Lou Teasdale has spent twenty years inside some of the loudest rooms in the world, from international tours to celebrity parties in Ibiza - and to the kind of nights that become headlines. For fifteen years, she has lived it all alcohol-free.

 

This is a book about finding out who you are without alcohol, not addiction recovery.

 

Use it as part rule book, part memoir and part journal: an honest, funny, and sometimes uncomfortable look at what happens when you stop using alcohol to borrow confidence, soften your feelings or decide who you’re allowed to be.

 

Blending extraordinary personal stories with practical DBT skills, exercises and plenty of space to write, Lou explores friendship, dating, sex, parenting, identity, anxiety, come-downs, and the strange pressure to drink when you never really wanted to.

 

Lou is an author, creative director, and beauty-industry founder who also works in suicide prevention with the charity Body & Soul.

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Author’s note

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This is part rule book, part memoir and part journal. It is not a recovery manual and it is not an argument that everybody has to stop drinking. I am not in recovery. I stopped because I chose to, and over the years I realised how much more of myself I could hear with a clear head.

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Everything in these pages comes through my own life: what happened, what I learned, what I got wrong, and the skills that helped me build something steadier. My experience will not be everybody’s experience, and the exercises are invitations, not instructions you have to complete perfectly.

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Some of the stories involve trauma, loss, sexual violence and difficult mental health. Read at your own pace. Skip a page. Come back later. Talk to somebody. There is no prize for pushing through something before you feel safe enough to meet it.

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What I hope this book gives you is permission: to question the rules you inherited, to get curious about what alcohol is really doing for you, and to find out who you are without having to numb, perform or apologise.