Join Jimmy Thistle for After Hours — the brutally honest, funny and heartwarming podcast that dives deep into alcohol, addiction, and recovery.
Each week, Jimmy sits down with real people who’ve faced the highs, lows, and hangovers of drinking culture. Through unfiltered conversation, laughter, and raw honesty, they explore what happens when we start questioning our relationship with alcohol — and what life looks like on the other side.
Whether you’re sober, sober-curious, or just wondering if alcohol’s got too much of a grip, this show is for you. Expect real stories, a few laughs, and plenty of lightbulb moments from people who’ve been there.
Recorded in the UK and Isle of Man but shared worldwide, After Hours is here to prove that recovery can be real, relatable, and even a little bit funny.
Episode 72 | Jessica White — Sexier Sober: The San Diego Coach Who Quit Without Trying & Never Looked Back
In this bright, sharp and genuinely thought-provoking episode, Jimmy sits down with Jessica White — sober coach, host of the Sexier Sober podcast, and professional organiser based in Carlsbad, California — whose story of growing up in a high-functioning drinking household, nine years of blackout drinking, and a moment of quiet moral clarity that ended it all without drama or rehab is one of the most distinctive the podcast has featured.
Jess grew up in San Diego in a well-meaning, loving family where both parents had substance issues — managed, high-functioning, never chaotic — but emotionally distant. She absorbed drinking as the normal currency of connection: football parties, family gatherings, the way adults loosened up and let go. A sensitive, neurodivergent kid who felt something was always slightly wrong with her, she couldn’t wait to find what would finally make her feel okay. At 14, she found it — blacked out the first time, threw up, and couldn’t wait for the next one.
For nine years, Jess drank hard and largely had fun — social, energetic, the life of every party. She chose UC San Diego deliberately, a school full of serious students, because some part of her knew she needed that counterweight. She graduated with good grades. But outside the library, Thursday through Sunday, she was blacking out consistently, waking up with no memory of whole nights, doing things she’d never do sober, saying things she’d never say, sleeping with people she’d never have chosen — and rationalising every single time that next time she’d moderate.
The moment that broke it wasn’t dramatic. It was a Tuesday night, Taco Tuesday, with a younger colleague who looked up to her as a role model. Jess had two or three drinks, remembered nothing, lost her phone, was driven home drunk by the person who called her a mentor. The shame wasn’t about the hangover. It was about the profound split between who she was performing herself to be and who she was actually showing up as. Out of alignment. Out of integrity. Done.
That was July 8th 2020 — two weeks before Jimmy’s own sober date. She never craved it again.
What makes Jess’s story distinctive is the path she took before that date. Three years of internal work — meditation, journaling, visualisation, studying how she worked. Six months of treatment at Rogers Behavioral Health for depression and anxiety — not for alcohol. A growing circle of people who were living differently and reflecting back to her what was possible. By the time she put down the drink, the work was already done. The alcohol just stopped fitting the life she was building.
Now nearly five years sober, Jess runs Sexier Sober — one-to-one coaching, a podcast, and a community membership — built around the radical idea that sobriety isn’t the goal. The goal is becoming so clear on who you are and who you want to be that alcohol simply stops making sense. Effortless sobriety, she calls it. Not easy. Just inevitable.
In this episode, Jimmy sits down with Simon, a 36-year-old Glaswegian stonemason and business owner who grew up in the drinking culture of the West of Scotland. Simon shares his honest journey from teenage blackouts and festival benders, to using alcohol as a stress coping mechanism when launching his own business — and how his wife Katie’s gentle nudge finally pushed him toward lasting sobriety. Now 10 months in and doing the inner work through therapy, Simon’s story is a powerful reminder that sobriety isn’t about white-knuckling it — it’s about understanding yourself.
Simon is a stonemason living in Glasgow.
For most of his adult life, he found himself drifting into moments where he’d imagine a sober life. He always wanted to get there, but never quite knew how. How would he fit in? How would he function without a drink?
In 2020, he started his own business. That became the final straw that broke the camel’s back. His drinking had been creeping up for years, and things were starting to unravel. Work, relationships, life, all of it felt heavier.
In July 2023, at the end of a music festival, he told his wife he’d had enough.
Since then, he’s had periods of sobriety, some longer than others. But now, 8 months in, something feels different. Alongside therapy and a deeper understanding of himself, this time feels real.
My Baby Was in the NICU — My First Thought Was ‘We’ve Got a Free Babysitter, Let’s Go Play Beer Pong
Saison 3 · Épisode 12
samedi 7 mars 2026 • Durée 01:11:10
Episode 62 | Rachel Sereni — From Watching Her Mum Die of an Overdose at 16 to Co-Hosting a Recovery Podcast: The Ratchet Rachel Story
In this raw, emotional and ultimately triumphant episode, Jimmy sits down with Rachel Sereni — co-host of the Rock Bottom with Ryan podcast — whose story of generational addiction, childhood trauma, and hard-won sobriety is one of the most layered the show has ever featured.
Rachel grew up in South Florida watching her mother — addicted to opioids and benzos — nod out on the sofa with lit cigarettes in her hand. As a five-year-old, Rachel was taking her baby sister’s dirty nappies off because nobody else was. Walking across roads alone to get cookies from the clubhouse because she was hungry. Her father eventually fought for custody — no small feat for a man in Florida in the mid-90s — and won. But Rachel’s mother kept coming back into her life, erratic and unreliable, until the day before her death when she offered Rachel a handful of coloured pills from her pocket at a shopping mall. Rachel was 16. The next day was the last time she saw her mum alive. That night, she got the call to go to the hospital. The nurses hadn’t cleaned her up. Rachel collapsed.
Grief, abandonment and the search for belonging set Rachel on a path of drinking, benzos and ecstasy through her late teens, surrounded by people far older than her who should have known better. By 19 she was stealing and watering down her dad’s alcohol. By 21 — legally able to drink for the first time — she’d just given birth to her son Gabriel. He went to the NICU for ten days. Her first thought? We’ve got a free babysitter. Let’s go play beer pong.
What followed was years of blackout drinking, getting barred from bars, fighting strangers and — as her alter ego Ratchet Rachel — becoming physically abusive to her partner Carlos. A DUI ended that relationship. A new one with John, who moved in fast and tried to keep up, slowly watching Rachel deteriorate: 221 pounds, sleeping all day, no job, their home a mess. On their seven-year anniversary she promised him a nice dinner and drank herself unconscious instead.
His ultimatum came the next morning. Ten days later, Rachel drove to a parking lot with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, two shots of banana liqueur, and a tube of toothpaste as her alibi. She got halfway through the bottle, threw it across a field, collapsed on the tarmac screaming, and that was it. Her surrender moment. She went home, got on the scales (221 lbs), started a new job, and got sober — all on the same day.
Something Physically Held Me Down in That Car Seat — Five Seconds Later a Crash Sent Metal Flying Through the Seat Where I’d Have Been Sitting
Saison 3 · Épisode 11
samedi 28 février 2026 • Durée 01:19:53
Episode 61 | Natalie — From Brooklyn Moonshine & Croatian Moonshine to Cocaine, Custody Battles & 3 Years Sober: A Story of Synchronicity
In this extraordinary episode, Jimmy sits down with Natalie — a first-generation Croatian American from Brooklyn, New York, whose recovery story is unlike any other on the podcast. It spans moonshine at age seven, a supernatural premonition that saved her life at ten, ecstasy, cocaine, a toxic divorce, a restraining order served on her last day of rehab, and a grandmother who died at 5:55pm on 11/11 — and whose passing became Natalie’s rebirth.
Growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, alcohol was never a problem in Natalie’s family — it was a ritual. Every September her Croatian family would make wine and Rakija, a 150-proof moonshine so powerful you’d feel it in your chest from a single piece of fruit soaked in it. Her first sip of Hennessy and Coke came at age seven from a great-uncle who loved her. She climbed a ladder to the roof singing. She was hooked on the feeling long before she knew what that meant.
At ten, a force she still can’t explain physically held her down in the back seat of her brother’s car — preventing her from climbing to the front passenger seat moments before another vehicle’s grill came crashing through exactly that spot. Her brother pulled glass from his hands, crying. “How did you know?” She didn’t. She just knew.
Diagnosed with depression, anxiety and rage at 12, Natalie witnessed a murder on her corner at nine, grew up without a woman figure to guide her, and found alcohol, ecstasy, pills, quaaludes, acid, ketamine and eventually cocaine in quick succession through her teens and twenties. She crashed her car outside a police precinct in Coney Island at 20, stone drunk, and charmed her way out of an arrest. She was always the ringleader. Always the one who didn’t know when to stop.
A nine-year relationship and brief marriage brought a period of relative calm — until it fell apart. Then a second marriage, two daughters, a COVID baby born mid-pandemic and sent home from a C-section in 24 hours, postpartum depression, and a marriage imploding around her. Natalie found herself waiting every night for her children to fall asleep so she could drink herself into a stupor, cut lines of cocaine, and clean the house alone in the dark. She was self-harming. She was having heart palpitations. The alcohol stopped working. No matter how much she drank she couldn’t feel anything — so she’d add more cocaine, and feel her heart racing towards a heart attack instead.
I Was So Drunk Walking Home at 3am I Fell Into a River — Clawed My Way Up the Embankment in My Going-Out Clothes & Carried On
Saison 3 · Épisode 10
dimanche 22 février 2026 • Durée 01:12:52
Episode 60 | Ash Shepherd — 5 Months Sober, a River at 3am & Why the Mummy Wine Culture Needs to Stop
In this warm, honest and deeply relatable episode, Jimmy sits down with Ash Shepherd — 34-year-old project manager, young mum and founder of the Booze Free Sparkle Instagram — whose story of grey area drinking, a 10-month sobriety attempt, relapse and finally finding her day one over a roast dinner she couldn’t eat is one of the most universally recognisable on the podcast.
Ash grew up in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire — quiet, bookish, nervous — and discovered alcohol at 15 outside Tesco with her friends, waiting for strangers to buy them Lambrini. She felt confidence for the first time. She also felt shame for the first time, dreading school on the Monday morning. Both feelings kept coming back for the next 18 years.
From 17 to 19, living in a little cottage in Tewkesbury with a flatmate who matched her drink for drink, Ash’s party house became the social hub for everyone who hadn’t gone to uni, had no real goals, and was just plodding along drinking. Vodka after work became normal. So did walking home alone at 3am — including the night she fell down a riverbank in her going-out clothes, clawed her way back up through nettles, soaking wet and freezing cold, and carried on to her boyfriend’s house.
Through her 20s, Ash settled into a pattern: Thursday night wine on the sofa, Friday hangover at her desk, Saturday binge, Sunday dying in bed. Her husband — sensible, moderate, with an off switch she never had — watched her consistently push past her limits every single time. When he went to bed, she’d stay up drinking alone. The hangovers started lasting a week. The shame never really left.
At 25, a colleague recommended The Rise of the Sober Istas by Lucy Rocca. Ash read it, felt something shift, joined an early online sobriety community and started blogging. That was the first seed. It took another eight years to fully germinate.
She did nearly 10 months sober in 2020 — set up a page, posted daily, was genuinely proud. Then the 30th birthdays started. She had one drink at a party, decided she was cured, deleted the sober page, and was back to square one within days. The lesson that stayed: never delete the page.
I Was One of the Top 100 Sexiest Women in the World — Secretly Dying Inside Every Night, Wishing I Could Go Home to My Mum
Saison 3 · Épisode 9
lundi 16 février 2026 • Durée 01:33:23
Episode 59 | Alex Leigh — From 90s Supermodel to Hiding Wine Bottles in Greece: A Story of Glamour, Grief & Getting Sober
In this dazzling and deeply human episode, Jimmy sits down with Alex Leigh — one of Britain’s top lingerie models of the 1990s, FHM’s top 100 sexiest women, a fixture at the most exclusive parties in London, and the woman who was secretly counting down to 6pm every night to open her first bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Alex’s story starts with loss. A perfect childhood ended at seven when her father died of pancreatic cancer aged just 43. Her mother relocated the family to Mallorca, where Alex endured relentless bullying, had to translate her homework through three languages every night until 1am, and protected her grieving mother from the truth by pretending she loved every minute of it. When they moved back to Manchester, she channelled all that bottled-up pain into becoming a rebel — bunking off school, smoking behind the church, and getting into the Hacienda at 14 because she was already six foot two and blonde.
At 16, a brother’s friend suggested modelling. Within months she was in London — a 16-year-old girl placed by her agency into a flat with a male photographer in his late 40s, with no chaperone, no advice about taxes, no instructions of any kind. Just dropped into the deep end of an industry where cocaine wasn’t offered, it was simply assumed. Bowl full of it at every party. Everyone doing it. No other way to be.
The money came fast and hard — lingerie campaigns, FHM, travelling the world. And so did the chaos. Alex went from photo shoot to after party to plane to next city, frequently still drunk from the night before, stinking of fags and booze, wondering how she was getting away with it. She had a penthouse in Kensington, a driver, a Bulgari perfume box permanently stuffed with cocaine, and absolutely no idea how to manage money. Then the 2008 credit crunch arrived and she and her then-husband lost nine properties overnight.
The second chapter brought Greece, a new relationship, two daughters — and a slow, secret slide into nightly bottle-of-wine drinking that became two bottles minimum, buying from different shops so nobody noticed the volume, padding her shopping so the bottles wouldn’t clink, hiding extras around the apartment. Until St. Patrick’s Day three years ago, when her mother took her daughter away and called her a disgrace. Alex woke up the next morning, hungover, sobbing, about to reach for a glass of wine to feel better — and in that moment thought: that’s it. I need help.
I Was Kidnapped, Nearly Raped Twice & Found Myself in a Sex Trafficking Gang’s House — And I Still Didn’t Think I Had a Problem
Saison 3 · Épisode 8
jeudi 12 février 2026 • Durée 01:26:00
Episode 58 | Kaitlin Reeve — From Sitting on a Window Ledge at Nine to Nearly Three Years Clean: A Story of Escapism, Danger & Recovery
In this searingly honest episode — released on Kaitlin’s birthday — Jimmy sits down with Kaitlin Reeve, founder of the Sober as a Mother Focused Instagram and one of the most unflinching voices in the UK recovery community. Kaitlin’s story spans childhood trauma, drug-induced psychosis, kidnapping, and the quiet moment in her garden that finally changed everything.
Kaitlin grew up unhappy — a child who never felt okay, who escaped into fantasy, books, films and food before she had words for why. She was drinking at nine, allowed to get drunk at 13, and watched the adults around her become happier, calmer and less shouty when they used drugs and alcohol. The message she took from that? When I’m a grown-up, that’s what will make me happy.
At 16 she had her first line of cocaine in a penthouse on High Street Kensington, surrounded by people she’d only ever seen in magazines. A girl from nothing, suddenly rubbing shoulders with Hollywood. She associated cocaine with glamour, freedom and escape — the antidote to every moment she’d spent feeling less than. She embraced it completely.
What followed was years of escalating use: being locked in trap houses, kidnapped, nearly raped twice, and finding herself in the home of an international sex trafficking gang — all of which she shrugged off because the good still outweighed the bad. A controlling, abusive relationship followed. Then a period of sobriety, then relapse triggered by her body going into fight-or-flight shutdown so severe she couldn’t go to the toilet without cocaine. Then drug-induced psychosis — hearing things, seeing things, a size 4-6 frame barely eating or sleeping.
The end came not with a dramatic rock bottom but with a quiet moment of exhaustion in her garden in late August 2022. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. She Googled 12-step fellowships, put on full makeup and her best outfit so nobody would think she was that bad, walked in — and by the end of the meeting said: Hi, I’m Kaitlin, I’m an addict. Her clean date is 6th September 2022.
Nearly three and a half years on, Kaitlin sponsors other women, maintains her daily prayer and meditation, and uses Sober as a Mother Focused — a beautifully named Instagram — to share the reality of recovery for mothers without tips or preaching. Just her story, honestly told.
I Woke Up Alone in a Tuk-Tuk in the Middle of a Jungle With No Idea How I Got There — And Went Back Out the Next Night
Saison 3 · Épisode 7
jeudi 5 février 2026 • Durée 01:35:28
Episode 57 | Cameron Kidd — From Waking Up in a Jungle Tuk-Tuk to 14 Months Sober in Copenhagen: Jersey Boy Finally Finds Himself
In this warm, funny and deeply honest episode, Jimmy sits down with Cameron Kidd — Jersey-born, Copenhagen-based podcaster and host of TOMU: The Open Mic Unfiltered — whose story of binge drinking, blackouts, ADHD and finally getting sober at 34 is one of the most relatable the show has featured.
Cameron had a decent childhood — loving parents, good school — but his parents’ move to France at 16 without really consulting him sent him into a spiral of resentment and freedom. Spat on and called an English pig at the French college, he was back on Jersey within days, living between his auntie’s house and a mate’s farmhouse with a bar downstairs, huge fields and summer bonfires. His own mini festival, every weekend. Ecstasy, weed, alcohol — and none of it feeling like a problem because everyone around him was doing the same.
Through his twenties Cameron moved around constantly — Jersey, Glasgow, Thailand, back to Jersey, Copenhagen — chasing fresh starts that always ended the same way. In Thailand he woke up alone in a tuk-tuk in the middle of dense jungle on New Year’s Day with no memory of how he got there. He checked himself over, found his way back, and went out the following night. In Glasgow he woke up with the top of his ear hanging off and no idea how. He came home from a beach party with his hand badly burnt — found by friends trying to cool it in the sea, then wandering off, ending up at a corner shop where a stranger looked through his phone and called his dad. He had his jaw broken and didn’t go to hospital for two days because everyone told him he was fine.
The blackouts became total. Every single time he drank, he remembered nothing — just fragments. He’d wake up and scan the room, reading the energy to figure out what he needed to apologise for. Until a night out in Copenhagen when a stranger approached him in a pub: “You don’t remember me, do you? You took me and the boys around the whole city, showed us an incredible night.” Cameron had no recollection of any of it. That was the moment that really scared him.
The end came after a big night last October. He turned up at his girlfriend’s door wrecked, broke down completely — I’ve had enough, I don’t want to be here anymore, I’m tired — and she gave him an ultimatum. He went to KKUC, a Danish substance abuse programme, and it was there they asked: “Have you ever been tested for ADHD?” He hadn’t. He got the best grade of his life. The relief — and the grief — of finally understanding why he’d always been this way was overwhelming.
The Alcohol Industry Doesn’t Care About Moderate Drinkers — Their Biggest Customer Is the Person Who Can’t Stop
Saison 3 · Épisode 6
vendredi 30 janvier 2026 • Durée 01:16:13
Episode 56 | Anna Donaghey — The Advertising Insider Who Sold Alcohol to a Nation, Drank Herself Sober & Wrote the Book on Rethinking Drinking
In this sharp, revealing and genuinely thought-provoking episode, Jimmy sits down with Anna Donaghey — sober coach, podcast host of The Big Drink Rethink, author of What Are You Thirsty For?, and former senior advertising executive who spent 25 years helping the alcohol industry grow.
Anna’s story begins unremarkably — a good childhood near Bristol, parents divorced at 16, first drink at 14 through a slightly older boyfriend, the usual combination of rebellion, escapism and enjoying the feeling. Brighton University, a course that took her to Turin, a taste of Italian wine culture, and a graduate scheme at Rover that would set the trajectory of everything that followed.
It was on the factory floor at Rover in Birmingham that Anna first understood what her drinking was really about — fitting in. Shoulder to shoulder with brilliant, salt-of-the-earth workmates who poured out of the production lines at noon on Fridays and drank until they couldn’t stand. A home counties girl who could sink eight pints and still win at darts. They loved her for it. She loved them for accepting her. It felt like belonging.
That need for belonging followed her to London, to advertising agencies in Soho, to client lunches that turned into client evenings, to fridges full of Stella Artois that opened at 6pm, to airport lounges and expense accounts and the seamless social world of agency life where work and drinking were completely indistinguishable. For over a decade, she was one of the best in the business — and she sat in boardrooms with the biggest alcohol companies in the world, helping them figure out how to create new drinkers, convert existing ones, and — most sinisterly — draw in younger audiences without technically breaking the rules.
She would never have worked on a cigarette account. She’d have stood up and said no. But she worked on alcohol. She just didn’t know the difference yet.
Six years ago, with no dramatic rock bottom and no catastrophic crisis, Anna simply looked at her life and saw two futures. One where she carried on and didn’t reach old age. One where she stopped. She stopped. And discovered that sobriety isn’t a destination — it’s a gateway.
I Was So Consumed With Getting My Next Drink I Couldn’t Enjoy Being in Sri Lanka — That’s When I Knew
Saison 3 · Épisode 5
dimanche 25 janvier 2026 • Durée 01:33:49
Episode 55 | Emily Chadbourne — 7 Years Sober in Melbourne: The Woman Who Stopped Before Rock Bottom & Wrote Down Every Win
In this warm, honest and deeply insightful episode, Jimmy sits down with Emily Chadbourne — personal development coach, sober advocate and Melbourne-based expat from the South West of England — whose story of grey area drinking, isolation in outback Australia and a meditation that changed everything is one of the most uniquely told recovery stories the podcast has featured.
Emily grew up near Glastonbury with parents who modelled a healthy relationship with alcohol — sherry on Sundays, gin at Christmas, nothing more. There was no trauma, no family history of alcoholism, and no obvious reason. Just a classic 1990s teenage girl sneaking cider in Somerset parks, a university degree she could have aced but didn’t bother to, and a hospitality career in London that put her shoulder-deep in a world where every meeting, every celebration, every Tuesday was a drinking occasion. She was fun, efficient, capable — and always the last one standing.
At thirty, she moved to Airlie Beach in Queensland with her boyfriend, and everything fell apart. Not dramatically, but quietly. The scaffolding of identity — her career, her friendships, her sense of significance — was removed, and she discovered she had no idea who she was without it. She drank every night. Alone. In the heat. In a town that closed at 8pm.
Melbourne was better, but the drinking didn’t stop. Working for herself as a coach, with no office hours and no colleagues to moderate around, she started buying two-for-twenty at the bottle shop after lunch meetings. Half a bottle by 7pm. A bottle with dinner. That unopened second bottle waiting when she got home. Three and a half bottles between lunch and bedtime, and never visibly drunk. Hiding empties from her housemates. Telling herself it was fine.
Then 2017 arrived like a wrecking ball. Her mum died of cancer. Her business collapsed. Her boyfriend left — and was in a new relationship with one of her best friends within weeks. She drank from coffee cups so her housemates wouldn’t see. She drank in the morning. She drank at her dad’s house by sneaking to his spirits cabinet between toilet trips.
Now approaching two years sober, Rachel has lost 80 pounds, is present in her son’s life, co-hosts one of recovery’s fastest-growing podcasts, and is getting married on her exact two-year sobriety anniversary. On her future mother-in-law’s deathbed, she made a promise to stay sober. She’s keeping it.
Then her grandmother — who had helped raise her — died on All Saints’ Day at exactly 5:55pm. 11/11. The angel number for divine guidance. 5:55 — the number for change. Natalie didn’t grieve. She collapsed. And then she surrendered.
She checked into rehab on November 28th 2022, excelled — they called her Little Miss Sunshine, she organised karaoke every day — and on her final day before discharge, was handed a restraining order from her ex-husband. She went to jail in February for sending a text. She lost her job of 11 years. Her ex lived in her father’s house for 17 months while she fought for custody from her childhood bedroom in Brooklyn.
A pregnancy gave her nine months of enforced sobriety she secretly loved. Then eight weeks after her daughter arrived, a hen party. Then Cheltenham Races — out from 9am, paralytic by afternoon, a blackout argument with a friend she can’t remember, a mortifying apology the next morning. Then a Mexican night out with margaritas that ended in the worst argument she and her husband had ever had — over nothing that would have mattered sober.
Her actual day one came on a beautiful sunny Sunday, throwing up in the toilet, sat at a pub table in front of a roast dinner she couldn’t touch, and thinking quietly: what am I doing to myself? That was it. 137 days later, she was on the podcast. She’s now adopted rescue chickens, taken up running and joined a running group — and is posting daily on @BoozeFreeSparkle about why mummy wine culture isn’t cute, it’s damaging.
She called AA in Greece. A kind man answered. She sobbed. He told her she wasn’t alone. She went religiously for a year. And then she moved on — because the best thing about recovery, she says, is that you finally get to live forward instead of back.
Now 14 months clean, medicated for ADHD, living in Copenhagen with his girlfriend and hosting his own podcast, Cameron is slowly learning who he is without alcohol. The hardest part? Someone once asked him what he enjoys — and he had no answer. But he’s finding his way back to the curious, excited boy he once was. One day at a time.
Now a sober coach, author and podcaster, Anna has flipped the question the recovery community usually asks. Not “how bad is your drinking?” but “is your life good enough?” Because if you’re a heavy drinker and your life isn’t where you wanted it to be, the chances are alcohol has far more to do with that than you realise.
Buy Anna’s book - ‘What Are You Thirsty For? Rethinking Alcohol and The Life You Want’
The Sri Lanka trip was the turning point. On holiday in paradise, Emily couldn’t be present for a single moment — every thought consumed by when the next drink was coming, how to get someone else to suggest it, how to engineer the beer before the train without being seen as the one who needed it. She came home, went back to the UK, and did the same thing with her sisters. On the flight back to Melbourne she decided: when this plane lands, that’s it.
A business mentor asked her to identify one thing holding her back. She begged internally for it not to be alcohol. Of course it was alcohol. That night she went out, got blackout drunk, and remembers nothing of her last ever drink. The following Sunday she walked into her first AA meeting.
What happened next was remarkable. Emily told everyone immediately — using the label of alcoholic not out of shame but as a strategic firewall so she could never quietly slip back. She wrote down every single good thing that happened as
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