I was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1978, the youngest of four children. I had a happy and uneventful childhood. I drank for the first time at twelve or thirteen years old. I quickly became the biggest drinker in my group of friends. This continued to escalate throughout my teens and early twenties. I have two major phobias that have and still do restrict me greatly, that developed at ages eleven and eighteen.

In 2003, I moved to Chicago. The extremely heavy daily drinking continued until I met my now husband in 2005. He and I still drank a lot, but slightly less than when I was single. I gave up alcohol in November 2005, when I became pregnant with our first child, a girl. I had valve replacement surgery in November 2006. I did go back on drink, but it took some time to ramp up to a high level. I didn’t drink every day, and I didn’t blackout every time. I had a son and another daughter after that. My drinking reemerged each time after I stopped breastfeeding each child.

In late 2015, I finally gave up alcohol after a night in which I am ashamed of. I stayed sober for seventeen months. I became severely depressed in late 2016, and was hospitalized on a psychiatric ward. Since then I have have many, many more stays on the ward, and many outpatient treatment programs: both for alcohol, and mental illness. I relapsed in May 2017. That is when I began cutting seriously. That continued until October of the same year. Since then it has mostly been with alcohl, but there have been three instances of non-fatal overdoses. Each time I did not intend to kill myself, but each time did require hospitalization.

I started this blog in May or June 2017, and had a few entries. In the last couple of weeks (it is March 2018), I have had an insatiable need to write, and so I have been vomiting out blog posts very frequently. This blog is for me, for catharsis, and you to understand the mental illness of one person. Hopefully I’ll continue to add some slightly amusing post along the way. Enjoy!