For much of my life, alcohol was woven into everything.
From my early teens and throughout my twenties, drinking became normalised in a way that made it difficult to recognise when things had moved beyond social drinking and into something much more serious. Like many people struggling with alcohol, I became very good at holding it all together on the outside. I looked functional. I kept going. I hid what was happening.
But behind closed doors, my physical and mental health was deteriorating.
Alcohol slowly became something I relied on, and over time, my drinking escalated. What started as coping became dependency. Shame grew alongside it, and so too did isolation.
When I became a mother and entered my thirties, things worsened. Motherhood was beautiful, but it also came with enormous pressure, and I reached a point where I simply could not continue living the way I had been.
That was my rock bottom.
It wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was the realisation that I couldn’t keep surviving while pretending everything was okay.
Today, I’m five years alcohol-free, and my life has completely transformed for the better.
Recovery gave me back everything alcohol had taken: my health, my peace of mind, my confidence, my relationships and, most importantly, myself.
That’s why I now share my story.
My message has always been simple: If I can get sober, you can too.
Because alcohol harm does not discriminate. It can affect anyone, at any time.
But this can also be true of sobriety.
One of the things that helped change my relationship with alcohol was taking part in the Dry January® challenge and using Alcohol Change UK’s Try Dry® app. Those experiences introduced me to something I had never really seen before: a supportive community.
For the first time, I saw people choosing alcohol-free lives not because they had “failed”, but because they wanted something better.
It shifted everything.
That journey is one of the reasons that becoming an Ambassador for Alcohol Change UK means so much to me. Supporting the charity that helped me discover life beyond alcohol feels incredibly personal.
