After crippling anxiety attacks, a talented pianist and burlesque performer realised she needed to rethink her relationship with alcohol. Photo / 123rf
I’d always thought alcohol helped me, but after crippling anxiety attacks I realised I had to learn how to cope without it.
I am about to go on stage, where I’ll be playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C Minor to an audience of 1500. Most people in this situation would be nervous: this is a high-profile event, which has been advertised with posters of me on London’s Tube. Instead, I drift on to the stage enveloped in a fluffy cloud.
For this, I can thank the bottle of wine I had at lunchtime, followed by the second one I finished in my dressing room backstage.
The Chopin goes perfectly, as does the subsequent Debussy: I’ve practised and performed these pieces so many times that the notes are ingrained into my soul. Only after the performance do things begin to get messy, with the rum and cokes I’m sinking while signing programmes in the bar.
I remember hugging two of my friends, then everything else is a blur. I drink until I pass out, knowing that – as always – I’ll be waking up with panic attacks and crippling anxiety, which I will deal with by opening another bottle.
I first had a drink at the age of 7: a sip of beer at dinner. This isn’t uncommon in Mediterranean cultures, though my upbringing in London’s Camden was hardly a conventional one. Dad, who was Italian, was a classical guitarist who later worked for the Italian cultural centre; my Japanese mother worked for her country’s embassy.
Though Mum and Dad remained married, they were separated and I spent my childhood going from one home to the other. When I was 10 years old, I had a horrible experience where an older boy on the estate where I lived sexually attacked me. I had flashbacks about this for years.
And yet I had a way of burying this trauma inside me, and distracting myself with my music. From early in my childhood it was clear I was a talented pianist. I was sent to the Junior Guildhall on weekends, where I was up against kids from Russia and Japan who practised for six or seven hours a day. My regular schooling was at a London comprehensive, where I didn’t fit in: my background was so different to the other children there.
As I moved into my teens, I found alcohol gave me the confidence to be louder, funnier and more outgoing – and also to help me stand up for myself and deal with the flashbacks of my childhood assault. By 17, I was drinking regularly at various pubs and clubs – mostly lager and bottles of alcopops.
People had never known quite how to categorise me, and I chose to continue down an alternative path; playing piano and harpsichord in a goth band and even doing some catwalk modelling. I won a place to study music at Liverpool, and then Newcastle, universities, where I continued to drink. I was jumpy in those days; rude to the men who approached me, and even started fights on the odd occasion. My friends gave me the nickname “Nutter”.
Even then, I knew my drinking wasn’t normal. I tried Alcoholics Anonymous but it wasn’t right for me: I was too emotionally immature, didn’t want to stand up in front of people to tell my story, and I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing theirs.
In the early 2000s, I found a way to combine my passion for music and love of quirky performance; joining the burlesque revival. Burlesque is a theatrical art form often performed in a highly-skilled glamorous, musical, “tongue-in-cheek” setting. The most famous performer at that time was probably the American Dita von Teese.
My act consisted of me coming on stage to play classical piano, dressed in a corset and holding massive fans, disrobing as I played, always with a wink. As a fan of old vintage glamour, the burlesque world felt perfect for me.
My act was successful: under my stage name of Chrys Columbine, I performed all over the world, for Elton John and Emirates princes. Reviewers called me “enchanting, ethereal and exquisite,” and Britain’s answer to Dita von Teese.
As you can imagine, this was a culture full of drinking (drugs as well). But despite the glamour and success, I always felt a bit empty and still like an outsider – so my excessive drinking continued.
Because I didn’t have a regular day job, it was normal for me to start drinking at lunchtime. I’d sink two, maybe three, bottles before going on stage that evening. Then there were the tequilas after the show, the rum and cokes.
Friends would marvel at my capacity for booze: I would share a bottle of champagne with one mate: he’d have two glasses and I’d finish the rest, before ordering a second bottle that I would drink by myself.
By my early 30s, my drinking had got so bad that I started to have blackouts, unable to piece together large chunks of the evening. One morning, I woke up with palpitations, thought I was having a heart attack and begged my boyfriend to take me to A&E. He called an ambulance: the paramedics told me it was a panic attack.
This should have been a wake-up call, but it wasn’t: I’ve lost count of the mornings I woke up after that, convinced that something terrible was going to happen. So I started drinking at lunchtime to make this go away.
In 2013, I broke up with my boyfriend and moved back home to live with my parents, who were briefly reconciled. It was a stressful time as my mum was recovering from cancer. At this point, my drinking turned secretive and I started hiding bottles in my wardrobe and drawers, ready to be taken out to the bins when no one was looking. I even started wrapping up the recycling in bubble-wrap because I didn’t want anyone to hear the clanking of the bottles as I was taking them out.
My health was going downhill and people began to notice. One day in April 2013, feeling shaky after two bottles, I asked my friend Mark to come and meet me at a cafe. It was clear that my appearance upset him enormously. Despite everything, I had always managed to look immaculate: my work depended on it. But Mark told me that I stank of alcohol and (I quote) looked like “a sack of s***”.
He said that if I didn’t stop drinking now, I may not be here in two years’ time. Mark was an army veteran, and he told me he knew the look of imminent death when he saw it. That lunchtime was a turning point: it was the last day I had a drink and the first day of my sobriety.
I knew I wasn’t the type of person who could reduce to a drink here or there, or “have Sundays off”: I would have to stop altogether. At first, I told myself I would just quit for a week. Instead of wine, I bought non-alcoholic beer and Fentimans pink lemonade. I was lucky that I wasn’t so physically dependent on alcohol that I had severe withdrawals, but I certainly had trouble sleeping and suffered disturbing, lucid dreams for months afterwards.
When I got to the end of one week, I thought: great – let’s keep this going for another seven days. I decided to take the perfectionism and obsessive drive I had needed in my performing life, and turn it to a more healthy cause.
I also knew that I needed psychological help to conquer my demons. Around the time I stopped drinking, I went to see an NHS therapist, who specialised in DBT (dialectical behaviour therapy), which is for addicts and people with other mental health problems. After 18 months on the waiting list, I started group therapy.
My fellow clients were women from completely different backgrounds. It gave me solace that if these women, some of whom seemed so level-headed, needed to work through their issues, maybe I wasn’t such an outsider and a “nutter” after all.
In 2018, I decided to make a career change and study to become a personal trainer. As well as being a talented musician as a child, I had also been an avid martial artist. So I decided to revisit that part of my youth and tracked down my childhood sensei and started doing karate again. To me, this was redemption and I felt reborn.
Getting fit and strong gave me my sense of self back: I started to realise I was equipped to deal with whatever life threw at me. With the personal training, I now love helping others to feel the same: fitter and healthier and able to live their lives as the strongest version of themselves.
For the past eight years I’ve been in a meaningful relationship with a man who supports me in everything that I do.
I’ve never had children. When I was younger, I was simply too much of a free spirit to settle down, and even now, I enjoy my freedom. I don’t regret this at all: I have a very close relationship with my cousins’ children.
I still do the occasional burlesque show, but am no longer part of that exhausting touring scene. Training has given me a sense of calmness and purpose, and the ability to achieve things I never thought possible, such as studying anatomy and getting a sailing licence.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been tempted to have a drink over the years. At a wedding, for example, I might think, ‘oh, it would be so nice to toast the couple’. But I know that if I started drinking again, I just wouldn’t be able to stop.
Life now is great. Just as I used to think everything was going to go horribly wrong, my outlook now is the complete opposite. There is so much to keep looking forward to. Stopping drinking will always be the wisest, and the best, decision I ever made.
As told to Miranda Levy