After my first daughter was born in 1999, I switched from lager to wine, drinking at home with my then husband or out with girlfriends in fashionable bars in the city. When I began working again a few years later, booze became even more of a crutch for relieving the everyday stresses of being a working mum.
A night out wasn't enjoyable unless alcohol was on the cards. I would never offer to be the designated driver. A meal was incomplete without the requisite bottle sitting in the middle of the table. Work events, birthdays, Friday nights, Saturday nights, nights in front of a DVD, holidays, Sunday lunches, barbecues: all involved drinking, no matter what I was doing and who I was doing it with. And on many of those occasions, I had a good time. But the years I spent binge-drinking were also marked with frequent episodes of drinking gone wrong. My "off-switch" had simply stopped working.
Friends would often bundle me into a taxi, handing the driver my address and an extra tenner for taking a drunken woman home who could potentially throw up in his cab. I woke up on countless occasions with no memory of the previous night. I wasted hundreds of weekends lying, comatose, in a darkened bedroom, sipping water and chastising myself for yet more embarrassing behaviour as a result of my alcohol consumption. I showed myself up in front of work colleagues by slurring my words, falling over and flirting outrageously. I once fell into an empty bath at 2am and gave myself concussion, as I attempted to brush my teeth at the sink, inebriated and exhausted. And, finally, the incident that called time on my drinking career for good - I woke up in Sheffield's Northern General Hospital at 3am, covered in my own cold, congealed vomit, and had absolutely no idea how I had ended up there.
The last thing I could remember was opening a second bottle of wine at home after a tiresome day at work in the enrolment department of Sheffield Hallam University. By then I had split from my husband and it was his turn to have our daughter. Depressed, I consumed three bottles of wine, alone. A friend later discovered me lying outside my flat, unconscious and vomiting at 10pm on a darkened pavement, and called an ambulance.
The shame and horror of that day made me realise that I had serious issues with alcohol, but even then I did not consider myself to be an alcoholic. The word implied a level of alcohol dependency that resulted in the wheels falling off entirely: the loss of a job, involvement of the social services or a drink-driving conviction. My own experiences with booze fell far short of such extremes, and yet I knew I had a problem. This recognition of a "middle ground" type of alcohol dependency - which I believe many of the women in yesterday's report will be able to identify with - led me to launch Soberistas.com in November 2012, a social network website aimed at women with problematic drinking patterns and a desire to lead a new, sober lifestyle.
Within its first year, Soberistas attracted 20,000 members and my story was repeated over and over again in the site's blogs and discussion forums; educated women, often mothers, largely with demanding jobs, were downing bottles of wine most nights in an effort to ameliorate their hectic worlds. Most of the women who use my site don't regard themselves as alcoholics and for that reason the majority are turned off Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet the common issues of self-loathing, weight gain, low self-esteem, relationship problems, shame and embarrassment, all as a result of the alcohol they are drinking in the evenings, come through again and again.
Although my own alcohol habit concluded with that frightening wake-up call, most women who visit Soberistas do not endure such a "rock-bottom" moment. They are largely representative of the almost-in-control drinker, the one who gets the kids to school on time, then manages a full day at the office, followed by after-work drinks with colleagues. Mostly, these drinkers do not refer to themselves as "alcoholics". They are just everyday people who "enjoy a drink".
They come to the site because they know they are at a tipping point, where those carefree nights of social drinking and office networking are morphing into something else, when the bad feelings are beginning to outweigh the good. By offering support to each other, many of these "almost alcoholics" successfully quit drinking. The realisation that an alcohol-free life does not equate to dull and boring, but rather offers an energised existence filled with clarity and self-confidence is a common one. Ex-drinkers report rediscovering who they are, minus the blurred, mind fog of booze. They write about improved performance at work and a greater ability to manage the work-life balance, simplified by the lack of regular low-level hangovers once experienced on an almost daily basis.
These new statistics on drinking are sobering for all of us. Thousands of women are struggling with their own, often hidden battle with booze. This is a secret and silent crisis, and I hope my own story can show that there is a way out - that there is help for women who think that it's time to call time on "wine o'clock".
