The disease that took my closest friends

One of the hardest things about addiction is that eventually you stop only fearing for yourself.

You start watching the disease take other people too.

And somewhere along the way, I realised that the people becoming closest to me in my life were other alcoholics and addicts.

Because they understood things nobody else seemed to understand.

The fear.
The withdrawals.
The shame.
The chaos.
The desperation to survive.

There’s something strange about recovery friendships.

People see parts of you that the outside world never sees.

And somehow, in the middle of all that darkness, deep friendships form incredibly quickly.

When I first moved to London, I became incredibly close to a woman in recovery.

She became one of my best friends.

One Christmas, me, her and another person in recovery spent Christmas together completely sober.

And honestly, it was one of the happiest Christmases I can remember.

There was something beautiful about all of us trying so hard to rebuild our lives together.

We laughed constantly.
Watched films.
Ate too much food.
Spoke about recovery and the future and all the things we still hoped life could become.

And four months later, she died in a fire.

She had relapsed and gone into blackout mode.

She did not even realise there was a fire happening around her.

I still struggle to process that sometimes.

Another one of my closest friends died from alcohol poisoning alone in a hotel room in Vietnam.

He was somebody I spent hours and hours speaking to on the phone. He was highly intelligent and knowledgeable.

Some nights we would speak for hours about addiction, fear, recovery, relapse, life, all of it. We did recovery zoom together for half a year during Covid.

And then one day he was simply gone.

Another one of the people I met in rehab was a girl from New York.

We became very close very quickly.

And somehow, in the middle of all that darkness, we laughed constantly.

We had so much fun together.

For a while after rehab, we stayed in contact and spoke often.

At the end of my drinking, there was a period where I was staying at my mum’s partner’s house and I became extremely physically unwell.

The rules of the house were no ambulances.

So instead of going properly into hospital, I was effectively trying to detox using alcohol itself because the withdrawals had become so severe.

But my body was reaching a point where it could barely cope anymore.

I could not even keep alcohol down without throwing it back up again.

I lost 10 kilograms in two weeks.

I looked frighteningly ill.

And I remember speaking to my friend from New York during that time.

She told me she thought I needed to go to hospital because she was frightened I might have cirrhosis of the liver.

I think in some ways she helped save my life.

Because eventually I became so physically unwell that I walked into A&E myself.

I did not even arrive by ambulance.

I simply walked in.

And as soon as they saw me, they immediately put me into a hospital bed.

That moment frightened me deeply because I realised how physically serious alcoholism had actually become.

Not emotionally serious.

Not mentally serious.

Physically serious.

The body eventually starts breaking down.

And the terrifying thing about addiction is that sometimes the people who truly understand how ill you are… are other alcoholics.

People who have lived it themselves.

People who recognise the symptoms because they have experienced them too.

I remember my friend from New York telling me about being in detox and having to constantly spray herself with water because of the physical state she was in.

That’s how severe alcoholism can become.

People do not understand the level of suffering withdrawals can cause until they experience them themselves.

She later died from this disease in her early thirties.

Even writing that still feels surreal to me.

Because people hear the word alcoholism and still sometimes imagine partying, bad decisions or chaos.

They do not imagine young people in hospital beds.

Bodies shutting down.

People desperately trying to stop withdrawals.

People dying far too young.

Nothing glamorous about hearing somebody you love relapsed and never came back.

Nothing glamorous about attending funerals for people who once sat beside you in recovery meetings talking about wanting to stay alive.

That’s when addiction stops feeling abstract.

Because suddenly the people disappearing are people you know.

People you laughed with.

People you cared about.

People who were trying.

And I think that’s one of the hardest parts of recovery sometimes — carrying the memory of people who helped keep you alive while not surviving themselves.