Oh the luxury of knowing that silly season is behind us for another year.
Gleefully we dump the mince pies, donate the weird gifts and vacuum up every last vestige of tinsel. It feels a touch Scrooge-like to be so relieved to see the back of such a âspecialâ time.Â
Except itâs not. Itâs only bloody reasonable.
Most of the joy was sucked from Christmas when we became adultsâŚ. FEMALE adults.
Because here we are, somehow almost entirely responsible for delivering the full Christmas experience â with giving our children all the sparkle and delight, with juggling family and in-law relationships, usually with cooking and (99 times out of 100) shopping resting entirely on our plates.Â
And then we wonder why weâre miseries; why it takes a gallon of alcohol to make us *joyful* and to lubricate our way through the season.
Weâre miseries because there is nothing merry and bright about being the Christmas workhorseâŚ
It mightnât be comfortable to admit it, but weâre drinking to get us throug...
Deciding to ditch alcohol can feel like a HUGE statement.Â
âOh God, everyone will think Iâm a raging alcoholicâ, or maybe âif I say I donât drink, but then I start again, Iâll have failedâ.
Those thoughts can be crippling.Â
But sometimes we set our goals too specifically, and in doing so we talk ourselves out of them before weâve even got off the starting blocks.
What if the goal wasnât to ditch the booze, but to find better ways to self-care, to self-soothe, to show yourself a whole heap of self-love?
Because, ultimately, itâs kinda the same thing.
Changing your relationship with alcohol doesnât mean you have to tip everything down the sink in a blaze of ânew meâ defiance (although you can if you want). It can just mean thinking, observing, nurturing, and then plotting a new path as all that understanding unfolds.Â
Big old lines in the sand can give us a tremendous kick when they work, but if theyâre stopping progress then⌠whatâs the point? Those small steps we take ultimately...
Want to work on your wellbeing? Start by ditching the self-flagellation, my friend.
We women are experts in telling ourselves to âdo betterâ. We constantly beat ourselves up for never being âenoughâ, for never getting things quite ârightâ. Weâre utterly unforgiving.
I get it â I was expert level in it too!
And thatâs why I drank. Because I was drowning under the unrelenting pressure of modern womanhood and Iâd learned, from a very young age, that alcohol was my band-aid of choice.
My beginnings
If you donât already know, I was born in the UK but grew up in Africa. My parents didnât drink any more than any of their friends, BUT my grandparents started each day with a Gin and Cinzano. And, at the ripe old age of 13, I was allowed to start drinking too.
I donât blame any of them. The received wisdom back then was that, âif we let them drink with us then they'll be used to alcohol and better able to manage themselvesâ. Unfortunately, that didnât work out so wellâŚ.
In my 20s I moved ...
2019 was a shit storm of a year. I had walked away from my 20 year marketing career a victim of some pretty unpleasant, but all to common, workplace behaviour a valium popping, nervous wreck unable to cope with the simplest of tasks. I was so full of shame, like so many women on the receiving end of toxicity in the workplace. Why couldn't I cope? Why wasn't I up to it? Why did they choose me? I didn't know who I was without my career. I was completely broken. Years of living in fight or flight trying to manage a full time corporate career two little babies, and a marriage that was not in great shape, surviving on caffeine, adrenalin and booze, I was brittle and it only took a few really unpleasant encounters for me to break. Then followed the aftermath, lawyers and financial uncertainty, I was lucky to have a great support system to guide me through the process, I couldn't have done it alone. Over that year whilst I maintained my running and built a daily yoga and meditation practice, ...
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