MY HEALTH EXPERIENCE:After a few glasses I was back worse than I ever was
MY FIRST drink at 16 felt like falling in love. It was a glass of Harp in a bar in Bray before a school disco and suddenly I felt transported. All of my insecurities left me and I felt confident. I was all of who I wanted to be.
When I was 17, my stepmother sent me to a finishing school in Windsor and I loved it. I enjoyed the freedom of defining myself. We would get a bottle of wine and cigarettes and sit in the bathroom. It was like a ritual. When I went to college, the drinking took off.
I was brought up in very much a party environment. To me, happiness meant parties. I didn’t actually know that the party stopped. My father once said to me, you think Christmas Day is every day. I thought he was the one with the problem.
I ended up working at Vogue in London. My job was to assess what was going on in retailing and report back. I was in my early 20s and I loved it. The 1980s were the most hedonistic period and there was I, in the thick of it.
Vogue House was this buzzing place. The whole culture of the place is utter freedom around ideas. I thrived, I loved it and they liked me and they wanted me to stay.
But the drink was having a negative impact. I was arriving late, sitting at my desk, feeling like I had swallowed acid the night before, feeling shame that this was not who I wanted to be. Suddenly this elixir wasn’t working. Instead of being transported to a heaven, this drug was taking me to a hell.
I couldn’t make sense of the experience, I didn’t understand – I was doing what I had always done but I was getting very different results. I was at some level refusing to believe that it’s what happens with addiction, you just refuse to believe the evidence.
If I look back now, I knew I had a problem with alcohol very early on. There was alcoholism in my mother’s family and at some level I knew that this snakebite has got me.
However, I was absolutely not ready to let it go. Instead of changing my thinking, I changed my boyfriend and I changed my job. I went to another glossy magazine working in advertising and it was a disaster.
I would arrive back at the office from lunch and I wouldn’t even have the form that said I’d got the sale. It was becoming quite clear that I was sinking and I was fired.
I started taking drugs around that time too. Cocaine gave me mileage and the illusion of being sober. Alcohol was failing me but I just thought I had been getting the chemistry wrong – what you’re meant to do is mix it with cocaine.
I knew at some level I had a problem, but to let go of something you depend on so heavily is very frightening.
At the age of 28 I gave up alcohol and drugs for eight months and decided I was going to go for this new organic, pure way of life. But it meant I had to disconnect from my drinking friends and it got very lonely.
I was invited to a party and I decided to go. Someone passed me a glass of champagne and after a few glasses I was back worse than I ever was. I was in bits.
Then I was offered a job with a new magazine and that’s where I met my husband. I had stopped drinking again but in the evenings it was, “come on, we’ll do down to the pub”. I didn’t drink the first few times but inevitably the day came and I said “why not?”.
I would organise a dinner for eight people at home and then I’d go out and have dinner somewhere else – I would leave my husband with a table of people.
I would disappear to go and meet some friend for just one drink and arrive back at my dinner party at 10pm. Mark would say, “look at my wife, isn’t she just magical?” But then I was arriving in poorer states of mind and he was getting embarrassed. And I knew it.
The day came when he looked me in the eye and I saw profound disappointment and I couldn’t tolerate that. I drove our marriage to a level of destruction where he just said he had to leave, and he did.
I tried to control my drinking, having two vodkas in the evening and one line of cocaine but I was always very hungry for more.
One night, I remember coming back to the flat and falling to my knees and pleading to my grandmother, “I need help!”
I had also taken Dispirin and I think that was a faint suicide attempt. I woke up the following morning, called a friend and said, “please take me to an AA meeting”.
I sat in this room with all these people and everything they said resonated with what I felt. It was a hideous and a magical feeling. It was stunning to find soul companions who were talking about what I was uttering internally. They were saying what I had not been able to admit to anyone else.
I slipped again a few times. I wasn’t yet ready to throw in the towel. I returned to Dublin because I knew I couldn’t get sober in London. I knew all the haunts and the dens.
I bought a one-way ticket home. I just had to get away.
I slipped again once or twice and then I remember just saying: “No. I’m not doing this again”. I was about 32. I asked someone to take me to an AA meeting and then a friend introduced me to the Rutland Centre and to a therapist.
Psychotherapy led me to discover the treasure of who I really am and the creative spirit that was to be my way through. It gave me the belief that I didn’t need alcohol.
When I first gave up the booze, I remember thinking, “what am I going to do with all this time?”
What I did was, I started to write all these poems. Every time I wrote a poem, it told me where I was or what I was looking for.
Eventually I put my work in front of a literary agent, Marianne Gunn O’Connor, and one day she agreed to meet me. The book came out two weeks ago.
The book means a lot to me. It reaffirms the seriousness of who I am – I don’t mean without levity, but I am a serious person.
“It emboldens and it gives me the belonging I’ve always wanted. I now belong to myself. This is who I am.
Soul Burgers is available from Dubray Books, IMMA Bookshop, The Winding Stair Bookshop and Raven Books in Dublin, Ruiseal Books (Cork), Khan (Mullingar) and from soul-burgers.com
In conversation with
JOANNE HUNT
