If you’re not into backstories, then feel free to skip this post.
But I think it’s important to tell you who I am and where I started, so you can understand how I made my way to this point—and why this journey looks different for everyone.
Who I’m Not (And Why You Should Care)
Let’s start with who I’m not:
- I’m not an alcoholic.
- I’m not in recovery.
- I’m not anti-alcohol.
- I’m not here as a trained coach, psychologist or therapist.
So why the hell would you be interested in anything I have to say?
My story’s not so unique as to deserve its own Netflix special, and I used to apologise for that.
A lot. Too much.
When I was interviewed anywhere, I would say, “Oh, it’s not that interesting, really, I just really like alcohol-free drinks.”
Lame!
I’ve thankfully come to realise, after speaking to so many people just like me, that my story is just as valid, just as real and just as impactful as anyone else and, most importantly, that I don’t need to have a ‘sad story’ to want to change the way I drink and to help others to do the same (although it seems every story does have a little sadness in it).
How It All Started
Like many Brits, my drinking started at an early age.
I remember the first time I ever got drunk.
It was at a house party at the cool girl’s house. I was about 14 and desperate to fit in.
I don’t remember much of the evening, but I have a very vivid memory of sitting on the carpet at the end of her bed and vomiting all over said flooring in front of everyone.
It was not a good look.
But one thing I have learned about myself over the 30-odd years since that night is that I am stubborn (I prefer tenacious, but others around me would say otherwise), and I was not going to let a little thing like abject social humiliation deter me from this new elixir of social lubrication.
And so began three decades of dedication to the art of partying. I could well have been the poster girl for ‘sex, drugs & house music’.
I may well share a few escapades in upcoming posts, although, truth be told, my memory of my 20s & 30s is somewhat hazy.
On the one hand, I’m glad that social media wasn’t as prevalent then as it is now, as there’s very little evidence of the debauchery I participated in.
Having said that, it’d be nice to have the odd reminder of the many, many lost nights of my life.
The Transition
My drinking started in earnest when I went to college.
A two-year failure in education, where I was completely capable of doing the work involved (and actually quite good when I tried), but I was far more interested in the social life, the partying, and the boys!
I knew after a few weeks that it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to go to university, so I played to my strengths and went to work instead.
24 Years in Hospitality
I’ve always liked working. Earning my own money and joining the ‘adult’ world was always important to me, and so I got my first ever pub job in The Prince of Wales in London’s Covent Garden.
I knew from my first shift that this was an environment made for me. The work, the banter, and the booze all called to me. It was a world of social possibility I’d never known, and I loved every minute of it!
Apart from a few stints at various sales jobs, I worked consistently in hospitality for the next 24 years.
From glass collecting to waitressing, cocktail bartender to general manager—if it was front-of-house, I did it all.
I finally ended my career working as the head of events before I was made redundant during the pandemic at 5.11pm one January evening by text message telling me ‘HR will be in touch’… while I was on maternity leave with kid no.2.
The Good Times
It’s hard not to romanticise some of the experiences I had working in hospitality.
It was two and a half decades of my life, and I had every experience and emotion known to human existence, and every one of them was accompanied by booze.
I even met my husband and my best friend (who was Man of Honour at my wedding) while working and drinking together, and that alone is reason to say that I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I’ve worked in nightclubs, racecourses, and event stadiums. I’ve hosted and danced with celebrities before they became megastars. I’ve had late-night cocktails with others after they had fallen from fame.
I even had the pleasure of welcoming the late Queen while working at the National Maritime Museum.
I have laughed a lot, danced to exhaustion, and even travelled a little with my work.
Sometimes, when I look back, it feels like I’m watching a montage of all the best moments in a movie of someone else’s life, and I am filled with gratitude.
And The Not-So-Good Times
But as with all stories, there’s another side to it, and that one is much darker. Because for every wild night, there was an equally wild morning where, in the cold light of day, things seemed far less glamorous.
I couldn’t possibly begin to count the vast number of horrendous hangovers I’ve had.
I’d love to say these were just bad mornings, but I so frequently put my body through such dire distress with ridiculous cocktails of drinks and drugs that I am, to this day, still shocked that I’ve never had to have my stomach pumped.
I would be violently ill for hours on end. My personal record was 28 hours of not being able to keep even water down as my body fought to survive what I had put it through.
I have woken up in strange places, with strange people, with absolutely no recollection of who they were, where I was, how I got there or what I’d done.
I have walked through exceptionally dangerous parts of town at exceptionally foolish times in the night, drunk and lost and alone.
I have entered into relationships with people I should have left alone, and have been stalked by people who should have left me alone, and I’ve been fired from a job which I probably should never have had.
I even broke my ankle once trying to help my male friend pee (and I have six screws and a titanium plate for life in case I ever try to forget).
I have been in bar fights and street brawls, and I am very lucky, again, to never have been arrested for the many, many stupid risks I have taken, from breaking into hotels to taking drugs in public.
And I have been sad.
Not a little down, not over-tired, but truly, truly sad at times.
In fact, in all my life, I have never been as sad as when I used alcohol to make me feel better.
For all the partying and socialising, I often felt lonely, isolated and misunderstood.
There are few things more isolating than finding yourself alone and afraid at four in the morning when the booze and the drugs wear off, and you suddenly realise your “friends” have all left and you don’t know where you are.
I’ve been in some very dark places, with some very dark thoughts and any one of those moments could (and probably should) have been a sign to make a change…but it wasn’t, and I didn’t. Not for many more years to come.
There were other times, too. I remember running one venue in central London.
The job had started off well, but as time went on, the rigours of hospitality were hitting me hard, and I was struggling. I was working seven days a week, without an assistant, for 10 to 14 hours a day.
I was feeling underappreciated, overwhelmed, and, needless to say, very burned out. There was a second bar in the basement, which only opened in the evening, so it doubled as my office during the day.
My office was a bar full of booze, and I was the boss. I remember pouring glasses of vodka at the start of my shift to steel myself against the raging of my inadequacies at a job I had always prided myself on being damn good at. Just another shitty day at the office.
So, how did I go from where I was then to where I am now? And where exactly am I now?
The Turning Point
My transformational journey started over five years ago.
I didn’t know it at the time, but pitiful as that redundancy text was (I’m not bitter, honest!), it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Towards the end of my hospitality career, I had moved from general manager to events and built an entire department where there was none.
I made good money for the company, trained my own team and developed a great working relationship with my boss (a lot of what I learned from him I’ve taken with me into building my own business, and for that, I will be forever grateful).
But truth be told, I had lost my enthusiasm for it, and the thought of going back to work held no interest for me whatsoever.
I was newly unemployed with a two-year-old and a newborn, and I was entirely lost.
I never saw myself as the stay-at-home-mum type, but we’d recently moved to a new area full of leafy green parks, rivers, and quaint village cafes, and so I decided to go all in on the middle-England-housewife-life for a while.
Surprisingly, I loved it.
I had my kids late in life and was 38 when I had my son, and 40 with my daughter (how would I ever find time to birth and raise children with all the partying I was doing), and it was nice to finally slow down after a lifetime of mayhem.
I tried my hand at a few stay-at-home jobs, but nothing stuck. After a while, I rekindled a passion for fitness and started studying Sports, Fitness & Coaching with the OU.
My body got stronger, and I started paying closer attention to what I was putting into it.
After watching ‘Game Changers’ (the Netflix documentary about vegan athletes), hubby and I went vegan for six months; it didn’t last, but we felt fantastic while we were at it… except for when we drank.
With everything else cleaned up, it became glaringly obvious when alcohol hit my system, and that turned out to be the catalyst for the a-ha moment I never knew I needed.
Having drunk alcohol for nearly every day of my adult life (apart from my two pregnancies), I’d never really taken the time to think about how booze was affecting me other than “Yay, let’s get pissed,” or “Boo, I hate hangovers.”
But now, I’d drink one or two drinks in an evening, and the next day, I could literally feel the alcohol coursing through my body as I ached to process it all and return to my new normal.
But it wasn’t just that hungover feeling (albeit, they were nowhere near the drink & drug-addled poisonings of yesteryear); what really sparked the need for change in me was the realisation that I would still be feeling emotionally and mentally drained on a Wednesday from drinks I had the previous Saturday night.
I was snappy with my husband, impatient with my kids, and lethargic with anything else.
I would avoid contact with other people, and I’d bail on any commitments I’d made to myself just as easily.
I ate terribly, slept poorly, and got no fresh air other than when taking the kids to and from school.
I was at 50-60% capacity for days after drinking, and it just wasn’t worth it anymore.
What was most shocking, however, was the realisation that I’d been doing this to myself for decades.
I’d been drinking day in and day out for years, never really giving my body time to recover and repair and wondering why I felt sad, lonely, lethargic, forgetful, unmotivated and at times hopeless.
It finally occurred to me that if I wanted my life to change, I needed to change the way that I drank.
The Moment Everything Changed
I remember the day I decided to commit to a change. We’d had a few at-home drinks a couple of days before (with two small kids, most of our socialising was done “at home” now), and I woke up still feeling subpar.
That morning, after dropping my daughter at nursery while walking my son to school, he was rabbiting on incessantly about something completely inane, as 4-year-olds are known to do, but for some reason, I just couldn’t hack it that day.
As my little man kept crowding me and talking at me, I snapped, “Get away from me!”
His face!
It’s a look I will never forget. I immediately fixed it with a mummy kiss and a cuddle, and he continued with his stream of consciousness, unaffected (I hope).
I, on the other hand, had been changed forever.
It was at that moment that I made a promise to myself and to my family.
A promise that I have kept every day since.
That promise wasn’t to give up booze forever and live a sober life.
It was a simple promise to never, ever (ever) have a hangover again.
I never again wanted to feel physically or emotionally sick to my stomach because I chose to drink, and the subsequent impact that had on the people I love most.
I never again wanted to be operating at 60% of my potential for the sake of a few forgotten hours.
And I never again wanted to see the look on my little man’s face because I didn’t have the capacity to be an attentive mother for the duration of a 10-minute walk.
That was five years ago at the time of writing, and it’s what began a journey into the world of low, no and light drinks and eventually led to building all of this.
Who I Am And Why I’m Here
So who am I, and why the hell would you be interested in anything I have to say?
- I am Denise Hamilton-Mace, and I am the founder of Low No Drinker.
- I am the host of the Mindful Drinking & Moderation in Midlife Podcast and the writer of this platform.
- I am an 80s & 90s action movie fangirl (there are a lot of movie references in my writing, deal with it).
- I am a mother and a wife.
- I am an ex-hospitality worker with 24 years of experience in the drinks industry.
- I love crisps & sushi.
- My favourite word is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia – Google it, you’ll see why.
- I am a former daily drinker and regular party girl who recognised it was time to make a change.
- And I am here to help you do the same.
If any of that resonates with you, then I’m glad you’ve found me, and I feel grateful that you’ll allow me to be your guide on your journey to taking back the power of choice from alcohol.
At no point will I tell you that you have a drinking problem, that you must go teetotal or that your choices to still imbibe full-strength booze are wrong. I have my own kids; I am not interested in being your mother, too.
Instead, I want to share what I’ve learned through my own experiences about changing a lifetime’s worth of habits to help you make the choices that serve you best.
I want to help remove the confusion around low, no and light alcohol drinks so that you can come to appreciate them for what they are: tools to help you achieve the life you want.
And I want to do all of that to help you build a life less intoxicated on your own terms.
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