I was introduced to alcohol before I even had a sense of self. Grade two. The 1980s. Back when some well‑meaning but misguided expert — Dr Spock — advised parents that giving children alcohol would “teach responsibility.” It didn’t teach responsibility. It taught normalisation. It taught familiarity. It taught me nothing about boundaries — only that alcohol was part of the landscape.
By grade five, I stole a miniature bottle of scotch from the living‑room minibar, took it to school, and drank it during maths class. My teacher marched me to sick bay — furious, worried, and unsure which reaction was appropriate. I never told my parents. Even then, alcohol wasn’t a thrill. It was a regulator. A buffer. A tool I didn’t understand but instinctively reached for.
My drinking lay dormant until my early teens when the cultural script tightened. Like most Australian kids in the early 90s, my friends and I stole bourbon and vodka from our parents, topped the bottles up with water, raided liquor cabinets, and mixed whatever we could find. We drank behind sheds because that’s where teenagers went to feel older than they were. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t chaos. It was simply what everyone did.
Then came the lead‑up to turning eighteen — the great Australian rite of passage. Binge drinking. Vomiting. Blackouts. Doing things you couldn’t remember. Laughing about it the next day. Calling it “normal.” Calling it “fun.” Calling it adulthood. If you could call throwing up and losing hours of your life a rite of passage, then yes — I passed with flying colours.
I didn’t have a male role model growing up. The closest thing I had was a father who functioned more like a guardian — distant, self‑involved, emotionally vacant — and who left before I even started high school. My mother’s instability filled the rest of the space. Her behaviour, justified by her mental health, created a childhood where I learned to self‑regulate without guidance. Alcohol became the stand‑in for the emotional scaffolding I didn’t have.
By my early twenties, living alone in a beautiful apartment in Hobart’s CBD, alcohol had become something else entirely. I had a good job, more money than most of my peers, and a life that looked enviable from the outside. Inside, there was a void I couldn’t name. Adoption. Identity. Sexuality. My mother’s behaviour. My father’s abandonment and the gaslighting that followed. The unresolved pieces of myself I didn’t yet have the tools to face.
Alcohol wasn’t the problem. It was the regulator.
It smoothed the sharp corners of my mind. It softened the noise. It made loneliness tolerable. It made confusion manageable. It made other people easier to endure.
The truth is I never liked alcohol. Wine tasted tart and unpleasant, but cigarettes dulled the taste. I tried everything — Jack and Diet Coke, Malibu, whatever was available — but nothing ever became a favourite. Wine simply became the most efficient tool. It was there when I needed clarity, when I was lonely, when something in me was unresolved.
It affected my career and friendships for years. In hindsight, which wasn’t entirely a loss. Sobriety later showed me those workplaces and friendships were never aligned with who I actually was. People love to judge drinking behaviour but rarely ask why it evolves. For me, it was never addiction. It was survival.
It stopped working before I turned forty‑seven. The binges were heavier, the recovery longer. I started asking myself why I was doing this to my body when the real problem wasn’t alcohol — it was the people around me. Friends who drained me. A mother whose text messages sent me into panic. Phone calls I could only survive if I were half‑cut. The bottle shop across the road became a reflex, a ritual, a way to brace myself.
Then my body turned on me. Violent vomiting. Anxiety spikes. Moments of terror I couldn’t explain. The sweating, the withdrawal, the panic in the days after a binge. It wasn’t serving me anymore. It was dismantling me.
Once I stopped, the truth about the people around me became painfully clear. Partner, family, certain friends — they were not who I thought they were. Sobriety didn’t just clear my head. It cleared the room.
I have never suffered fools, but alcohol made me less observant. The red flags were always there; I just told myself I would deal with them later. Sobriety sharpened everything — my instincts, my boundaries, my ability to see people for who they are, not who I hoped they were. One friend in particular — someone I kept around far too long — became obvious once I was sober. Distance between cities had blurred the cues, but once the fog lifted, the truth arrived surgically.
The truth is alcohol never fit me. The cultural pull in Australia is enormous, but I have always walked to the beat of my own drum. Drinking made me less authentic, less aligned with myself. It helped me survive certain things, even protected me at times, but it ran its course.
I had to find peace on my own terms. And I did.
Sobriety didn’t save me by fixing me. It saved me by revealing me.
It showed me the version of myself I had been circling for years — the clear one, the aligned one, the one who no longer needed a regulator to exist in the world.
Now, I’m not performing survival. I am living. I am present. I am myself.
Alcohol no longer fits because I no longer need it to.
