A shorter version of this article originally appeared in You magazine.

I used to wonder if there was an actual moment, a point in time, when I went from being a ‘party girl’ to being an alcoholic; from being apparently in control of to being controlled by alcohol.  Was there an actual glass of vodka and coke that effectively drained the last drop of my allotted amount of booze – an amount that, in fact, should have been enough to last me a lifetime?  Now though, after more than 10 years in recovery, I know that the answer is not so simple.  Alcoholism doesn’t happen overnight, there is no switch that flicks in an instant taking you from one state to another; and there is no going back.

As a teenager I didn’t really drink at all.  An unfortunate run-in with cheap red wine on my 14th birthday, complete with spinning beds and head-down-the-toilet puking, did a great job of putting me off booze altogether for a good few years.  Then, at the age of 21, I got a job on a cruise ship and it was there that I really discovered alcohol.  For someone young and single the life at sea is a lot of fun.  We worked hard and played hard.  The money is good, your overheads are minimal (no rent, bills or food to pay for) and you’re visiting exotic locations with a whole bunch of other young, single people with money to burn.  Down in the crew quarters there was a permanent party.  Booze was cheap and copious and, when you weren’t working or sleeping, you kept the door to your cabin open and your stereo turned up loud.  It was a lot of fun, it really was.  And at 21 you can shake off the after-effects of overindulgence without so much as an aspirin.  I wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker, not by shipboard standards at least, but I certainly drank every day, and alcohol was always there to oil the wheels of the party and keep us all dancing.  Did we drink more than we should have?  Probably, yes, but the term “binge drinking” hadn’t been invented and, like I say, we were young and carefree with plenty of disposable income.

By the time I returned to London, 6 months later, I had entirely overcome my aversion to alcohol.  I suppose my relationship with booze was, at this point, much the same as many people’s.  I liked a drink when I went out; it smoothed the rough edges of my social insecurities, making me feel relaxed and confident.  I was working as a waitress and, at the end of a shift, a couple of glasses of wine would help me unwind, and after work we would often hit one of London’s late-night drinking dens – quasi-legal dives filled with off-duty catering staff, cabbies and musicians.  I rarely drank to the point of incapacity, alcohol was there to loosen me up, dampen inhibitions and make me “more fun”.  It worked too, I was generally the life and soul; witty and brazen, adventurous and up-for-it.  There was the odd ill-advised one-night-stand of course, waking up sober with a very different guy to the alcohol-veiled charmer I’d gone to sleep beside, but I was hardly unusual in that; almost everyone I knew had the occasional ‘beer-goggles’ pick-up.  No, by and large I was having a good time, and so were the people around me.

It was in one of these dives that I met my first husband.  He was the manager of a late-night jazz club with an existence even more nocturnal than my own.  He finished work around 6am, stumbling home and into bed just an hour or so before I got up for work.  We rarely saw each other in the hours of daylight and, though I was unaware of it at the time, in retrospect I can see that we rarely saw each other stone-cold sober either.  The birth of our son Joey, when I was 24 caused an even greater divergence in our lives.  I had stopped drinking during my pregnancy and becoming a mother had seriously curtailed my party lifestyle.