Member-only story
Let’s talk about your drinking
How it affects us all.
This is a blogpost I’ve been writing for two years now, but for some reason I didn’t finish it. Then I gave up drinking for a month, and it reminded me that it’s time I finished it.
At the young age of 23 I was offered a job working for a substance misuse charity. I had to reach out to private landlords and convince them to offer their apartments to people recovering from drug or alcohol addiction, sometimes with a conviction to their name.
It was a tough sell, words like addicts and ex-offenders don’t have such a good sound or reputation. Fortunately though, there were some very understanding people out there, who had experience of addiction or problematic drinking.
A few landlords preferred to call it problematic drinking, just to cover the whole range and include more of us. They were of the mindset that some of us aren’t addicts but our drinking still massively affects those around us after all, and of course we’re poisoning our own bodies.
At the same organisation, I later became part of a pilot model to see how volunteers fared in rehab units. People without the professional training but with some understanding, without the harder therapeutic direct but more so someone to chat to generally, share stories and play backgammon or the PS4 with.
