Unknown Speaker 0:16
Let's get this started. Do
Unknown Speaker 0:26
yay, welcome, welcome.
Unknown Speaker 0:35
Let's get this started. Shall we
Speaker 1 0:38
almost seven o'clock? And wait until seven o'clock. First of all, those of you who are there, if you are able to just let me know in the chat that you can hear me, that would be super cool, and that you can see me, that you can see my big presentation deck. Yay, cool. It's awesome. Thank you. I'm really glad you're here. This is going to be something a little bit different. I was going to say, Oh, hi, hi. I want to say people's names, but I also want to give you the opportunity, if you want to, I only have your first names, but if you want to change your name or whatever, please feel free to if you can do that by right clicking, I think it's in the participants panel. If you, if you click on your name in the participants panel, you can it says more. And then you can change your name if you want to, for any reason you don't want your name being said out loud. I like to give people that option, because I know these things can be pretty sensitive for people. I'm sorry my cat's in here,
Unknown Speaker 1:57
little heads poking through.
Speaker 1 2:00
Alright, it's coming up to seven, so we will start. I think it's very exciting to have you here. This is the first time I've done something like this before. It's a little bit different than my normal style of webinars. Hi. I was just saying, for those of you who've just joined, if you want to for any reason, if you don't want me to say your name, if you want to change your name in the panelists, the participants area, I can only see your first names, but if any reason you want to change them, you just click on your name in the participant area, and you just go on to you, click down more, and then you can just change your name to whatever you want, Fran, japani, whatever, whatever floats your boat. Alright, so let's get started. I'll mention that again as we go a little bit, because people tend to come on a bit late, but it's lovely to have you all here. Yay. This is something a little bit different, as I was saying, than I normally do. Hi, Alex, good to see you. It's something a little bit different than I normally do, a little bit of storytelling. This is really more of a conversation, but what I wanted to I started writing a piece that I was going to publish around my experience of being in that kind of weird place where it took me really long time to kind of work out whether my bad was bad enough, because it didn't seem to be what I was what, you know, what we were told, having problematic alcohol use looks like I didn't look like it. I didn't feel like it. And I'll talk about it a bit more in this
Unknown Speaker 4:02
hour that we have together,
Unknown Speaker 4:06
but I wanted to
Unknown Speaker 4:08
share something that I thought that
Speaker 1 4:12
you might need to hear. I didn't have a rock bottom, I didn't identify as an alcoholic, and I still don't. It's funny, when I put the post out about doing this session, someone came back to me and they were like, how can you be a coach if you didn't know that you had a problem with alcohol? I was like, Wow,
Unknown Speaker 4:33
interesting question.
Speaker 1 4:36
But I really it's very difficult for us to see when things are problematic for us, because there's so much of society that tells us that, what you know, that it's normal to be able to drink and and we look around and we and we look at our friends, and we think, oh, you know, he drinks more than me, so on so forth, which is why I came up with the title, which I really love. Are not that bad, but bad enough. So for me, it wasn't really that I had. I didn't have this kind of, like rock bottom, although when I do tell my stories, you'll probably be like, Oh my gosh. They sound quite full on. But honestly, they're just like little isolated incidents.
Unknown Speaker 5:17
I just had these little
Speaker 1 5:19
red flags, like tiny moments didn't sit right, and after a while, they began to add up. And eventually I stopped saying, is not that bad, and started asking the question, is it bad enough for me? And that changed everything. And so this is really I want to tell you my story. Some of you will have heard it before, going through my journey, through the notes to self, as I like to call them, into the kind of when I stopped drinking, why I stopped drinking, how I stopped drinking, but then also what changed on the other side and what expected and what was really the situation. And this is really for people, if you're quiet, if you're kind of wondering, and you're carrying around that vague sense that something needs to shift, that's
Unknown Speaker 6:16
what this conversation is here for. It's
Speaker 1 6:18
an invitation come and hear my story in it's not, not that bad, but bad enough. There's no cameras on you. Like I said, No one can see you all. Conversation happens via the chat, and feel free to type away. I love being interactive. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you my story in a very so, you know, put yourself a cup of tea, pull up a chair,
Unknown Speaker 6:47
relax.
Speaker 1 6:52
It's a quiet, safe, completely discreet place. I will be doing a replay, but I will only mention the names of people who talk in the chat. And as I said at the start, if you want to change your name, you can. You can just click on it and press the More button, and it will allow you to change your name.
Unknown Speaker 7:15
So let's get started.
Speaker 1 7:18
Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming and listening. First of
Unknown Speaker 7:30
all, I'd like to begin
Speaker 1 7:33
acknowledging the lands that I'm on, the Bunurong people of the Kulan nation, as the custodians of Curt Barak, where I live, and I want to share my admiration for the Aboriginal culture, and I witness the connection that they have with each other, with the land and with their community. And a lot of the work that I do,
Unknown Speaker 7:57
and lot of my
Speaker 1 8:00
journey through alcohol myself has been in remembering that I am part of nature, has been in connecting with nature. Myself in nature, and as I do so, I feel the incredible anchoring from nature, and I'm so grateful for the Aboriginal people's amazing custodianship, the power, the beauty and the healing potential of this land that I live on. And I want to pay my special respects to the elders of the Bunurong, people, whose wisdom and guidance and support are exceptional and felt way beyond to the Aboriginal community. I honor that this is Aboriginal land and it has never been ceded, and I am committed to listening to the Aboriginal community and learning how to be an active ally in their journey to justice. So also honoring the lands that you that you are on tonight as well. Feel free to share that with us, if you would like to. Don't worry, I won't say it out loud. Okay, so I invite you to relax. I invite you to sit back and have a story told to you for 3035, minutes, and then we will do a little bit of journaling, work together and have a bit of a conversation. If anyone wants any coaching, they're more than welcome to have some. And then we'll go off on our merry way. I hope at the end of it that you will feel that you've had an opportunity to tie down and understand kind of where you are on the journey. And yeah, I hope that you're able to relate to what I, what I, what I share with you. So I start the story for me, a very different night than the night it is here in Melbourne tonight. Night. I don't know about you, I don't know what it's like where you are, but for me, it's cold, wet, it's dreary, and the night I was reflecting on was a beautiful, balmy Saturday night in the summer here in Australia, and I've been drinking with my friends since midday. I
Unknown Speaker 10:23
love to party.
Speaker 1 10:25
My weekends were generally spent getting really, really
Unknown Speaker 10:31
inebriated
Speaker 1 10:34
with my friends in some shape or form. So it wasn't really unusual than this particular occasion. We were having a party, but
Unknown Speaker 10:44
we were super excited. It was fun.
Unknown Speaker 10:47
We were fun. I was fun. Wasn't
Unknown Speaker 10:54
I? Our friendship group was made up of
Speaker 1 10:58
middle aged professionals, some academics, some corporate types, people working in non for profits. And we all had come together, really, via our kids. We lived in in the West, in Melbourne, in the West, and we were having good time.
Unknown Speaker 11:22
The garden was lit
Speaker 1 11:25
with hundreds of string lights. It looked magical. My hobby was on the decks. He liked to think of himself, still does as a bit of a DJ. And it was a gazebo where the decks were underneath, and we had big black speakers pumping out bangers from the raving days, and people were singing and having fun. And I looked around at our friends at the time the kids were beginning to disperse. I looked at the house and the music, and I was like, this, is it right?
Unknown Speaker 12:02
We've done it. We've made it. How cool.
Unknown Speaker 12:09
Like, unknowingly
Speaker 1 12:10
though I was ticking off my autistic list of what makes a good life. We were busy, we were social, we were liked,
Unknown Speaker 12:21
we were winning.
Unknown Speaker 12:26
One of my friends, Kath,
Speaker 1 12:29
was getting quite sloppy, just very slim person, and
Unknown Speaker 12:34
alcohol tended to go to head really
Unknown Speaker 12:36
quickly. She weaved towards
Speaker 1 12:41
me and my friend, and she threw her heavy arms over our shoulders, and we took her full weight, grateful that she was a marathon runner. Love you guys, she said she sweared red wine teeth and stained lips way too close. She wasn't normally very an in your face person. She stumbled around into the sun lounger, and she smashed her giant red wine glass across the wooden deck, and wine splattered everyone and everything. Her husband, who was used to this stuff and wasn't drinking at the time, ordered her an Uber, and a few of us drifted out onto the front veranda and waited with her. We were having sticky siggies, keeping one eye on the bedrooms where my kids had gone to bed and a couple of other kids were staying. And then when her Uber arrived, people started making polite goodbye noises and I ducked inside to check on the kids. Wine Glass in hand,
Unknown Speaker 13:49
they were both in my youngest bed waiting
Unknown Speaker 13:53
my eldest
Unknown Speaker 13:55
a big eyed an innocent
Speaker 1 13:59
human with thick hair falling over his heart shaped face, the kind of kids that people call an old soul, obsessed with Harry Potter history and constantly visiting Sovereign Hill. He once got into trouble at school for dancing in the rain, that kind of kind so he looked at me, and he said, Mum, can you not bring Daz in here with us? He was pointing at my wine glass. It's making me feel anxious, which was a very grown up thing to say. You
Unknown Speaker 14:38
think that would stop me in my tracks?
Unknown Speaker 14:42
And I did let it land. I did feel it.
Unknown Speaker 14:47
I still remember it very clearly.
Speaker 1 14:51
It was a step on the path, but didn't stop me.
Unknown Speaker 14:56
I shoved it down,
Speaker 1 14:59
added it to. A self recrimination that I pulled out at three o'clock in the morning, mouth dry, heart racing so weak, why couldn't I just stop at one or two? But no, that wasn't my moment of reckoning. There were more to come that was a moment a sign
Unknown Speaker 15:24
that my drinking was making my kids feel unsafe.
Speaker 1 15:35
So throughout that year, I had more wake ups again, not rock bottoms, but close enough. I wasn't as bad as some of my friends. I certainly wasn't as bad as Kath that night, at
Unknown Speaker 15:51
least that's what I told myself.
Unknown Speaker 15:55
But I was bad enough
Speaker 1 15:58
the year before, I'd left a job that nearly broke me workplace bullying cracked my carefully curated identity right open. I've been proud of my job. I was a corporate marketing manager for big brands like Warner Brothers, Disney, Coles, Mars, at parties, all I had to do was say who I worked for, and people just nodded. I didn't have to explain myself. I belonged. I had worth. But when it all imploded and I ran from the building doped up on valium that my GP had prescribed me to help me keep pushing it down. Keep holding it together. I
Unknown Speaker 16:47
couldn't make sense of it.
Speaker 1 16:50
If I just worked harder longer, they'll see who I really am.
Unknown Speaker 16:58
But they didn't,
Speaker 1 17:00
and the new manager kept coming at me like a freight train, until I started to become the person that she made me out to be, until the version of me I'd spent 45 years building shattered like glass. If I wasn't the high achiever,
Unknown Speaker 17:16
then who was I?
Unknown Speaker 17:18
What even was the point of me?
Unknown Speaker 17:21
I I left.
Speaker 1 17:24
I decided to try and hold them accountable. But mentally, I was broken. I was so paranoid. I was imagining that there are people climbing on my fences and looking into my garden to see if I was sick enough to not be there. I was paranoid. I was ashamed. I avoided the people I knew. I wore sunglasses and coals so I wouldn't run into anyone. I was collating evidence for legal action, but I couldn't recognize myself, and that summer, we had a group camping trip planned. I didn't want to go. I love the people, but I hated the chaos. Camping with my husband always meant military level logistics and high stress. He would get anxious and shouty. His mood would ripple through me. My nervous system soaked it all up. He, like me, is autistic and ADHD, but we have very different wiring. He often misses the social cues and doesn't notice when people have had enough or when the music's too loud. He gets sloppy, and I feel other people's reactions to him, and every single beat of it in my body, camping became a place I drank to numb it, all the shame, the stress, the responsibility of trying to manage everyone's experience.
Unknown Speaker 18:49
And that day,
Unknown Speaker 18:51
I didn't want to go,
Speaker 1 18:54
but not going wasn't an option, not in my marriage, not in my mind.
Unknown Speaker 19:01
So I drank gin at 10am
Unknown Speaker 19:04
just to get out the door Nietzschean. Well, that was new,
Unknown Speaker 19:11
and I noticed
Speaker 1 19:14
that was a line I hadn't seen myself crossing, like drugs I never thought I'd touch. You know the ones where you're like, oh, wouldn't do that. While we were there at the camping trip, I kept steadily drinking just enough to keep the edges soft, just enough to disappear. And that night, I took some valium as well, and I fell asleep in the tent, dead to the world. The next morning, my friend Belinda looked at me and gently said, Did you take something last night? No, I lied ashamed.
Unknown Speaker 19:54
Didn't you hear your kid screaming? She said, I
Speaker 1 19:58
had to go and help him. It was out of his mind. There was a spider. Now, my eldest has a spider phobia that is off the charts, not just a shadow, full body panic, screaming, life or death, stuff. And I missed it. I was meters away, dead asleep. Another mother held my terrified child while I lay passed out in a tent, and I remember thinking, What kind of mother does that
Speaker 1 20:37
in the year after I left my job and started studying to become a counselor. I knew something was up with my drinking the spider incident, gin at 10am wine in the kid's bedroom. These weren't rock bottoms, no, but they were notes to self, and still I filed them away. Told myself I wasn't that bad. I wasn't like my friend who hit the deck at the party. So I kept doing what so many of us do. I took breaks, 30 days, six weeks. I set a goal to make eight weeks, and somehow I never did. Every time I stopped drinking, I felt this overwhelming anger, a sense of deprivation I couldn't explain I got fed up with being controlled, and wanted to scream a big F you in the face of the boring asshole who signed me up for this. Oh, wait, that was me, and it wasn't just about alcohol. I always paired quitting with some other extreme attempt to fix myself a new diet, to change my life regime. I'd stack goals on top of each other, have a massive blowout beforehand and make sure I felt like the inside of a gross, dirty bin liner so awful that the thought of drinking felt impossible. I'd get ready to repent ingrained Catholic patterning and brace for the necessary purgatory of sobriety, and when I couldn't finish, when I couldn't reach the finish line, or even when I did, I'd go back to drinking. Fuck it, I'd say, waiting for that heat of alcohol to spread its fuzzy, warm blanket of relief. I'd clear the house of wine, and then I'd find myself rooting through cupboards for anything, an old bottle of cooking wine, some strange liqueur left behind from a holiday chat rose. I think of something called I can't even remember, like me, or something like that. It didn't matter how revolting it was. I drink it. That's how strong the craving was, not just for alcohol, but for relief, for relief from the feeling of being deprived, for relief from the feeling of being good. And one night, I was sat on the grouse verge out the side the front of my house with a mini, mini bottle of Hinkle. You know, there's little bottles of champagne, smoking a cigarette and talking to my friend about whether I should try. AA, I didn't want to I didn't see myself as an alcoholic. I just needed to get tough with myself, pull my socks up, knuckle down, get a grip. And then a friend suggested I read some quit lip. So I started with this naked mind and quit like a woman and we are the luckiest, three of the most excellent books. I do believe this friend had had a friend, friend of a friend, who'd gone for a full year alcohol free by reading, listening to podcasts, following people and doing little online courses. So I started reading, listening following, following people who questioned alcohol without shame or labels or hitting these frock bottoms. The a message of being powerless to alcohol didn't resonate with me at all. I didn't want to be one of those people who friends, couldn't drink around, or who couldn't go to a pub, in case I went berserk, if I fell off the wagon and downed any drink in sight, the alcohol missed having descended and rendered me powerless. If that was sobriety, I'd rather keep drinking. I didn't want alcohol to be something to be scared of. I wanted it to be irrelevant,
Unknown Speaker 24:40
and something shifted.
Speaker 1 24:43
I realized I didn't have to quit drinking to start getting ready to stop before it had always been jumping feet first. What I'd been doing all the self flagellation, the stern talks, the feast and famine, it wasn't working. I.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
So I thought I'd try something else.
Speaker 1 25:04
I'd learn everything I could about alcohol and how it affected my brain and body. It became my special interest, my hyper focus. It was no longer something I was having to do. It was something I really wanted to do. I was super interested in it. I
Speaker 1 25:23
i learned how alcohol mimics our body's own chemical messengers and then depletes them, how tolerance bills, how cravings weren't about willpower, that the wine witch might not be an enemy to battle, maybe like witches throughout history, she just got a bad rap.
Unknown Speaker 25:48
I learned that self compassion wasn't fluffy.
Unknown Speaker 25:51
It was vital.
Speaker 1 25:54
It was vital for us to feel safe enough to stay with ourselves when we're struggling, maybe the only way that change would stick without it, our inner critic would have us hitting the eject button before we had time to switch our thinking brains on. But just before Christmas, I was at a friend's house watching, ironically, the movie wine country. I don't know if you've heard of it. Can't remember who's in it. I feel like
Unknown Speaker 26:28
my brain's gone completely blank.
Unknown Speaker 26:32
Amy Poehler, I think was one of them.
Speaker 1 26:36
My son was there with me too. He had a friend of the persons that I was staying with, and as we left, I I slipped, and I fell with my full weight into a gnarly old rose bush, one of those well pruned, hardened old veterans. A thick nub punched straight through my neck, just below my jugular.
Unknown Speaker 27:01
I ended up in Footscray hospital.
Speaker 1 27:04
The discharge note red, pissed fell into a rose bush. It's still on my medical records, even now, I still feel the sting of that sentence, the disapproval. We were meant to go away that weekend, and instead, I lay bruised in bed, scrolling my phone, ashamed, and that's when I saw an ad for a 30 day online alcohol program starting on January the first. It cost money I didn't want to spend, but I also didn't want to have another year like the one I just had. So I signed up. I'd already decided to take a year off alcohol. I just needed structure, accountability. Everything I read had said a year gave your brain time to rewire, time to experience all the firsts without alcohol and create new associations, birthdays, camping, Christmas, sex, all of it amongst my friends, a bunch of health conscious boozers. Irony a year off, wasn't that weird? We ran, we meditated, we made green smoothies. A health kick made sense. But telling my kids that was the defining moment.
Unknown Speaker 28:16
If I told them,
Speaker 1 28:19
I had to mean it, I couldn't let them down again. And that's when I saw how deeply I built my identity around alcohol. It wasn't just what I drunk, it was who I was, the fun one, the wine lover, the host, the good bottle Bringer, the one who danced, letting go of that identity felt like exile.
Unknown Speaker 28:46
Fun. People drank and I was fun, right?
Speaker 1 28:50
But it also felt like freedom, relief. I didn't have to think about wine all the time. I didn't have to plan transport like a military operation. I could just drive when my kid needed picking up early from a sleepover. I didn't need to book an Uber and for the first time in years, I felt potential. Now this is where I want to pause a moment, not only to have a sip of my drink, but also because
Speaker 1 29:29
this is the part of the story where you might expect me to start sharing tales of my green juicing prowess, The Yoga, the meditation, the fitness and weight goals achieved, my clutter free, perfect home life and family. Now, look, I can whip up a mean tempeh, a great kale noodles, and I can am shanty with the best of them. But what I discovered on my other side is. Of my year long break from wild coal was something quite different. I went into it with goals that were mainly about fixing myself. I wanted to be thinner, more productive, healthier, sexier. I wanted to figure out what was going on with my body, because I always felt like I would be dismissed every time I mentioned that I drank more than the weekly guidelines, and I dismissed myself as much as any medical professional would too. I wanted to rebuild my trust in myself. I wanted to feel more normal, but what I really wanted was just to be able to go back to drinking the elusive two glasses of wine on a Friday or Saturday night. What we've been taught, what we've been told by the big alcohol companies drink responsibly campaign, that we should, that we should be able to do the dream of being fun but appropriate, pulled together a woman at the top of her game. I didn't want to keep waking up at 3am hating myself and wishing I could just pull my fucking oar in. What actually happened when I removed wine wasn't that I woke up with a color coded bookshelf or abs of steel. Instead, I discovered my midlife unraveling. I pulled off the wine mask, and unlike Scooby Doo there was no gasp of recognition when it came off. I had no fucking idea who I was, so I set myself a project. I tried to figure out what I even liked. I'd never really had hobbies or interests outside of work and drinking.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
