When I was eighteen, I did a detox.

It was brutal.

They had to increase the Valium because I wasn’t coping on the regular dose. My body wasn’t coping. My mind wasn’t coping. And even while I was in detox, I drank. That probably tells you everything you need to know about where alcohol already had me at eighteen years old.

I lost my licence around that time too. Alcohol was already taking things from me, although I don’t think I understood then just how much it would eventually take.

Then, when I was nineteen, I got a phone call.

There was a bed for me in the County. A place for people with alcohol and drug dependence. Someone had fought to find me that bed and it was available the next day.

And I said no.

I said I would be fine.

This woman had told me that if I got clean and dry, she would help me get through my nursing training. We had actually shaken hands on it. She believed there was something on the other side of alcohol for me. She was offering me a hand towards it.

And at nineteen years old, I shoved it back in her face.

I thought I would be fine.

That sentence hurts now.

Because here I am, twenty-seven years later, facing detox number two at Plummer Court, and I am scared.

I got the email. Monday.

Such a normal word for something that feels absolutely enormous.

Monday.

The day I have wanted for so long and, now that it is actually here, part of me wants to run in the opposite direction. Because detox means stopping. And stopping means confronting the terrifying possibility that this really has to be it.

No more alcohol.

Those words frighten me more than I want to admit.

And right now my alcoholic brain is responding in exactly the way you might expect. If Monday is the end, drink everything before Monday. Have one final fucking blowout. Get drunk while I still can.

There’s something desperately sad about that when I see it written down.

I keep thinking about nineteen-year-old me and that bed I refused. I should have listened. I should have gone. I should have taken that woman’s hand and allowed her to help me. Maybe my life would have been different.

But I didn’t.

And I cannot go backwards and make nineteen-year-old me say yes.

I can only decide what forty-six-year-old me does when somebody offers her a place on Monday.

This feels like my last chance. Not necessarily because somebody has told me it is, but because that is how it feels inside me. My chance to find out who I am without constantly needing alcohol beside me.

Because alcoholism doesn’t always look like a group of people sitting around drinking together. I don’t need to be surrounded by alcoholics. I don’t need a pub full of people. I don’t need company, music or an occasion.

I’m perfectly capable of sitting alone and drinking.

I’m about to sit alone and get drunk.

I don’t need anybody else there to make those moments real.

Alcohol and me can create them entirely by ourselves.

And perhaps that’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever had to admit.

Monday scares the absolute shit out of me.

But this time, when somebody tells me there is a place for me, I am going.