'I was 30 and a high-functioning cocaine addict'
This time last year, if I posted anything on social media it would likely have been about my life as an interior designer, painting a picture that I was a thriving businesswoman – a happy and healthy one, with great clients and an impressive portfolio. My followers and those who hired me to renovate their high end homes likely had no idea that behind the scenes, I was using cocaine four or five times a week.
It took me almost a decade of using before coke brought me to my knees at the age of 30, but what started out as a bit of fun (I’ll never deny that I had good, funny times while taking drugs), ended up morphing into something beyond my control. It stripped me of my entire personality, my life was a mess. I know I’m not the only one who’s been lost like that either; since sharing my story on social media, it appears thousands of others are too. And I want to help them love their life the way that I do now.
I was 20 when I moved from Oxfordshire to London. I got a job at an estate agents and that’s when I was first introduced to coke. I remember so clearly how it quietened the noise in my head – something that rarely happens due to my ADHD. I liked the way cocaine made me feel, and I ended up going out two Thursdays on the trot with the receptionist, drinking and taking coke. By the third Thursday, I'd been fired and that wasn’t the last job I’d lose.
In hindsight, maybe the signs that I didn’t have an off switch were there from the start, but in the earlier years of my drug-taking I just thought I was a normal party girl, living a carefree life in the city. Cocaine wasn’t a taboo, it was normalised – while it’s legally a class A banned substance, in reality it often falls within the same bracket as alcohol in social situations. In some cities you can get it delivered quicker than a takeaway. Throughout the various jobs I had before starting my own business, I had times when I would go back to manager's houses and snort cocaine after post-work drinks. If the people above you are doing coke with no consequences then you feel like it's fine. Normal.
What I didn’t realise is that when you drink and consistently take cocaine, your body produces another compound called cocaethylene. When you create a habitual affair between coke and alcohol, your brain sends off receptors to want coke every single time you drink. For many in my generation, I think we’ve ruined the ability to just enjoy a drink because of that – after a few months of taking drugs recreationally, I found I couldn't go for a mid-week dinner with a girlfriend and have a glass of wine with my food without thinking about cocaine. Then buying some.
What started off as fun and doing it with other people then slid into me scheduling my weekends around drug taking, always choosing the sesh over a more wholesome option. The next stage was taking cocaine alone when everyone else at the afters had gone to bed. I started using it at inappropriate events, say a friends wedding, losing more jobs and by the end things started to fall apart at the seams with a car accident, the break down of a relationship and a very lonely last four day bender which I was lucky to survive.
Because of the relationship, I’d already isolated myself from a lot of friends and I didn’t know how to cope with being alone and sober. Due to my drug habit, I’d also run my business into the ground. I completely hit rock bottom in March. Finally, I wanted to quit for good. I left the home I shared with my ex and moved back in with my family, committing to a fellowship program where I attended 87 meetings in 90 days. It was hard being honest with my parents about what was happening in my life and it took about a month for me to tell them the full story, initially saying I was an alcoholic which felt more palatable.
When you’re first going sober, it has to be your sole focus. You can’t dip in and out of it, or leave space to have your old ways tugging at you. Meetings are all I did for three months — I went to a meeting, then went home, went to another meeting, then back home. Through that, I learnt that it’s about so much more than just stopping drugs and alcohol. It's about learning why you took those things to excess in the first place, how did you get there? Who are you?
Today, I am seven months sober from drugs and alcohol – and when I’m posting on social media, you can find me speaking with honesty, heart and of course a little bit of humour about how I’m finding my recovery.
The fellowship has been a great help for me but the literature is from the 1940s; we need a more modern approach alongside it to help people in addiction - and social media is a great tool, but only if we use it for the greater good. When my first video, talking about how I was managing my ADHD medication while being in recovery, quickly amassed over 100,000 views, I realised there was clearly a need for this type of content.
I started getting hundreds of DMs a day and my follower count leapt up by thousands a week and now sits at 52,000. I began doing Q&As, making videos directly replying to comments and the questions I’d been asked. Sometimes I get 2,000 views, others it’s 600,000, but I know that my videos are helping people and that's really all it's about. They offer a place for those struggling with cocaine, or any drug (alcohol included), to not feel as ashamed or lonely.
A month after my account started going viral, I began my podcast Class A People too, which hasn’t left the top 10 in the Top Education charts on Spotify since it’s first episode in July. I’d seen loads of sobriety podcasts, but they were all featuring well known people and I wanted Class A People to be a platform for real people who wanted to share their stories to help others like me and them. A lot of people struggle to come to terms with the fact they’re an addict. In their eyes, they haven’t lived through a big traumatic event. But I've learnt that all trauma is valid and that finding an escape or pleasure through an external substance is not a long-term solution.
It's so easy for people to just go for a drink when they are struggling. We seem to have forgotten how to get real, natural dopamine hits from other things in life. Nature, cooking, sound baths, walks with friends. I hope to be able to show people who are struggling that those are the things that will make a difference. Because those are the things that help you discover who you are, truly.
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