I was born and bred in London, where I went to private school and university. I wouldn’t say that as a teenager, or even at university, that drinking was even a part of my life.
I’ve been working in financial services for about 35 years.
On the first day of my first job ever, someone said, “Let’s go for a liquid lunch”.
I said, “Well, what the hell is that?”That’s when my relationship with alcohol started. It just gave me this feeling of protection, ease and confidence. Looking back, I think what also happened was it started tapping into a part of me that I just didn’t know about yet.
At quite a young age, when I was about 24 years old, I was sent off to Singapore, which was a great experience for me to do some work out there with the company I was working for. But when I got back, my mini bar bill was the only one that got called out. I thought, you know, mine was just higher because it was such a lovely experience. It just was part and parcel of it.
Towards the end of the 90s, girlfriends were pointing out things like I should go to an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting. I went to my first one in 1999 in Kings Road, but I was nowhere near wanting to stop drinking. By then, I was starting to love alcohol and was drinking before I met people, saying to myself that I had social anxiety so needed it. So that started, but the consequences weren’t huge. But by around 2003, I was going out with a girl whose mother had been out with someone with drink problems and she said there’s something wrong with you. She said, “You either get yourself into help or we break up.”
I went into my first private rehab in 2003. I was sober for about three months, but then I carried on. That cycle of rehabs and relapse went on for a good eight years. I was getting jobs and losing them – some paid for rehab, some of them I just walked out of. By now, I was drinking in the mornings.
Exercise has always been a part of my life, but in those days, exercise was the enabler for my drinking because it got me fit to carry on drinking on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In those four days, I’d probably go through about five litres of vodka, and I’d still be functioning and walking around. I was never a daily drinker, but in those four days, the devastation was pretty bad.
I was getting picked up by the police and paramedics on a regular basis.
At this stage, there was self-harm and overdoses. I was drinking on top of taking the bipolar meds and antipsychotics these clinical psychologists were dishing out.
I was living in my parent’s house in South London and my bedroom was filled with 60 empty bottles of vodka. Every time I saw one of those empty bottles at eight o’clock in the morning, when I was getting ready for work, I wondered whether it would be a good idea to get a bottle of vodka first. So that’s what I’d do. Then I’d go into the toilets of Victoria station, take out an Evian bottle and fill it with the vodka. I was turning up to work having drunk a half litre.
The consequences were getting serious. I was losing jobs and out of work for long periods of time. I also lost relationships with my family. Friendships ended, wealth dried up and girlfriends left.
As much as AA wasn’t the right thing for me, there are some sayings from there which are actually true. One of them is that there’s only one of three ways this was going to go: death, insanity or prison. I’d had multiple interactions with the police, doing things like leaving restaurants without paying and getting locked up overnight for being drunk and disorderly on the streets. Once, I woke up in the sectioned ward of a facility – that was very scary. I used to call the police as I was walking down the road at 12 at night saying, “I’m going to kill myself.” I was taking medication and drinking on top of it. Self-harm, overdoses – that is mental decline.
In November 2013, I had lost yet another job and I don’t know what happened, but I had a relapse and my manager said, “The best thing I could do for you is to let you go.” I didn’t walk away feeling angry. He’d done it in such a nice way. But the most important thing was that I was alone. No one wanted to help me by then. There was no company, there was no money. My parents had washed their hands of me. I was all alone, and I had to make that decision, to say to myself, “Do I live or die?”
And I thought, right, well, I don’t want to die. So, I started thinking, “I’m an intelligent and capable guy, I need to start using some of this responsibility I’ve built and my education to help myself now”.
I went to a day drug and alcohol service in Croydon. It was nothing like the private residential rehabs I’d been in before, but I think that was important. When I walked in, I hated it – it was so different to where I’d been before, and I thought it was horrible. But it ended up being exactly where I needed to be.
I had to apply for money from the Borough to get in. The funding actually got rejected the first time around, so I wrote a really detailed email to explain why I deserved it. I was finally using my intelligence. They approved the funding, but the most important thing was that when going through their process, they asked me a question that no one else had before: “What hasn’t worked for you up until today?”
I’d never really thought about it like that. But when I looked back, I realised that the places I’d been to before weren’t working for me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying hard enough, it was just that they weren’t the right fit. When I finally found the right place – and I had a gut feeling that it was this place in Croydon – and I was finally at the right headspace, then it would work.
So I went to the Croydon service, I worked hard and this time, it clicked.
One of the great things about this programme was that they seemed to really understand what I needed, and that it was about more than just a one-size-fits-all intervention. While I was there, the team said I should get in touch with an organisation down in Brixton called Janus Solutions, that they might have something that would resonate with me and help me in my journey. I got in touch and went to see them. We had a chat and talked about what had happened in the past. They told me I was intelligent and capable, but that I needed to use those qualities to help heal myself.
“I thought, brilliant, this sounds aligned to me”. The group of people there were all very different to me. None of them came from my social and career background. I needed that, because it was just a very diverse group of people – so different to being surrounded by business professionals like I had been in private rehabs.
There’s one common theme for why a lot of people have alcohol and drug problems: childhood trauma. I kept mine a secret for over 20 years. But it cost me. The price I’d paid was a whole Bible’s worth of justifications to drink. In Brixton, they broke down all these justifications layer by layer. And that’s why this programme worked for me – it asked what was really happening. Distilled it. Broke it down. Challenged the justifications I had built up in my head for why I needed to drink to go to the hairdresser, to go shopping. I needed the effect alcohol had on me, so I’d use any excuse under the sun.
I wasn’t able to work, so for three months, seven days a week, I gave the programme everything I had. And I think what happened was that the DNA of how I responded to life completely changed. So, when I left there in February 2014, in that year afterwards, I just accelerated and went out to rebuild my life.
I started having healthy new relationships. I rebuilt my relationship with my father, mother and brother, my niece and nephew. I went back to the city and did banking. I met people who’d actually sacked me! But there was no place for pride – I thought, “This is my career, I’ve got the credentials. You have to face it head-on.” So I went back.
It took courage to go back to an environment that I knew was going to be scary. I’ve always been a good worker, but my ability to work was even more heightened because I was thinking and operating in an entirely different way.
This carried on for seven years. I kept on being more successful, getting promoted, building more financial stability. But this time I had very different friends to the ones I had many years before.
Then in February 2020, just before COVID, I quit. I left a very well-paid job, which was pretty risky. But I did it to form my own venture called Emerald, which works with businesses and individuals on sustainable recovery. It’s something I feel so passionately about.
During lockdown, I got myself into a Business School programme. I used that year to form the venture and then I went back to work.
Now, I just like helping people. I’ve guided people over the last few years. I’ve been a mentor. I’ve been helping people with their careers because when you’ve been in and out of work so many times, you know how to get a job! The memories are still there of all the bad things that happened, but it’s about not dwelling on them now. Sometimes I have to remind myself to go back to that guy from 2014, to be that courageous.
Since I finally stopped drinking, I have dealt with my father passing away, lockdown and other huge personal losses. But now, I deal with it all with responsibility and maturity, not taking the easy way out.
My advice to others would be to ask yourself honestly, “What hasn’t been working so far?”
Because it’s very easy to carry on with the rehab circuit. Just ask yourself a simple question like that and do a bit of research. Be open to doing something new and actually putting the work in to find out what that is. What worked for me was that I was given a choice.
I heard one guy from the Brixton group say he didn’t think he could make it, that the “Mountain was too high”. That’s a phrase that people use. They say it’s too much to rebuild. But it’s not. People can do it.
I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve been able to turn myself into someone who’s an asset to society.
But more than anything, in my heart, the number one thing is my parents being proud of me.