3 Things I Learned From the Worst Year of my Life

I've been asked to speak at The Rising Festival in Cambridge, in celebration of International Women's Day. Here is the transcript of my speech. I do hope you enjoy it.

Three things I learned from the worst year of my life.

My name is Clare Pooley, and I’m going to tell you the story of the worst year of my life. I realise that doesn’t sound particularly uplifting. Bear with me.

The worst year of my life was 2015. I was totally stuck in a rut. I was depressed, a terrible insomniac, two stone overweight, anxious all the time, and self-medicating with a bottle of wine a day. 

In March of that year, I quit drinking alcohol. Eight months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet now I see that that year was the most important one of my life, which has, since then, been transformed in incredible ways. Here are the three things 2015 taught me:

1.     When you drink to numb all the difficult things in life, you numb all the good bits too.

I drank in the way that many women do. At the end of a busy, stressful day, when the big hand hit ‘wine o’clock’ I would pour a large glass of Chablis (because if you drink expensive wine you’re a connoisseur, not a lush, right?) and tell myself that it was ‘me time.’ Because I was worth it. 

Gradually, over a period of years, that one glass became two, then three, and the glasses got larger. By 2015 I was drinking a bottle a day, more at weekends. Even I knew that was WAY more than the government guidelines.

Drinking was my hobby, my thing, my passion. I drank to celebrate, to commiserate, to relax, to have fun, for pretty much any reason at all, actually. Every now and again I’d worry about whether it was getting out of control and I’d find myself, late at night, asking Siri if I was an alcoholic. Siri would give me an online questionnaire which would ask questions like ‘do you drink alone?’ I’d answer ‘no’, because I was with the dog. 

I would scroll through my social media feed and chuckle at all the memes about ‘mummy’s little helper’ and ‘mummy juice’ and feel reassured that everyone drank the way I did. And I wasn’t wrong. 

In the UK, it is middle-aged, well-educated women who are most likely to be problem drinkers, not the hedonistic youth. An OECD report estimated that one in five female graduates drink hazardously (at more than twice the safe level).

I totally ignored the fact the that the WHO classifies alcohol as a group 1 carcinogen, or that alcohol causes insomnia and exacerbates depression, anxiety and dementia. I ignored the 700 calories in a bottle of wine, because it was a liquid and didn’t count. 

Instead, I would focus all my attention on the studies that showed that red wine was good for you. It was part of a Mediterranean lifestyle. It was made from grapes, for goodness sake. One of your five a day! I would imagine myself as one of those wizened, but happy, crones, dressed in floor length black shapeless dresses, gossiping on the sun-drenched steps of a piazza at the age of one-hundred-and-nine. 

I didn’t want to stop drinking. I thought my life would be over. And I was terrified about what people would think. It’s not easy at my age, in today’s Britain, to tell people that you don’t drink.

If you quit smoking, people treat you like a hero. They tell you that you are brave and clever and pat you on the back. If you quit dairy or gluten or sugar you can boast about it on Instagram and get loads of ‘likes.’ If I told people that I’d stopped drinking tap water they’d not bat an eyelid. But if you tell people at a party that you don’t drink alcohol they look horrified. And then they want to know WHY. They want gory details. They want to know if you got done for drunk driving, had inappropriate sex with inappropriate people or passed out in gutters in front of your children. Alcohol is the only drug you have to justify not taking.

But then, when I finally plucked up the courage to quit, miracles started to happen. Not immediately, but gradually over the next few months. For a start, the insomnia that had plagued me for decades disappeared, and I started sleeping like a baby. I also lost two stone. The low-level anxiety that had been my constant companion for years slowly drifted away and I felt much more positive and energetic about life. It was like someone had turned up the colour contrast on the TV, and life morphed from rather grey to technicolour.

As a teenager, I’d always loved writing, and when I stopped drinking, that passion returned with a vengeance. I became more creative and imaginative than I’d been for years. I started writing a blog, which I called Mummy was a Secret Drinker, an online diary of what I was going through, and within a few months, my blog picked up hundreds of thousands of readers from all over the world. 

I wasn’t alone in finding that quitting booze can reinvigorate your life and your career. Readers of my blog have done extraordinary things since they stopped drinking – they’ve launched businesses and new careers, written books, rediscovered old hobbies and found new passions. It’s no co-incidence that many of the most successful people in any field don’t drink. Anna Wintour and Tina Brown – don’t drink. Bradley Cooper, Tom Hardy and Samuel L. Jackson don’t drink. Kim Kardashian, doesn’t drink. 

I realised that for the previous decade, in trying to numb all the difficult parts of my life, I’d numbed all the good bits too.

Then, just as everything was going swimmingly, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I learned the next big lesson of that year:

2.     Dealing with addiction or trauma turns you into a superhero

It’s not easy giving up an addictive drug, especially when the majority of the population don’t treat it like one. You take it one day at a time. You spend hours wrestling with the demons in your own head. Then, one day, you come out the other side and you think wow. I did it. I’m free. And then you think now I can do absolutely anything.

Being diagnosed with breast cancer was a bit of a shock. It shouldn’t have been. The American Society for Clinical Oncology estimate that alcohol is the direct cause of more than one in twenty of all cancer deaths globally. In fact, alcohol kills more people around the world than malaria, meningitis, tuberculosis and dengue fever put together.

If I’d still been drinking at that point, all the wheels would have come off. I’d have dived into a vat of vino and not reappeared for some time. I’d have yelled and screamed in front of my children and would have been entirely focussed on me, not them. As it was, sober, I coped. Everything carried on as normally as possible, I took it one day at a time and wrestled with my demons.

And, when it was all over, I thought wow, I did it, I’m free. Now I can do absolutely anything. 

When you self-medicate your way through any difficult patch, trying to rub out any feelings of fear and anxiety, you become more and more cowardly, and unable to deal with the vicissitudes of life. 

When you learn to deal with trauma completely raw, you become braver and braver. And you realise that on the other side of your maximum fear lies all the best things in life. That is where the magic happens.

So, I faced up to my biggest fears. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of being judged. And I wrote a book. I called it The Sober Diaries,(available from Amazon and most good bookshops. My publisher told me to say that) and I told everyone my darkest secrets, about how badly I was addicted to wine, and how much my life had changed since I gave it up. 

And that’s when I learned the third lesson:

3.     Speaking your truth changes lives

We spend so much time curating our own images, and presenting perfect versions of our lives online. Then we make ourselves miserable by comparing the truth of our lives with the fiction we’re shown of other peoples. 

Social media does not tell the truth. It tells us that everyone is beautiful, happy and successful, when the truth is we are all struggling with something. Behind all the whitened smiles are people dealing with addiction, redundancy, caring for parents with Alzheimer’s or children being bullied. And many, many of those people are feeling totally alone.

Oprah Winfrey said, in her speech at the Golden Globes “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”And, you know what? She’s right, because when I published my truth, I learned that stories really can change lives. 

I’ve had thousands of messages from people all over the world saying “I thought I was the only one struggling with my relationship with booze, and I thought life without it would be miserable, so thank you for making me feel less alone and for giving me the courage to quit.”

            

I’ve now been sober for four years, and cancer free for three, and life has never been better. I’ve done a TEDx talk, up here at my old Cambridge college, talked from the stage at WOMAD for Radio 4’s FourThought, and have had the great honour of being invited here to talk to all of you. I’ve also written my first novel – The Authenticity Project – which is coming out in Spring 2020. So, my new fear is whether anyone's going to want to read it!

 Sometimes, what feels like the end is actually the beginning.

 You might be lucky enough to be the sort of person who can drink ‘sensibly.’ If so, I applaud you! (Although, full disclosure, I hate you a little bit too). But the truth is that most people use something to take the edges off life, whether it’s bingeing on sugar, spending hours on social media or a fortune on internet shopping. 

Whatever your prop is, you’re likely to discover that in escaping the difficult things in life, you’re also escaping its opportunities. Learning to live life in the raw will make you a superhero, and being open about your demons will change lives.

TO READ CLARE'S BOOK CLICK HERE (UK) OR HERE (USA).

One Year of The Sober Diaries

I can't quite believe that it's exactly a year since The Sober Diaries was published.

I wrote this book because I remembered how alone I felt when I was struggling with my drinking. I thought that, in a world where everyone drank, and where my social media feed was filled with wine memes, I was the only person who couldn't handle it.

Somewhere along the line, I'd gone from being someone who controlled her booze, to someone who was being controlled by it.

I read a huge number of books, looking for someone just like me. Most of the - often brilliant - memoirs I read focussed on the horrors of addiction. Some of the stories I identified with, but many I didn't. Then, right at the end of the story, the narrator would say 'and then I got sober and everything was brilliant.'

I really wanted a story that started there, where those stories ended. I wanted a story which went through all the details of how you got sober, and what life was actually like when you did. Was it miserable, as I suspected it would be?

So, a year after I quit drinking, I started writing the book I'd really wanted to read. A year later my fabulous editor - Charlotte Hardman at Hodder and Stoughton - picked up my proposal and took a huge leap of faith.

For three nights leading up to publication, I didn't sleep. I'd written my blog under a pseudonym - SoberMummy - as I was so ashamed about my drinking, and yet I was about to tell the whole world my darkest secrets under my actual name. Was I crazy?

But the truth is, the last twelve months have been extraordinary. I've had one or two trolls, obviously, but they've been drowned out by the tsunami of messages I've had from people all over the world saying I thought I was alone until I read your story and you could be writing about my life and now I know that life can be different. Better. Amazing. 

And that gave me the courage to do a TEDx talk on the shame associated with drinking. (click here), and a talk at WOMAD for Radio 4 on the miracles that happen when you quit drinking (click here). And I feel like, I hope that, I'm making a difference.

So, I just wanted to say to all of you, a huge THANK YOU, for all your support over the last 12 months, and CONGRATULATIONS to all of you who've made a difference to your lives, however big or small. You are all superheroes.

And to celebrate 12 months of publication, the new paperback edition of The Sober Diaries is out now in the UK (click here). If you're in the USA, I'm afraid it's still only available in Kindle and Audio (click here).

Merry Christmas and THANK YOU to you all!

SM x

I'm Back!

Hello!

I'm back. I'm so sorry about the radio silence.

I've not posted on here for a month, nor have I replied to any comments (so sorry if you left one - I’m trying to catch up!) I've not bought a single Christmas present. I've not sent any cards. There were days when I only just changed out of my pyjamas to do the school run. I've not worn any makeup for weeks.

For the last five weeks, I've been editing my novel - The Authenticity Project. The deadline to get it back to my publishers in the UK and USA was yesterday. I made it. Just.

I know I shouldn't grumble, as writing is actually the best job in the world. Whenever I talk about 'my job', my children clutch their sides and laugh hysterically, as they can't believe that anyone can be paid to make up stories. I can't quite believe it myself, to be honest. But the last few weeks have been hard.

For a start, there's the constant self doubt - is anyone actually going to want to read this? Plus, one of my main characters is an addict, and whenever I get to the chapter where he (spoiler alert) falls spectacularly off the wagon, I feel awful. Writing about his struggles getting sober feels much like I'm doing it again myself.

Now I'm done, I'm exhausted. And the hours spent hunched over a laptop, mainlining mince pies for energy, mean that I'm physically out of shape and have done my back in. I'm a wreck. And Christmas is approaching like an out of control steam train...

So, now the manuscript has left my desk and hit the desks of my editors, I can concentrate on getting fit, and getting my s**t back together in time for December 25th.

And it's so fabulous to be back here with you guys. I'm so sorry for abandoning you!

I'll post here in a day or two on how to survive Christmas without the booze, and I am still posting information and inspiration every day on the SoberMummy Facebook Page (click here), 'like' page to stay updated.

In other news, The Sober Diaries is coming out in PAPERBACK with a brand new cover design on December 27th. You can pre-order here.

Huge love to you all!

SM x

An Exciting Week...

I still vividly remember the days (years) when I would wake up at 4am on a Monday morning feeling toxic, filled with dread, or at least ennui, about the week ahead.

Today, I woke up at 4am because I am so excited about this week that I just couldn't stay asleep any longer.

(You may well, at this point, want to give me a virtual punch, in which case I completely understand and I am truly sorry).

Then, I walked out of my bedroom to discover that the dog had thrown up several times on the carpet overnight. What the universe gives with one hand, she takes away with the other.

The first exciting event is that my book is coming out in german. How wunderbar is that? Please tell any of your german friends! You can order a copy here.

You can also buy The Sober Diaries in dutch (here), french (here) and in english (here UK) and (here USA).

Another thrilling, but also terrifying, event this week is that my first novel is being sent out to publishers.

I've been writing and re-writing this book for about six months, and planning it in my head for many, many years, so this feels much like handing round your baby to a bunch of strangers, hoping that they'll look after her and not say yikes, what an ugly infant, take it away!

I dare not tell you much about the book for fear of jinxing it, but I will tell you that one of the main characters is, obviously, an addict. He is deeply flawed but utterly gorgeous, and I am secretly in love with him (don't tell Mr SM).

I'd be hugely grateful if you could send it good vibes! Thank you.

I'm still on a high, too, from the weekend. One of the joys of no longer being anonymous is that I can meet up with other sober revolutionaries in real life, which is what I did on Saturday night, in a really cool bar in Soho.

I met the amazing Jolene Park, who is visiting from the USA. If you haven't yet watched her TEDx talk on Grey Area Drinking, you must. It's here.

Lovely Mandy, from the brilliant LoveSober podcast came too, plus the hugely talented ladies who founded We Are in Good Company, the sober greeting cards business, who are single-handedly taking on all those booze joke cards.

I was there first, and asked for a lime and soda. Every time a new person joined me, also not ordering booze, the waiter looked increasingly confused.

We drank mocktails and hoovered bar snacks for FOUR HOURS, while we laughed till my jaw ached, and the bill came up to twenty pounds a head. Bargain for a Saturday night in the West End! That's what happens when you don't split the bill with the drinkers :-)

Saturday night was, for me, a great reminder that ex-drinkers really are the best people around.

Yesterday, I took Kit to a waterpark with a friend. I was hanging out with a cup of tea, when a lady I'd never met came up to me and said "excuse me, but are you Clare Pooley?" That has never happened to me before. She was reading my book, and recognised me from my TEDx talk.

Needless to say, my kids were thrilled because they now think that I'm going to be on Love Island and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Ha Ha. Must practise swanning around in a bikini and eating locusts.

There's loads more information and inspiration, as always, on the SoberMummy Facebook Page ('like' page to stay updated), including a brilliant article on booze and the menopause which is going up this evening.

Huge love to you all!

SM x

Oh, The Irony!

Just like back in the drinking days, I have insomnia.

It's 3.45am, a time I know well from when the nights were dark and full of terrors, when I'd wake up dehydrated, sweating booze and hating myself.

Only now, it's not booze keeping me awake, it's adrenaline.

The last two days, since I sent my book, like a fragile Chinese lantern, out into the world, have been a rollercoaster.

Since I posted yesterday, the Daily Mail article telling part one of my story (part 2 is out tomorrow) went to the 'most read' top position on the Mail Online and my little book climbed up and up the Amazon chart.

I wasted hours of the day constantly refreshing the Amazon bestseller list, unable to tear myself off the laptop. Once an addict, always an addict.

By the end of the day, I'd reached the giddy heights of #35 in 'all books'.

Even more extraordinary, for a while I was the number one bestseller in the 'raising children' category.

Oh, the irony! The one thing I have never, ever pretended to be is an expert in parenting!

Anyhow, as you probably guessed, I couldn't stop myself reading the Mail Online comments.

Some were, as you can imagine, pretty awful. One of my favourites was 'If I had a wife like her, I'd be drinking a bottle of wine a day!'

However, there were some pretty incredible comments too, and the 'most liked' comment of all was a lady who just wrote 'I can relate to this.'

And that's all I ever wanted to do - to tell my story so that anyone out there who is in the pickle that I was in can relate, and then see the way out.

Also, I discovered that all the wonderful messages from you guys and from friends and strangers far and wide via Facebook, text and e-mail, created the most magical, troll-proof armour.

I felt so surrounded by love and support that absolutely nothing bad could get through. So THANK YOU!

Now I really have to try to sleep, because this is only the beginning. On Tuesday morning I'm on Woman's Hour live, then there's more TV, radio and press coming thick and fast.

Things are changing, my friends. Remember how difficult it was to confess to quitting alcohol? All that stigma and shame? Well, no more.

Because 2018 is going to be the year of SOBER, not as a badge of shame, but a positive, aspirational, lifestyle choice.

VIVE LA REVOLUTION! And a very happy New Year to all of you.

To find my book click here. To go to the SoberMummy Facebook page click here.

Love SM x

What Happened Next....

Blimey, what a rollercoaster....

My book launched two days ago, all over the world.

It was much like giving birth, although painful in a very different way, and not half as messy.

For months I'd been creating and nurturing this baby of mine, and then it was out into the world, fending for itself and meeting strangers, many of whom have (very kindly!) cooed all over it, but some (I'm sure, although no-one's said as much yet...) think it's a rather noisy, smelly little thing.

The night before the launch I didn't sleep at all. I was terrified. I was scared that no-one would buy it. I was scared that people would buy it, but then hate it.

I felt horribly exposed, like one of those nightmares where you end up walking into a crowded room naked, by accident (anyone else have those?)

Then, the morning arrived, and it was actually okay. Better than okay.

I had hundreds of messages from people (including you guys on this blog - THANK YOU!) saying how much they were enjoying reading my story, but also - crucially - how much it was making them think.

(Many thanks to Laura Willoughby, Lucy Rocca and Penni Moussa for letting me share the news on Club Soda, Soberistas and Recovery Buddha, and to their amazing communities for all their support).

Most importantly, I've also had many messages already from people saying you are describing ME! I'm so pleased I'm not alone. And those are the ones that make it really worthwhile, because that's why I decided to do this in the first place, because I still remember how alone I felt, back on Day One.

I became glued to the Amazon book chart, of 6 million titles, watching my baby climb up to #1000, then #500, then #300, and - incredibly - it's still going up.

We're on holiday in Scotland, and on the afternoon of the launch we had a long drive to do, to a family gathering. So, I downloaded the audio version of the book, so we could listen to it with the children.

(I figured that they had to know what was in it, and this way, anything that bothered them we could all discuss together rather than them fretting in private).

It's very odd listening to an actress being 'you'. Karen Cass does a brilliant job. In fact I liked her rather more than myself and am wondering whether she'd take the job on permanently.

Then we got to the first scene with the husband, and discovered that the voice she’s given him doesn't sound like him at all! The children thought it hilarious.

I had my finger constantly on fast forward so I could skip over any mention of things like being the tooth fairy, or Santa Claus or - god forbid - the husband and I having sex.

(My eldest came across a sex reference when leafing through a proof copy and hurled it across the room screaming aarrrghhhh! No child should ever have to see THAT! And now I can NEVER UNSEE IT!)

So, last night I went to bed early, hoping to catch up on some sleep after the excitement of the last two days.

I woke up at 4am and made a terrible mistake. I looked at my phone. There was a message from a friend of mine in Australia (where it was coffee break time) saying YOU'RE IN THE DAILY MAIL!

I knew this article was coming, but we'd expected it sometime next week, not today.

Then I made my second mistake. Everyone had told me never read the comments on the Mail Online, for that is the land of the troll.... 

Now I'm never going to be able to get back to sleep. Bugger.

I've put the Mail article up on the SoberMummy Facebook Page. Click here.

Listen out for Radio 4's Woman's Hour on January 2nd!

If you'd like to read the first few chapters of the book FOR FREE, then go to my Amazon page, here, and use the 'see inside' option.

Thank you all for making such a safe haven here where I can retreat to and offload. I don't know what I'd do without you.

Love SM x

It's Out Today!

I can't quite believe it's actually happening.

After eighteen months of pitching, writing, editing and publishing, the book is OUT TODAY, in all good bookshops (I hope!) in hardback, on Kindle and on Audible.

My publishers have described it as:

"A bravely honest and brilliantly comic account of how one mother gave up drinking and started living. Think Bridget Jones Dries Out!"

Here's what some Amazon reviewers had to say:

"This book is at once immensely serious, very funny and extremely well-written." 5 stars.

"A tough subject but a book you don't want to put down? Quite a feat!" 5 stars.

And the fabulous Lucy Rocca of Soberistas has chosen it as her book of the month.

But, what I really want to know is what YOU think. Because this would never have happened without you.

For a start, I'm not sure I'd be sober now without your support, and I wouldn't have had the courage to pitch the book idea to publishers without your encouragement.

So THANK YOU ALL. SO MUCH.

I've mentioned some of you by name (pseudonym!) in the acknowledgements. I'm only sorry I couldn't mention you all.

I really hope you like the book. You can find it by clicking here. If you use the ‘see inside’ feature, you can read the first few chapters for free!

Please help me spread the word, and - if you get a moment - leave a review on Amazon.

Hugest hugs to you all,

SM x

Why Mummy Drinks Wine

There's something I need to make clear right at the beginning of this post:

Motherhood is by far and away the most rewarding, enriching and joyful aspect of my life, and my three children fill me with wonder every day. However...

....motherhood is hard. Harder for our generation, I would suggest, than for any previous one.

A while ago, my sainted mother came to stay at our house for a week to look after the children while the husband and I went on our first holiday without children for thirteen years.

She was horrified!

"Why do you women make things so difficult for yourselves?" She asked. "Why all the after school activities, the music practice, the endless playdates, the fussy organic food? We didn't have any of that stuff in our day. You ate fish fingers, Smash and Angel Delight and spent your afternoons in front of the TV, and you turned out all right!"

Well, that's debatable, but she has a really valid point.

I have seen motherhood from both sides of the great divide: as a full-on working mother and as a stay-at-home mum. They are very different, but both equally hard.

As a working mum, I was desperately trying to perform in the office as if I didn't have children at home, and to be the sort of mother for my children who didn't have a job.

I constantly had to morph, suddenly and seamlessly, from one persona to the other, from presenting at a board meeting to reading the Gruffalo for the thousandth time, and I was convinced I was failing at everything.

After I quit, I was determined to be the perfect mum, to create craft tables and freshly baked cupcakes and to remember to do my pelvic floor exercises.

Instead, I felt guilty about how tired and isolated I felt much of the time, and I was exhausted by the stress of trying to persuade fussy children to eat the perfect diet, to keep them off the electronics which I was told would fry their brains, and to mimic all the perfect images of motherhood littering my Facebook feed.

There has been a backlash recently, with a host of fabulously funny mommy bloggers railing against the pressure to be perfect and revelling in being relaxed, slovenly mothers.

And hurrah for that!

But what antidote do they suggest to all this stress and pressure?

BOOZE! Lashings of it.

There's are several bestselling (and hilarious) books along these lines, like Hurrah for Gin, Why Mummy Drinks and Unmumsy Mum.

There are endless Facebook memes about wine o'clock and mummy's little helper.

And I get it! I get it better than anyone. For a decade or more, wine was my sanity, my oasis, the way I slid from one part of the day into the next.

The problem is that all the books, all the jokes, normalise using an addictive drug as self-medication.

We get so used to dealing with all the everyday ups and downs of life with booze that we don't learn any healthier ways of de-stressing. After all, pouring a glass of wine is much easier and quicker than meditating, doing yoga or going for a run...

Slowly, insidiously, the amount of wine you need in order to wind down increases, and you discover you're drinking a bottle of wine a day and finding it impossible to moderate.

So, at the risk of sounding like a killjoy, I think we have to call time on the mummy wine jokes because what they do is normalise the issue. I spent years thinking the amount I drank was perfectly okay, because everyone else was doing it too...

Astonishingly, the hugely popular mummy blogger, Scary Mommy, agrees with me. She says she's 'done making Mommy wine jokes.' Her post explaining why is on the SoberMummy Facebook page (click here to visit, and 'like' to stay updated).

But, more than that, I think we have to look at why mothers end up relying on wine, and start creating lives for ourselves that we don't feel the need to run away from.

We have to make life simpler, and stop judging ourselves, and other mothers, so harshly. We need to focus on the important stuff- creating a relaxed and happy home, not one driven by lists of endless stuff we all have to achieve.

If you'd like to read the story of my first year without booze, you can buy my book - The Sober Diaries - here.

In other news, I've found a brilliant group of (mainly) women, based in Cape Town, but with a global following, called World without Wine. If you're doing Dry January you can sign up to receive daily motivational e-mails. They also have a fabulous Facebook page.

Love to you all!

SM x

What I've Learned After 1000 Days Alcohol Free

It's been more than one thousand days since I had a glass of wine.

Blimey.

I didn't have a dramatic rock bottom moment one thousand days ago. I didn't wake up in a gutter, or in someone else's bed, or crash the car when drunk. Thank goodness.

It was more like the painfully slow break up of a serious relationship. Like having to face up to the fact that the man I'd turned to whenever I was in trouble, whenever I wanted to have fun, whenever I wanted to just chill, was no good for me any more.

I had to leave him. Throw him out. Pour him down the sink.

By this point, I was drinking a bottle of wine a day, more at weekends. As a result, I was overweight, miserable and stuck in a rut.

Again, it wasn't dramatic drinking. I rarely appeared drunk, or got into trouble. Rather worryingly, a bottle of wine disappeared rather easily....

This was not my first attempt at dealing with my alcohol problem, obviously. I'd spent weeks, months, years even, looking for an alternative, trying endless ways of cutting down, of 'moderating.'

But it was all exhausting. And every attempt (much like trying to crash diet) ended, eventually, in failure. Back to where I started, if not more so.

So, finally I realised that there was no alternative but to pack it in altogether.

That prospect was, frankly, terrifying. But I resigned myself to the fact that my party days were over and that from now on I had to be a good girl. I knew I would feel proud of myself, but - obviously - I wasn't going to have any fun any more. Life, as I'd known it, was over.

But here's what I've discovered one thousand days later:

Life, as I knew it, was over. But the new life I've discovered is WAY BETTER, better in a myriad of different ways.

First off, there was all the physical stuff.

Stopping drinking changed the way I look. Some changes came immediately - like losing the puffy face and the bloodshot eyes, some took longer, like losing all the excess weight.

Within the first year without booze I'd lost two stone (28 pounds), and I've remained consistently at my ideal weight ever since, without any effort.

Also, I may be one thousand days older, but I actually look younger. I have better skin, clearer eyes, bouncier hair and oodles more energy.

Next time you're at a party, check out the most fresh-faced person in the room, not the one with the fake, waxy, botoxed face, but the one with the natural looking glow. I bet they're not drinking booze.

When you drink, you lose your ability to listen to your body. You can't tell when you're genuinely hungry and need to eat, or when you're just craving carbs because you're hungover. When your body is dehydrated and is trying to tell you you're thirsty, you drink alcohol - a diuretic.

Now, I eat when I'm hungry, and rehydrate when I'm thirsty. Simples.

And one of the biggest physical changes is being able to sleep. 

I was a terrible insomniac for years. I blamed stress. I used to fall asleep, no problem, but I'd wake up at about 3am, tossing and turning, and be totally unable to get back to sleep until just before the alarm went off.

Lack of sleep affects everything. It makes it difficult to function at your best short term, and, longer term, has a huge impact on your mental and physical health.

Now, I sleep like a baby. And I'm a morning person! Who knew? I bounce out of bed like the Duracell bunny, all ready to take on the day.

But quitting alcohol hasn't just changed me physically.

When I was drinking, my moods were all over the place. I'd veer from euphoric to depressed, then back again, regularly.

Now I'm zen. Ok, perhaps not completely zen - I can still be a nutter from time to time, but everything is relative.

I used to feel anxious much of the time. I thought that alcohol helped, that it dampened down the anxiety. It was only once I quit that I realised it was the alcohol that was causing the anxiety in the first place. My medicine was actually my poison.

But the biggest change of all, the one that rolls out gradually over the months and years after you quit, is what's happened to my life.

You see, I drank to take the edges off life, to blur all the hard bits. What I hadn't realised is that I was blurring all the good bits too.

When I stopped drinking, I had to learn to deal with everything life threw at me raw. Initially it was a terrible shock. It was hard. 

But, once I got used to it, once I showed myself what I could do and how naturally brave I am, I felt like a SUPERHERO. I realised that I could conquer anything.

Not only did I find my superpower, but I rediscovered all the energy and enthusiasm for life that I had when I was much younger, before all the self-medication numbed it all.

And, without the booze anaethetising my brain constantly, my synapses started firing and I re-discovered creative abilities that I'd thought I'd just grown out of.

My horizons have broadened and my life has just expanded. It feels like a brand new start.

My not drinking has changed my relationships with other people too. I'm a much better mother, a better wife and a better friend.

Admittedly, some of my friends have taken it rather hard, mainly the ones that drink the most themselves. I'm still often asked when I'm going to 'fall off the waggon' and join in again.

But the truth is, I don't need to. Because I've discovered that parties can be just as much fun without the booze - more so, because you can remember them. 

A bad party is still a bad party, drunk or sober, and spending hours at a party which is only about drinking when you don't drink is a little boring. But the result of that is that I've become way more inventive about the ways in which I socialise.

I meet friends for long, rambling walks with dogs. I go to the theatre and concerts. I've bought back party games to dinner and lunch parties, and involve the children as well. I do galleries and exhibitions, trips and outings.

I've discovered that socialising is about shared experiences, varied experiences, not just getting pissed together, and that's deepened and strengthened my relationships as well as making life much richer and more interesting.

Plus, I've got more money to spend on all that stuff, now I'm not spending it all on expensive vino.

So if you're thinking about quitting booze, or you've recently quit and you're still scared that it's going to completely change your life...

....it will. It will change everything. But for the better.

If you'd like to find out more, you can read my book - The Sober Diaries. Click here to go to my Amazon Page if you are in the UK, here if you're in the USA, here if you're in Australia. You can read the first three chapters for free by using the 'look inside' feature!

Love to you all,

SM x