Why I relapsed

After the longest sobriety stint I'd managed to date

Content warning: alcohol & eating disorders

In 2023, I found myself living alone in Amsterdam after separating from the partner I’d moved there to live with. At first, it was liberating — you mean I get to live the party lifestyle in a European capital city, as a small-town girl originally from North Wales!?

It quickly turned sour.

From blackout first dates to dinner parties where I listened only for the sound of the wine bottle reopening, too busy watching with growing impatience how slowly my friends sipped their drinks to have any interest in the topic around the table. I was livid that they’d only brought two bottles of wine.

Eventually, I watched them baulk at me for creating a ‘cocktail’ towards the end of the night with lashings of a stolen bottle of vodka belonging to my housemate, and some flat Fanta from two weeks prior. I drank all three after they sensibly turned their noses up at it. It was a Tuesday.

I drank to socialise, to feel normal. This turned into drinking for the sake of drinking; often making too many drunken faux pas that all the efforts to socialise that I’d made were more fruitless than I could’ve attempted sober with my own confoundingly awkward personality.

So I got sober.