I love June, the way the natural world just suddenly seems to explode into colour and beauty. I remember one day in June two years ago when, a few shaky months sober, I walked out of my front door one morning and felt like I’d been hit in the face with a tsunami of colour and light. Like someone had suddenly turned up the brightness level of the world by about a thousand. When I realised for the first, but most definitely not the last,…Continue Reading “What a wonderful world”
Photo credit: Zulmaury Saavedra on www.unsplash.com I’m on holiday at the moment and I was sat last night with two of my gorgeous friends (who were both drinking). We were having such a lovely time, laughing and chatting and suddenly one of them said, jokingly: ‘do you know what pisses me off? Tomorrow Julia will be all fresh and we’ll be rough but she’s having just as good a time as us now’. And I smiled (a bit smugly, it has to be said), because…Continue Reading “Alcohol is a thief”
When I was at school I was terrible at PE. Think of the worst person at PE at your school, times that dreadfulness by about 100 and you have me. I flinched and ducked whenever the ball came anywhere near me. I was the slowest runner, the shortest and lowest jumper, the one who impaled the javelin into the ground about 50cm in front of her and sent the discus flying off in entirely the wrong direction. I was not only consistently the last person…Continue Reading “Rewrite your story”
Photo credit: Nicholas Sampson on www.unsplash.com I went to hot yoga for the first time today. I hadn’t met the teacher before and when I rocked up at the studio reception I could see in her face that she thought I was going to die in there. She took one look at my fat, 40-something Lycra clad ass and thought ‘she has noooo idea what she’s getting herself into’. Which was simultaneously insulting, given that I’ve been practising strenuous vinyasa flow yoga for two years…Continue Reading “We can do hard things”
Just writing that feels beyond surreal. Two bloody years. Two years of no hangovers, no toxic shame, no self disgust, no ‘am I an alcoholic and if I am how the actual fuckety fuck will I ever manage to stop drinking?!’ 3am anxiety spirals. Two years of freedom from all that shit, living my very best life. I always seem to feel the need to qualify my blogs with the statement ‘my life isn’t perfect now’ which is silly really because of course it isn’t….Continue Reading “Two years sober!”
Flashback Soberistas blog from 6 months sober, August 2017 My baby isn’t sleeping AT ALL well at the moment and will only sleep for the majority of each night if someone is holding her so I’ve had a lot of time on my phone browsing the internet. One of my fave sobriety blogs is Hip Sobriety and I read this post last night: http://www.hipsobriety.com/home/2015/10/20/how-to-build-a-sobriety-toolbox This got me thinking about the sober tools I’ve developed over the last nearly six months (eek!) so I wrote them…Continue Reading “My sober tools”
Hi lovelies – well another Christmas has come and gone, for me my second sober one (not counting pregnancies), and I wanted to share some of the good stuff I’ve noticed this year about doing the festive season 100% sober, second time around the sun – so you know what you have to look forward to next year! 1. Less stress – sooooo much less stress. This has been the biggest eye opener for me this year. My kids are 5 and 2, the little…Continue Reading “It gets easier – 10 random reflections on a second sober Christmas”
It always seems impossible until it’s done. My yoga teacher said that tonight. She was teaching us a posture that takes a lot of physical strength (moving up into chaturanga from lying face down for the yogis among you, essentially deadlifting your own body weight for everyone else). About half the class could do it. The other half, including me, could not move so much as a millimetre off the floor, despite putting so much effort in that I felt like I was on the…Continue Reading “It always seems impossible until it’s done”
Flashback Soberistas blog from 10 months sober (on New Year’s Day 2018) Happy New Year lovely Soberistas! I was out last night and although I didn’t think for a minute I would drink it seemed like tempting fate to reflect on my first sober festive season any earlier than today. And today feels like a perfect day to reflect, with the shiny new year stretching out in front of us all. Last year I started 2017 with a feeling of trepidation. I was anxious and…Continue Reading “Sobriety delivered what alcohol promised (for Christmas)”
Image credit: Instagram @stacieswift I had one of those ‘wait, whaaaaat?’ moments this weekend, which are still fairly frequent visitors in my sobriety even this close to two years in (two years, I can’t even begin to start processing that yet!). As usual for me at this time of year I had a hectic weekend planned with lots of fun stuff, doing stuff with OH and the kids, stuff for me, stuff with friends. They were all things I really wanted to do, but when…Continue Reading “I think I might be growing up!”
