Hitting Rock Bottom: The Ugliness of where I have just been
To be fair, it wasn't always bad. But it hasn't been great for a long time. I found this picture I had uploaded as a profile picture to Facebook, New Year of 2008: A friend had commented and affectionately called me an "alcky". Little did she (or I) know how close she had come to the truth, 14 years ago. The "routine drinking" started in 2006. I had just left my first job as a young engineer with Shell UK under stressful conditions, and started a new job in a small consultancy. Unfortunately the stress followed me to my new job, and I was faced with debilitating insomnia. Living in Aberdeen, where the summer days started getting bright at 2am, it was a nightmare. To cut a long story short, after months of trying this and that, I worked out that if I drank a bottle of wine a night, I could sleep. This was the start of my undoing. What followed was 15 years of drinking, every.single.day (save for a 5 month hiatus in 2020, a story for a...