28th February 2024
Jules's story.
When Jules began to recover from her issues with alcohol, she slowly came to realise that an eating disorder has been silently lurking in the background. This is her story, in her words, of how she found healing from both conditions.
I’d always believed I was a very good drunk.
I come from a family of "good drinkers" which is to say that in my family, we have a culture of heavy drinking. Some members would probably consider themselves “functioning alcoholics." Within this network, I had a reputation for being the "good drunk" because I was able to get everyone home safely, even if I had blacked out.
I was a daily drinker but it was confined to the moment I finished work. I hated evening meetings as they would delay the moment I could start drinking. Most people in my life knew that I drank, but very few knew the extent to which it had come to control my life.
In the last months of active addiction I blacked out almost as soon as I started drinking but while it was confined to the evenings there didn’t feel like I had a reason (or indeed the means) to stop.
But during the Covid pandemic when I no longer had to drive anywhere, my drinking increased dramatically. Everything to do with work moved to Zoom, so it didn't really matter if I drank during the day. I couldn't seem to stop, and eventually, I hit a point where I felt miserable all the time. I was consuming two to three bottles of wine every night and wondered what kind of crisis point would make me give up alcohol. I believed that the only way out would be suicide or death by misadventure, which had almost happened a couple of times. Would getting caught for drink-driving and ruining my career be enough? Even throwing up blood didn't seem to be a strong enough wake-up call. Looking back, I can see that my alcoholism had persisted for years at a low level, I was still functioning, still working, but feeling terrible all the time. In the previous six years, I had developed gastritis which eventually turned into hemorrhagic gastritis, which caused me to throw up blood.
Yet I didn't know what would finally push me over the edge. I had already done plenty of unwise things, so what was left?
As a Christian, I have a habit of having what I call a quiet time in the morning. Time for prayer and reflection. One day as I was just sitting there feeling just as sick and dehydrated as usual I wrote in my journal “God, I just don't know how I'm ever going to get out of this”. It's not like I'd never mentioned the drinking to him before, but this time there was a different emotion behind it. I was feeling baffled, powerless, finished. Desperate. “I just don’t know how to get out. “I wrote. ‘You are just going to have to do something because I can’t.”
And what came into my head really was that I should contact a well-known addiction service and ask for help. I thought “Lets go with that. At least it’s something. They're not going to make me stop. I’ll just talk to them.”
I contacted them and someone rang me quite quickly and invited me to an online meeting where the advice was “why don't you drink a bit less?” I laughed out loud and thought “If I could, I would! I’ve kind of tried that already! Drinking less seems like a really good idea at 8:00 AM when I feel awful, but a terrible one at 6:00 PM when I finish work!”
But I agreed to try, and after a few more weeks of that, unsuccessfully as it turns out, I told some friends of mine that I really didn’t know what to do, that I knew I needed to stop but just couldn’t. And they told me that their daughter-in-law was sober in Alcoholics Anonymous and suggested I speak to her.
I knew the person they were talking about. I used to drink with her. She used to be a “good drinker” as well.
So, I rang this person and, we started talking. I told her my story and she very simply to me “You just need to stop. And you can’t do that on your own. You need to go to Clouds House.”
My initial reaction was that I couldn't afford it. It wasn’t going to happen. But I also remembered that the person at the charity I’d contacted had said to me I was probably going to need a detox because I’d been drinking for a long time at a relatively high level.
So, my friend and I came up with a plan - I was due a sabbatical, and I was going to spend it in rehab! And with the help of the local addiction service, my employers, another amazing charity which supports people in my line of work, a part Bursary from Clouds House, and as much as I could afford to pay personally, I ended up in Clouds House for 6 weeks.
My friend had also put me in touch with AA, and so before I went to Clouds, I found a sponsor and started attending meetings even when I wasn't sober - which felt awful, but also gave me quite a good support network before I went.
The minute I knew the date I was going to be admitted, I knew that was going to be my sobriety date. I never doubted that the 4th of January in 2021 was going to be the day that I stopped drinking. And that's thankfully never changed.
It’s often said that having co-occurring mental health and addiction issues is like playing a game of whack-a-mole. No sooner have you dealt with one thing, that another one pops up somewhere else. And as soon as you’ve dealt with that one, another appears. Then another, and another. For me that turned out to be true - as one thing subsided, another took its place.
My relationship with food had been dysfunctional for a while. Initially, because I felt sick all the time because of all the white wine I was drinking, I would just eat bland food like toast to settle my stomach. It wasn’t about weight loss.
But gradually after I stopped drinking, I began to realize how much more I weighed than I used to. And I thought that giving up drinking meant that I would be able to lose weight. So that mindset was developing already. And the minute I started losing a bit of weight I wanted to lose more. I felt that I’d lost control of pretty much everything in my life, at least I could control this.
I didn't stop eating in an obvious way, because I didn't want anyone to notice, but I ate increasingly less, and I was very careful about what I ate, and obviously, just from giving up drinking and not eating so much starch to try and settle my stomach, I did carry on losing weight.
And I now understand that it's not uncommon for somebody to have an “anorexic switch” that goes off in the process of healthy dieting- effectively saying “Brilliant. I’ve found something I'm good at. I know, let's lose more.” And then the compulsive thoughts kick in.
As I said, I’ve never had a brilliant relationship with food and was brought up in a family that puts a lot of value on being thin. So, it didn't take me too long to realize I'd probably had issues around eating and body image for quite a lot of the time before - they just weren’t the dominant issues. But when the drinking stopped, they took center stage. Soon I was obsessed with my weight and my BMI.
In October 2021 I was in a pretty desperate place. Although I qualified for NHS help as my BMI was well below the threshold, the waiting list was months long. Knowing I was getting worse, a horrific flashback to the drinking days, I didn’t give up trying to get help and fortunately, through a combination of self-funding and charitable bursaries, I managed to see an eating disorder therapist regularly and things began to improve.
I used to run a bit. I'm never going to be like a professional runner, but I enjoy it. I used to do the odd 5K but that was it really. When I stopped drinking, I thought it was great that I could run again and not be throwing up blood at the end of it. So, I took up running again, but that interacted with the eating disorder in quite a destructive way. I would eat very little and run more and more and more. It became a self-destructive cycle.
The turning point came when I joined a running club. I didn't mind looking unwell and feeling faint on a run if I was on my own, but I did mind doing that with other people.
I realized if I don't look after myself properly including eating healthily, I wouldn't be able to run as I wanted to. This became clear to me when I got injured. I went to a physio who told me that I had a bulging disc because I was too underweight for the amount of miles I was running.
It was at that point that running became more of a priority than restricting food and that in turn became an important part of my recovery. I have a place for the London marathon in April, running in aid of Mind, and I know that if I am going to succeed I have to fuel myself appropriately and stick to the training plan if I am going to avoid injury.
I am incredibly grateful to be in recovery from alcohol addiction- however bad things are I know that they would be much worse if I was still drinking. As my sponsor likes to say “Theres nothing alcohol can’t make worse”. My relationship with food can still be tricky at times though I am also very grateful to be free of the compulsive thoughts that accompanied anorexia. I know that support and community (through AA and my running club) have taken me from a place where life felt unlivable to a place where I feel I have a purpose and a future.
