What I Love Now | Designer, Beauty, Fashion & Soft Luxury After Healing
Some people collect memories. I collect handbags, perfumes, makeup and the stories attached to them. And despite everything life has thrown at me — addiction, healing, reinvention and growing up — some things have never changed. I still love beauty. I still love fashion. I still get excited by a perfect lipstick, a beautiful perfume […]
Lipstick Armour: The Beauty That Hid My Alcoholism
Lady Danger & Learning To Feel Powerful People often assume beauty is vanity. For me, beauty became armour. Long before recovery, beauty was one of the few things that made me feel powerful when I felt powerless inside. I remember falling in love with a lipstick shade called Lady Danger by MAC. Bold. Dramatic. Powerful. […]
How One Night Changed My Entire Life: Recovery, Family & Choosing Sobriety
I never imagined one night could change the direction of my entire life. But sometimes life forces you to stop. And sometimes it does not do it gently. There was a night in my life that I will never fully speak about publicly. Not because I am hiding. Not because I am ashamed. But because […]
How Makeup Helped My Confidence, Recovery & Self-Esteem
Makeup and confidence became connected for me long before I understood recovery, self-esteem or healing. Beauty was never simply about appearance. It became comfort. Ritual. Confidence. And sometimes, if I am completely honest, armour. From Harper’s Bazaar magazines and teenage makeup disasters to hospital detox and rebuilding my self-esteem, makeup quietly followed me through every […]
Four Years Without My Mother
My mother packed my entire life into bin bags and left them in the shed. I still think about that moment sometimes. Over fifty bin bags filled with my belongings, sitting in the shed outside the house I grew up in. There was nothing left of me inside. No traces. No bedroom. No feeling that […]
Losing Friends while losing myself to Alcoholism
Not only did I lose family — the only family in my life — I also lost two best friends. Both things are difficult for me to talk about. Because friendships carry memories. History. And versions of ourselves we no longer fully recognise. Losing friends during addiction is something people rarely talk about openly. We […]
The Fur Babies Who Witnessed My Relapse and Comforted Me Through Alcoholism
Especially cats. In many ways, they felt safer to me than humans did. They gave me affection in ways humans sometimes could not. Comfort without questions. Love without conditions. They simply stayed. And even as a child, I felt understood by them in a way I struggled to feel understood by people. Cats became my […]
How Grief, Trauma & Loss Fed My Addiction
I do not think my alcoholism began with alcohol. I think it began with grief. With loss. With trauma I did not know how to process properly. I lost two dads in my life. And when I lost my biological dad at 18, something inside me changed permanently. Especially because I was never properly told […]
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 […]
How Muay Thai and Yoga helped my mind
I actually started Muay Thai in rehab. Yoga I had done before on and off throughout my life, but Muay Thai was completely new to me. One thing people do not realise about addiction recovery is that your body is often physically exhausted by the time you finally stop drinking. In rehab, we were not […]
