I drink a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc a night and I'm fifty-two years old and I'm not an alcoholic. I'm head of marketing in a Surrey commuter town with a teenage son and a teenage daughter and a husband who's stopped commenting on the volume of wine in our recycling bin.
I've been drinking like this for about eight years.
It crept up.
My GP, when I finally told her last spring, didn't ask me much.
I underreported, of course.
I said I had about fifteen, maybe eighteen units a week.
The real number was closer to fifty.
She told me to maybe try two alcohol-free nights a week.
That was the entire conversation.
She moved on to my blood pressure.
I left that surgery and I sat in my car in the car park and I cried — quietly, not crying-crying, just leaking — because I had thought, naively, that the GP would say something.
Notice something.
Push me towards something.
She didn't.
The system is not built to catch a woman who looks fine.
I'd already done it all.
Annie Grace.
Dry January three times.
The Try Dry app, until I couldn't bear to open it.
Two months of alcohol-free wine that just made me drink the real one afterwards.
Three different brands of kudzu capsules — Planetary Herbals first, then a cheaper one, then a Swanson "full spectrum" — and none of them did anything I could feel.
I tried CBT for eight weeks at eighty pounds a session and the very nice therapist asked me to journal my feelings before the first glass, which is what I was using the wine to not do.
The nuclear option, the one I dreaded, was Antabuse.
The drug that makes you sick if you drink.
My sister-in-law's husband was on it for two years.
He said the worst part was the panic of accidentally eating tiramisu.
I thought, that is not a life.
That is just fear instead of wine.
Then I gave up activities one by one.
The Saturday morning yoga class, booked Friday lunchtime when I felt motivated.
Cancelled by 11pm.
The book club I used to host — I dropped going because two of the women had started bringing alcohol-free wine on purpose and I couldn't bear what that meant.
The big family camping trip last August.
I told everyone I'd hurt my back.
I sat at home and drank for the three nights instead.
Not the drinking.
The shrinking.
The woman who changed it was the pharmacy technician at my local Boots.
I'd been buying multivitamins and milk thistle and B-complex from her for years.
One afternoon she rang up my order — same as always — and said, can I tell you something.
You don't have to listen.
Has anyone ever explained why these don't work for what you're actually taking them for.
She said two things were going wrong.
One, eight years of nightly wine had quietly downregulated my GABA receptors — the receptors that make the brain's own calm — so my nervous system was running on emergency power by 5pm every day.
That's the 5pm voice.
That's the wine witch.
Not weakness.
Receptor depletion.
Two, my liver had become a bouncer at the door.
Every milk thistle capsule, every kudzu pill, every B-vitamin I'd ever swallowed got broken down by first-pass metabolism before it reached the bloodstream where it was supposed to work.
She pulled a sachet of paracetamol off the shelf.
Said: imagine you swallow this.
By the time it reaches the bit of you that aches, your liver has already neutralised most of it.
Now imagine if there was a way to slide it in through the wall instead of through the door.
That's what a patch is.
I sat down on the little chair by the blood pressure machine.
A study at a research centre in [country] found that around 78% of orally-administered kudzu was lost to hepatic first-pass metabolism in adults with five or more years of nightly drinking.
She said, naltrexone has been licensed for alcohol use disorder in this country since 1994.
Thirty-one years.
The clinical evidence is rock solid.
But your GP won't bring it up until you call yourself an alcoholic first — and you're not going to, so she's not going to.
The system has nothing for you.
There's another route.
It's a patch.
Kudzu and magnesium and B-complex and milk thistle, transdermal, twenty-four hours.
She gave me a name on a Post-it.
Frimod.
I went home and ordered it.
I didn't tell my husband.
I didn't tell my sister.
I was too tired of being disappointed again.
The protocol is the protocol.
Mechanism.
That word changed everything.
A 2005 trial run by a team at a university in [country] found that adults who drank most nights and were given kudzu cut their consumption almost in half in a single session, without trying.
Night one.
I wore the patch under my blouse.
I poured a glass at 5:30.
I had a few sips.
The second pour didn't happen.
I thought it was a fluke.
Morning two.
My hands weren't shaking when I picked up my coffee.
I hadn't noticed they'd been shaking.
I just noticed that they weren't.
Week two.
I slept seven hours, three nights in a row.
My face in the mirror looked less swollen.
My husband said, you've been less tired.
Month one.
My daughter came down to the kitchen at 7:45.
She got her toast.
And then she sat down at the table.
She said, Mum, you look different.
You look... better.
She didn't go back upstairs.
Month three.
I had two glasses at my sister's birthday.
Walked away from the bottle.
Drove home.
Slept through till morning.
If your GP did the units conversation and moved on.
If you've spent four hundred pounds on supplements that did nothing.
If your daughter eats breakfast without you.
If you're brushing your teeth twice before the school run.
If you've done Dry January and you're still on a bottle a night.
Sarah Mitchell tells her version of this in an article — twenty-five years of it, the day her daughter looked at her again, all of it.
It's not always comfortable to read.
But it's the first thing I read where I felt understood instead of judged.
Read it.
It explains everything.
https://www.zynvista.com/UK/gray-area-drinking
