Sarah Day, 46, started drinking wine at the age of 15
A mum has revealed her “glamorous” job led to a harrowing battle with alcoholism. Her liquid lunches spiralled into an eight-bottle-a-day wine addiction, starting when she first woke up in the morning.
Sarah Day, 46, began drinking wine at just 15, enjoying three nights out weekly with pals. However, her career shift at 21, from personal trainer to PA, brought with it a culture of “lots of social drinking”.
Attending “liquid lunches” quickly turned into a dependency, eventually leading to her opening a bottle of wine at 5am just to kick off her day. After spending £30,000 on rehab and enduring countless hospital detoxes, Sarah was signposted towards Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in 2013, when she was 35.
She said she battled to keep up with the sessions for years. But it wasn’t until a “particularly bad” detox in 2019 that she fully committed to sobriety.
Now she is celebrating six years free from alcohol after an incident at a children’s birthday party led her to seek help. And Sarah, a mum from Croydon, is determined to prove to other women struggling with addiction that recovery is possible.
She said: “My jobs involved lots of socialising and liquid lunches. It turned into drinking at 5am to get up in the morning and stop the shakes.
“Because of my lifestyle, taking millionaires out for lunch, I could say: ‘Yeah, this is just what I do.’
“But I struggled to hold down relationships, I lost all my hobbies and interest in anything that wasn’t alcohol.” Despite her high-flying lifestyle facilitating her addiction, Sarah is convinced that alcoholism was always lurking in her genes.
Tragically, Sarah lost her father, Bill, to throat cancer in May 2011 when he was just 60 years old. After splitting from Sarah’s mum when she was 10 years old, he fell into a pattern of heavy drinking.
Sarah feels there wasn’t a singular cause for her alcohol addiction. Instead, she believes it was an inevitable path.
She said: “Alcoholism is just in a person’s make-up, sometimes,” and went on to describe her upbringing. “I felt very loved as a child – although I was quite quiet, and never really comfortable in my own skin. In my teens, I started to become very disinterested in everything apart from drinking and boys.”
She recounted her early experiences with alcohol, saying: “I started drinking when I was around 15 or 16 – and it was like: ‘Wow, I’ve got this confidence now, to be the person I’ve always wanted to be.’ It instantly had a hold on me.”
Despite the impact on her studies, Sarah managed to complete her education with nine GCSEs and two A-Levels, later becoming a personal trainer at 21. However, her battle with drink began to encroach on her career, with her admitting that she often “went out partying” with clients.
Her career path then took her into the role of a PA for high-flying CEOs, immersing her in a world of opulence. Sarah said: “I was a PA for CEOs, managing directors – all sorts.
“It would allow me to go under the radar, because they’d have one lunch each, and one opportunity to drink a lot. Whereas I’d attend multiple liquid lunches a day, thinking it was fine – it wasn’t.”
Sarah’s drinking problem escalated – her boozy lunches turned into nightly outings, seven days a week. Eventually, she began drinking first thing in the morning – and by 30, she was consuming 80 units a day, just to alleviate “the tremors”.
Following a binge, she’d detox in hospital – and claims she also spent £30k on rehab stays, but nothing seemed to have a lasting impact. In 2019, at a child’s birthday party thrown for a friend of her daughter’s, Sarah was spotted drinking and blacking out in the bathroom.
A parent phoned for an ambulance and Sarah was taken back to hospital to detox. “I wanted to get sober as quickly as possible – but only so I could get discharged and head to the off-licence,” she said.
“But the next day, I couldn’t walk properly and I was still shaking. My doctor told me: ‘If you can prove to me that you can walk to the bathroom, we’ll let you go.’ With determination, I did it – but when I looked in the mirror, I felt like I was seeing myself properly for the first time in 20 years.
“I was dangerously underweight, my skin was pale, and my eyes were glassy – just like my dad’s. I heard a voice in my head say: ‘This relationship is over’ – and I walked back to bed.”
From that life-changing moment, Sarah dedicated herself to a sober lifestyle and has been a regular at AA meetings since. She’s mastered the art of handling tough emotions such as anger, sorrow, and confrontation and is reconnecting with her passions.
“Everything’s starting to fall back into place again – I’m free” she revealed. “I’ve got my identity back – I know what I like to do, which colours I like, which music I like. I have so much to live for.”