Derry women charts her journey to sobriety

“My story starts on September 21, 2022 - the day I decided I had to get sober.”

Laura Curran’s searing honesty is borne of fearless introspection and a ‘fantastic support network’.

Immediately warm and engaging, Laura (32), who has a four-year-old daughter called Hannah, vividly recalled the day that changed her life.

Smiling, she said: “Hannah is my life, my love and my lesson in life. I asked God for patience and he gave me Hannah.

“There was nothing spectacular about that day, the day I knew I needed help. It was a week after my birthday and I woke up hungover, again, fuzzy, again, not sure of what had happened the night before, again.

“I opened my eyes and Hannah was still sleeping in the bed beside me and I thought, ‘What’s happening?’ The voice didn’t belong to me. It was like the last wee, tiny bit of dignity and hope that was left outside me and it said, ‘We need to try. We need to ask for help. We need to speak to somebody.

“I remember what I was wearing and I remember looking at Hannah. The main thought I had, which was obviously painful but it moved me enough, was, ‘I don’t want her to get sick in the middle of the night and I can’t help because I am out of my socks. I don’t want her to grow up and feel she can’t come to me’.

“There were incidents that had happened where I hadn’t been equipped to deal with situations and yet that didn’t stop me. There was nothing phenomenal about the morning I stopped,” said Laura.

Laura described her body at that moment as ‘becoming the vessel to get me somewhere else’

She explained: “I just kept thinking, ‘I need my sister. I need my sister,’ said Laura.

Laura remembered getting Hannah up and getting into her car.

“My sister, Claire, lives at the top of my street and I went to her house,” she said. “I knew I was going to tell her what was happening but I didn’t know how I was going to tell her because I didn’t really know the words to put together to say where I was in life,” she said.

“I got to her house and her car was pulling out as I was pulling in. She leant out the window and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ straight away.

“I said, ‘I need help’ and she went, ‘Finally.’”

Laura said, up until this point Claire had been wise enough to realise if she had pushed Laura, she would have lost her, rather than help her.

“Claire was very smart and astute the way she went about it,” said Laura.

“From then the ball was rolling. However, my first thought when I had said it out loud was, ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything. I am going to have to fix this now. My life is going to turn upside down and inside out. But, it was the best thing I ever did.

“Claire and I phoned the GP but it was six weeks or so before they could see me. Given the state I was in at that point in my life, six weeks was way too long.

“I didn’t know where I was going to be in six weeks. I didn’t know if I was going to survive six weeks. So, Claire said, ‘Right, we’ll phone the Northlands’ and nine days after that call, I had my first appointment with Northlands.

“I was nine days sober. I stayed sober the whole time. It was horrendous. It was lonely. Some of those nights I was completely alone. I didn’t even have Hannah because she was with her Daddy,” said Laura sadly.

Laura revealed in that initial meeting, the crucial thing she experienced was “somebody nodding their head and saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve been there. Me too’.

She added powerfully: “The first time somebody says ‘Me too’ to you, it’s like cutting the shackles off yourself.

“I instantly thought, ‘I’m not alone’. It was the first time in years I felt not alone.”

Laura said the major part of her drinking started with postnatal depression, although she had been drinking from an early age.

“I had a massive struggle with postnatal depression. I had Hannah in September 2019 and I went into lockdown as a single mother in March 2020,” she said.

“My relationship with Hannah’s father had broken down and there was a lot of drink involved there. I moved in with my mum and I continued to drink.

“I got away with it because I emphasised the ‘poor me’ aspect of my life. I would say to people, ‘You don’t know what I am going through. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t question why I am doing the things I am doing’. In a sense it was manipulation. I’d say, ‘If you really loved me or if you understood me, you’d let me drink. This proves you don’t understand me’.

“I was drinking gin and wine. At the very end, it was anything up to three bottles of wine a night. It was always to get me to go to sleep. It was always to get me to black out. It was going to sleep properly, it was blacking out,” she said forthrightly. “I couldn’t have done it without the support network of Claire, Hannah’s father and my mother. I don’t think I would have told anyone I was struggling as much as I was.”

Laura had an epiphany following her first AA meeting.

“The night that I went, I have never felt I was in the right place at the right time so much. The people, the stories, everything resonated with me and it was that moment when I thought, ‘This is it. This is addiction.’

“The reason I am so open about my situation is because, when I got sober, I struggled to find another woman who was talking about it.

“I needed to see what it looked like. I needed to see proof there was a woman out there who had gone through what I had gone through and come out the other end.

“When I couldn’t find her, I started thinking about the girl coming behind me, looking for the same thing and I thought, ‘ If it’s not there, maybe I have to be some form of a blueprint. I won’t get everything right but I will be honest and that is all that anyone can ask and all I can ask of myself,” said Laura, who has charted her journey to sobriety on social media.

She described the experience as bittersweet because although people are ‘liking’ her posts, they are also ‘going through a terrible experience’.

“I have had so many messages from so many women saying, ’I was struggling with my alcohol usage and I came across your video’. It would break your heart and lift your heart at the same time,” said Laura.

Laura is unflinchingly clear her sobriety was the “first thing in her adult life where I actually did something solely for me”.

She added: “For everyone else who benefits from it, it is a bonus of the work I have done within myself.”

“I took for so long in my life. I took and I took. I manipulated and I got my way around drinking. I took. I took because it suited my pain.

Laura after her haircut for the Little Princess Trust.

“With getting sober, you see that very clearly. You can see those patterns and the things you have done and I thought time to even those scales, if not tip the scales the other way. I want to give as much as I can give.

“Donating is a major part of that. I had seen the Little Princess Trust putting Hannah to bed and I thought, ‘Not every wee girl is well enough or healthy enough to be in her own bed’. So, after Easter I donated 12 inches of hair and raised £500 for the charity,” said a delighted Laura.

“Every single aspect of your life will improve with sobriety,” said Laura, “but it is not overnight. It is not a quick fix.”

“I had to step back and say, ‘I’m Laura. I’m struggling with addiction. Alcohol is my major poison here. What are we going to do about it?

“I had to start telling people who I was to meet people like me and that is where the scariness comes in but pebble by pebble and she did it.

“I am still building my foundation but in the long run, I would love to be helping women who have been through any struggles I have been through, postnatal depression, addiction, relationship breakdown but I need to be well and healthy and safe within myself. I want to be there for women and girls. I want them to grow up with their own power.”