My name is Sarah. I’m a mum and a wife from sunny Essex, UK, and I quit alcohol when I was 28 years old. Now approaching 15 months sober, with my 30th birthday hurtling towards me, I’ve been reflecting upon my experience of giving up alcohol in my 20s, in a world that is literally obsessed with alcohol. People my age (the ones I hung around with anyway) were the tail end of the underage cheap binge drinking generation. £1 shots, knowing the right bouncers so you didn’t get ID’d, pre-drinks (never going into a bar without getting hammered first). From the first time I got paralytic drunk at 14 years old, I never drank alcohol for the taste, but to see how battered I could get for as cheap as possible. I would drink to take away my insecurities and give myself the confidence I lacked when sober, and I wouldn’t stop until my body physically couldn’t take any more (enter, the tactical chunder). It was normal… Until it wasn’t. People my age (the ones I hung around with anyway) were the tail end of the underage cheap binge drinking generation. £1 shots, knowing the right bouncers so you didn’t get ID’d, pre-drinks (never going into a bar without getting hammered first). From the first time I got paralytic drunk at 14 years old, I never drank alcohol for the taste, but to see how battered I could get for as cheap as possible. I would drink to take away my insecurities and give myself the confidence I lacked when sober, and I wouldn’t stop until my body physically couldn’t take any more (enter, the tactical chunder). It was normal… Until it wasn’t. How do you even do that?) and I knew that eventually, I was going to end up ruining the life I had worked so hard for. The life that was far from the insecure, binge drinking teenager who grew up with an alcohol-dependent parent herself.
