Featured Image Credit: Tiktok/issyhawkins_
Topics: Health, Mental Health, Alcohol
Jess Battison
Warning: This article contains discussion of alcoholism which some readers may find distressing.
A woman has shared the way she would hide her ‘drinking problem’ from her partner before getting sober.
Issy Hawkins is a sobriety advocate who believes she knew she had ‘a problem’ from the age of 18, before ending up in rehab at 21.
The actor uses her social media to talk about her sobriety, ADHD and mental health.
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And in one recent video, Hawkins talked about how she attempted to hide her habits from her boyfriend.
“I used to hide alcohol empties in the bush outside mine and my boyfriend’s flat,” she says, “because I couldn’t think of any other place to deal with them.”
Now nine years sober, the woman explained she would drink while on her way from the tube back up to her home.
“I would try and get as much alcohol in me as possible so that I could deal with the evening ahead,” Hawkins says. “If I knew that we weren’t gonna be drinking that night, I just felt like I had to stock up.
“I had to get in much in me as possible.”
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So, once she made it back to the flat, the actor would worry: “Where the hell am I gonna put the empties?”
The woman ended up putting them in a bush outside which was ‘all well and good’ at first.
“It was that short-term thinking of ‘this is probably gonna bite you in the ass at some point’. But I was so drunk all the time.
“And that is the problem when you have a drinking problem – you’re just constantly in blackout and you forget what you’ve done, where you’ve put things.”
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But when winter rolled around, Hawkins was faced with a problem.
She ‘very vividly’ remembers when the leaves would fall off the bushes and forcing her to be ‘confronted with all of these vodka bottles’.
The woman says it would be a case of shocked asking: “Who’s done that?” and, “Who in the great f**k has done that outside our flat?”
Hawkins explains that when ‘you’re walking around with any kind of addiction problem’ then you’re essentially always ‘waiting for stuff to bite you in the ass’.
“You’re constantly waiting for the lies to catch up with you,” she adds. “And it’s horrible.
“Because they’re not the kind of lies that you can actually protect because you’re not in your right mind, you’re kind of in a fuzz and a haze the whole time.”
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So, Hawkins says you ‘actually don’t know’ about the lies you’ve already told and ‘it’s such a horrifically awful way to live your life’.
This created an ‘anxiety’ that followed her around on a daily basis, as she would be hiding alcohol in various places, both at home and at work.
Now on her sobriety journey, she looks back and sees the ‘mess’ she got herself into because she was ‘so terrified’ of not having alcohol.
Please drink responsibly. If you want to discuss any issues relating to alcohol in confidence, contact Drinkline on 0300 123 1110, 9am–8pm weekdays and 11am–4pm weekends for advice and support.