From university 4 bottles of wine to 6 bottles of rum and coke a day

At 22 years old, I was physically dependent on alcohol.

I was at university at the time. Everyone around me seemed focused on lectures, essays, library deadlines, and building their futures.

Meanwhile, I was planning my day around Tesco Express.

I would walk there almost mechanically, buying four bottles of wine a day. At the time, it felt normal to me. Looking back now, it almost sounds laughable — not in a funny way, but in the surreal way addiction slowly changes what you accept as normal.

I wasn’t drinking for fun anymore.

I was drinking to feel stable.
To stop shaking.
To calm my mind.
To get through the day without feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

What people often don’t understand about addiction is that it rarely begins with chaos. Sometimes it begins quietly. Functionally. Socially acceptable. Especially in environments where heavy drinking is normalised.

University culture made it easy to hide.

People joke about drinking bottles of wine as students. Nobody notices when the line between “partying” and dependency slowly disappears.

But addiction progresses.

By the age of 32, my drinking had escalated to six bottles of rum and coke a day.

Writing that sentence still shocks me.

Not because I’m ashamed of it anymore, but because I now understand how unwell I truly was.

Alcohol became both the cure and the poison.
The thing destroying me, and the thing I believed I needed to survive.