Putting the Cork Back in the Bottle: How I Became Wilde About Wellbeing

You don’t know me yet, and why ever would you read someone you don’t know? I figure we’ll be talking about some personal things in future, so I thought it might help, if I told you a bit about me first.

When I got into Oxford University, I also got into the darkest time of my life. The elation of ending up at such a prestigious establishment was soon replaced by the realisation that I was a minnow in a pond of super-intelligent sharks. At school, I had been top of my year in everything, and while that meant I didn’t fit in with the other kids, at least I felt like I had intelligence to fall back on. Oxford, though, was a different experience: I felt like a misfit simply by being there in the first place, never quite able to believe that I deserved to be there. I couldn’t embrace the classes and lectures, as I felt a great deal of shame to have been let into what I saw as the magical echelons of highest of higher education.

So far, I’m guessing you may not be identifying with this story? Perhaps you’re thinking that this is simply a ‘woe is me’ type story from a girl who was very lucky to even have experienced university?

I’d always felt like I didn’t fit in: from a very young age, I was the ‘odd one out’. I grew up in an unconventional family situation, which set me apart when I realised that the other kids at nursery didn’t have three parents. Depression set in when I was a youngster, and university just served to aggravate it further, and as an eighteen year old living away from home for the first time, I had no idea how to manage my body and mind.

I discovered alcohol was no longer the glass of wine or two at dinners with my parents, but a means of helping me to feel better. When I drank, the internal pains of feeling sad, angry, bleak, seemed to be quelled for a while. At first, I’d go out with friends to drink, but gradually I realised that they all drank less than me: once again, as the ‘drinker’ of the group, I didn’t fit in and the friends drifted away, and the nights out became solo ventures before fading away completely.

Many people drink alone through breakups, job losses, and crippling debt. But I drank alone to settle my very soul: the anxiety that plagued me, that eternal knot in my stomach, seemed to melt away under the influence of rum or vodka or gin. I wasn’t fussy. I went through times where I drank more than I ate: food seemed like a waste of calories, when they could be spent on my drug of choice. Those dark nights, alone in my room, playing music that let me wallow further, a bottle of wine at my side: a constant companion in my bleakness.

All this time, I was back and forth to my doctor, being dosed up on one medication after another. They never helped in the same way as alcohol, or any of the other habits I picked up later, worked for me. It didn’t, of course, as I felt increasingly isolated and that was how my four years at university went. I jumped between various bad habits, able to reduce one, but always giving in to another, when the deep-seated feelings of not being good enough resurfaced. And resurface they did. Frequently.

After I left university, I met my husband and found AA meetings. I thought that these would fix me, that all I needed was to stop drinking and that would make me into a new person. I would be able to socialise, to work, to feel like I belonged. I spent eight years sober, back and forth to meetings, therapists, counsellors, hypnotists and so on. I felt as lost, as pained at the end of those eight years as I did at the beginning, despite doing all the ‘right things’ that AA had instructed me to do.

I felt at my wit’s end, and how useless was I that I couldn’t even get happy after eight years of sobriety? I returned to drinking and realised that it didn’t make a huge difference to my mood. I was even able to do it in moderation. I still felt appalling, and used food to try and make myself feel happier. It didn’t. All food did was assist in my weight gain, which made me even more depressed and desiring to isolate further.

I wanted to feel like I never had to perform any behaviour, but that I had the choice. I desired to be able to choose when I drank and ate, and to do so in moderation. Though at that time, I had no knowledge of what ‘moderation’ even meant, I just knew that others could do it. I didn’t want to be sober anymore: it didn’t feel like it worked for me.

I’d struggled with finding a job that didn’t overstress and overwhelm me: I was so desperate to get everything right, so that I felt good enough. I wanted to be accepted into a team of colleagues that supported each other, that offered a nurturing environment.

My job at a chaotic London City hedge fund did not offer the environment I needed and so craved, and I was still sober, not really fitting in to the boozy nights out that my colleagues enjoyed. I quit the job, and started spending increasing time at home alone, isolating myself. I would bawl my eyes out, wishing for a different life: a life where I felt as though I fitted in and could be myself. We even moved from the city to a rural house in a small village, in the hope that it might help my anxiety and depression. Of course, it didn’t because the problems lay much deeper.

One day, I was listening to podcasts. I came across Jonathan van Ness interviewing a quirky addiction recovery expert called Dr Adi Jaffe, who runs the IGNTD Heroes recovery programme. Dr Jaffe talked of moderating drinking, of being able to celebrate reducing drinking and other habits, without the strict requirements of abstinence that AA and other 12-step programmes have. Dr Jaffe’s focus is on the emotions that lie far beneath the symptom of drinking, using food, and so on. I liked this approach, it wasn’t anti-AA, but it was a place for those of us for whom AA didn’t work. I had found somewhere that would welcome me with open arms. I signed up for the programme immediately.

And I found myself. I still work the programme. I still drink. I still mess up from time to time, and fall off the recovery path. But I found somewhere I can call ‘home’.

However, I met a humongous stumbling block at first: I could not see the point of getting better. After so many years of carrying the weight of depression and anxiety on my shoulders, I didn’t know why I was bothering. I also sat with the belief that it was too late for me, that I’d suffered so long, and seen so many other therapists, that this would never work. It was easier for me to believe this, than to look at whether or not I could find a point in taking the next step on my path.

I realised that finding my own journey to health and wellbeing was not enough for me. I needed to have a purpose to help others. I always knew I had a deep-seated desire to use my empathy, my experience and my learning to connect with men and women in a similar situation, but I didn’t realise that was my purpose.

Starting the Wilde About Wellbeing podcast was about nothing other than sharing my journey, in the hope that it would inspire, connect with, and give inspiration to others who could identify with my rocky and difficult path. We are all on a journey, and we can learn together what the individual pieces are that make up the full wellness jigsaw.

The first time I pressed ‘publish’ on a podcast. The first time someone messaged me saying how much they enjoyed an episode. The first time I felt compelled to share something from my life on the podcast. So many firsts that led to an incredible change in my perspective: unfortunate things that happen to me are not bad, they’re just learning points for me to share with others.

So that’s me, and my transformation from drinking myself into oblivion to being ready to share myself and my journey with other people. I will be posting regularly on Medium.com with my experiences on my path, and what I’ve learned from them — and how you can learn from them too!