‘Okay.’ Sue cleared her throat before starting to read: ‘Alcoholism is a family disease. Compulsive drinking affects the drinker and it affects the drinker’s relationships. Friendships, employment, childhood, parenthood, love affairs and marriages all suffer from the effects of alcoholism. Those special relationships in which a person is really close to an alcoholic are affected the most, and we who care are the most caught up in the behaviour of another person.’

I couldn’t stop nodding along to what Sue was reading. It was like everything she was reading was all about Mum. She continued, ‘We react to an alcoholic’s behaviour. Seeing that the drinking is out of hand, we try to control it. We are ashamed of the public scenes, but try to handle it in private. It isn’t long before we feel we are to blame and take on the hurts, the fears and the guilt of an alcoholic. We, too, can become ill.’

And then I realised I was losing some focus on what Sue was saying because I was thinking about all the times I felt guilty about Mum’s drinking, and how I tried to smooth it all over even though it hurt me so bad.

I focused back in as Sue read, ‘Watching fellow human beings slowly kill themselves with alcohol is painful. While alcoholics don’t seem to worry about the bills, the job, the children, or the condition of their health, the people around them usually begin to worry. We often make the mistake of covering up. We try to fix everything, make excuses, tell little lies to mend damaged relationships, and worry some more. This is our anxiety.’

All of it, every damn word that Sue said, felt like it was written just for me. And hearing that word, anxiety, somehow brought a little relief. I could still feel the anxiety in my body, I could feel myself all tense, but I owned it, and knew that I had to get rid of it. I knew that I had to stop swinging from feeling like a wound-up ball of anxiety to feeling absolutely nothing. I wanted to tell Sue that what she was saying was exactly what I’d experienced and it was like she was talking about me.