavy drinking was never-ending and my lifestyle masked my alcoholism – although friends around me could see I had a problem.
Everything spiralled out of control in 2014, however, when I found myself in hospital after suffering not one but two strokes. It never dawned on me that my hard drinking was the cause. And so for the next three months I carried on. It was only after my sister, who was terrified of losing me, asked me to make her a promise not to drink for one year that I finally realised how much I was hurting not only myself but the people who cared about me.
That promise, made four and a half years ago, saved my life. That was my opportunity to stop drinking once and for all and – with the help of recovery meetings, friends, family and excellent resources on the internet – I haven’t looked back since.” Jojo’s book Happy And Sober is available on Amazon.
I STRUGGLED WITH THE DEMANDS OF PARENTHOOD
Author Lauren Derrett, 45, lives in Essex with her husband. She has four children and two stepchildren.
SHE SAYS:
“THE LAST time I got drunk was December 28, 2017, at a family party to celebrate my niece turning 21. And I got really drunk.
The next morning I woke up with a dreadful hangover and the usual feelings of guilt, disappointment as well as the fear that I had made a drunken fool out of myself at the age of 44.
As I had many times in the past, I promised myself that I wouldn’t do it again. Except this time, I really meant it.
Was my life so awful that I needed to reward myself with a glass of wine simply for making it through each day? Were my kids so awful that I needed to medicate myself just to get through the horrors of parenting? Up until 13 years ago, I only ever drank socially but after the birth of my third child Darcey, now 14, I felt I was struggling with the demands of parenthood and I began rewarding myself with a drink or two at the end of every day. Aside from the nine months when I was pregnant with my youngest child Ace, now six, I continued to drink daily, sometimes a bottle a night, perhaps more at the weekends.
For some people this kind of drinking might not be a problem but for me it was.
I began to plan my day around my next drink. Some days I would eat lunch out, alone, just so it would be socially acceptable for me to drink before my official wine o’clock began around 4pm.
I knew what I was doing was harming my body, I knew the guilt I felt and the money I was wasting but I ignored it all. But after my niece’s party I finally realised I had to do something to end the cycle. Previous attempts to stop drinking had ended in failure because I’d never held myself publicly accountable. This time I knew that if things were to be different I needed to say it out loud. ‘I’m drinking too much’, ‘I need to drink daily’, and the one that nobody ever really wants to admit, ‘I’m slowly killing myself’.
My first step was to sign up for Alcohol Concern’s Dry January campaign, sharing my donation link online with everyone I knew so that I would have to go through with it. I then surrounded myself with people who were choosing to live sober lives. I also educated myself on the health risks of daily drinking, which
Lauren Derrett is the author of Filter Free: Real Life Stories Of Real Women, is available on Amazon and via her website at thisgirlisenough.co.uk