Life Uncut - It's time to rethink our relationship with the drink! - Uncut with Helena Sauzier and Danni Carr

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Hey Lifers!Today we are having a big chat about our relationship with alcohol, and we might have a problem with alcohol despite not being an alcoholic!Firstly, Laura and Producer Keeshia unpack a bit to do with hens & bucks parties and whether there are different rules for your relationship on the 'last night of freedom.' Then we unpack what the optimum time for foreplay is! Start your timers Lifers! We need some stats.Then we are jumping into a big chat on alcohol!Helena Sauzier, who you might know from Bach joins us to talk about why she went sober. Helena wasn't an 'alcoholic.' She wasn't a 'problem drinker' but she had a problem with herself when she drank. Next up we are joined by Danni Carr.Danni is a musician and her life was pretty engulfed by drinking culture.4 years ago, she decided to go sober. She realised that she had been using alcohol to feel more confident in social situations when it actually led to her being embarrassed and mortified about her own behaviour. We talk about:-Why do we have a problem with it when our friends say they're not drinking? Why do we call them boring?-How drinking can affect our relationships in such a negative way-How our lives can improve by moderating or eliminating alcohol from our social interactions-'Mummy wine culture'-How you don't have to be an alcoholic for alcohol to be a problem in your lifeTell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friends and share the love because we love love! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Life Uncut podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. This episode is recorded on Gadigal land of the Aurora Nation. Hi, guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. This is staying in. This is staying in.

Fuck it, let's just keep going. It's Life Uncut. I have literally just gotten off a plane. Not only have I just gotten off a plane, got off a plane, I got my child off a plane and she was not wearing any clothes by the time we landed because she'd spilt an entire bottle of juice down the front of herself. So we were walking through the airport, just me and Lola

and a naked Marley May, or she had underwear on. Well, I was about to say, like, hang on, there's a bigger issue here. He said, with my child. I was like, you have two children, so I don't know where the other is. One of them's on the plane still. No, poor Marley. She was in her underwear and the pair of tiniest shorts walking through Sydney domestic airport.

And everyone was looking at me like I didn't know how to parent. And I was like, oh, no, trust me, I do. and this is where we're at. This is what I'm dealing with. She literally upturned an entire bottle of juice just down the front of herself in the last five minutes of the flight. You know, my favourite thing about Miley May

is she can be very sassy. I really, really like her little sass pot attitude. What about the fact that she's absolutely insane? I can imagine her strutting. You know that thing about how they say, like, you feel more naked when you're naked but with shoes on than you do actually naked?

I feel like she would strut that. She'd be like, yep, I am free. No, she was walking through the terminal, yelling at the top of her lungs i am a juicy nudie rudy i am a juicy nudie rudy and i was like that sounds a lot weirder than what it is trust me she's three and doesn't know what she's talking about but talking about what we're talking about i feel like firstly we should say this is producer keisha hello she's here again and that is because brit is still off so i mean if she's still celebrating her sister's wedding yeah sherry had two weddings so like an extended celebration i

think is it's fair she's still having a great time although brit was here to record the body of the episode so i'm just here for the intro and maybe for suck and sweet i don't know we'll see how we go yeah look we i mean we have no plan does that surprise anyone no and certainly not me do you know what happened this weekend you went to visit your dad i know that i did i did and it was rather i mean it was beautiful we went to magnetic island it was rather uneventful which is exactly what i needed but do you know what else happened this weekend i feel like we're playing a game of charades now Matt's box it was Matt's but you know how I know because I saw the picture of Matt with all of his mates and I zoomed in to see who was hot because I was like they'll be at the

wedding and then you went into their profile to see if they were single and then you were like hey Laura can you please sit me next to Nick that didn't happen but I will sit you next to Nick is this real I'm like who is Nick and is he available this is great Nick is Matt's cousin and he is single and I think I put you on his table but that won't be awkward for you at all now because you probably know about it I very much appreciate the cupid nature I think that when when you're single and you go to a wedding like I'm telling you right now there is no moment that you're going to feel more single than at a wedding so I really appreciate it when people think about like when they think about it and they're like oh those people are both single

like let's seat them next to each other you're playing cupid I love this I feel like this with table seating like seating plans and trying to like figure out also when you've got divorced families because our families are separated so trying to like figure out the logistics of where everyone's gonna sit and then I'm like oh that person's boring so I don't want to put that person next to that person that person's single so I don't want to like surround them with couples we have a singles table kind of like you have a children's table but ours is just like full of single people and we put you all together so that you can like it's like survival of the fittest it's like bachelor in paradise at your wedding which is a perfect theme I love this actually

gonna be a couple of bachelors there from Matt's season so yeah there is it was Matt's bachelor party, his Bucks party. We all saw the Instagram footage, but I don't think any of us saw the B-roll footage of what actually went on. Ooh, is this like spicy? I think he may have had a topless waiter, which I'm fine with. It started off above board as it always does. I saw that they went like whitewater rafting or something. They did like an exercise activity at the start of the day. Then they went on a boat. Then they went back to our house and who knows what happened after that. But the reason why I want to talk about this is because I received quite a few messages from people over Instagram on the weekend and it was something that got me thinking about

box parties and hens parties and why I mean I don't know I feel like there's a lot of conflicting feelings around it but basically the questions and the messages I was getting was how do you feel that Matt's having a box whilst you're out of the city so like I was obviously on Magnetic Island I was very far away from him and also like was I jealous that he was having a box like how was I coping with it I was completely fine like couldn't be more happy for the guy if anything I was like I checked in on whatsapp in the morning and I was like oh when was he last online 5am good nudge like completely completely fine but it made me question why is it that so many people are not fine with their partners going on bucks or why should we feel so insecure or why is it like

that that's something that you should be worried about because my question is surely if you trust your partner. And surely if they are somebody who is trustworthy, you shouldn't have to worry if they're going and going on a box night or they're going to have their own box. Like surely the same rules apply no matter what's happening in your life. I mean, my thought process is if you have dedicated each of yourselves to marry each other, there should be an underlying amount of trust there. But I think that maybe that could be a little bit naive. Like I think we could be living in a bit of a perfect world. I don't think a lot of people trust. Actually, you know what? I read the messages we get through to Instagram and I know for damn certain that not a lot of people

trust their partners at box parties like whether it be their box or whether they're going to a friend's box yeah but also like just because it's a box party doesn't mean that the rules of your relationship don't apply do you know what I mean it's not that I never when they're like it's our last night as a single man I'm like no you haven't been single for five years like it's not it's really not and I guess that that was the big thing that made me question I was like why do so many people think that this is going to be a get out of jail free card for him like why would everyone think that this is a period or a time that makes it okay for someone to play up and I guess the thing is that maybe there are a lot of guys who do play up or maybe there are people who use that

as an opportunity to behave badly towards their partners or behave badly in their relationships and I think that that is a really fucking big conversation to have and a really big thing to unpack because why would anyone feel like they need to have just one night off where they don't tell their partner what happened. Well, I think something that is a little interesting is whether we do think the rules are the same on a box party or a hen's party and normal life. I mean, you just said that you think there may have been a topless waitress there, which play on. We love that. I mean, I will find out. It's not like I'm like, it's not that this is this big ambiguous thing and I'm not going to ask the question. I just like have had both kids for the last couple

of days. There was talks about it and I'm going to, that's going to be the first thing I asked when I get home. But logistically, if there was, then they would have been at my house. That's all. and like tick tick you do you boo if it were a regular saturday night and matt wanted to go hang out with four of his mates and they're all hanging out at some random guy's house that he's friends with right and he comes home and he's like oh you know had a great night like party with the boys topless girl was there yes there's a fucking different standard okay 100 there's different rules that apply for a normal Saturday night and a Bucks party Saturday night but the rules of the relationship don't differ what I mean by that is like if Matt was to go to a person's house and

there was a topless waiter there that was their actual job you know not just some topless girl that was hanging out in the lounge room like a topless waiter I'd be like okay we'd shout for a Saturday but I'm not going to break up with you for it but if he was to go out on a Saturday night and then cheat on me because it's just something he did on a Saturday yeah I probably would end up breaking up with him in the same way that if he was to cheat on me at a bucks party I would also be like well I think we really need to talk about our relationship and why you're marrying me if you feel like you need to have a night off the relationship I very much agree but I do think that there are slightly different rules for bucks parties but I also think that everyone has a

different line of where they draw the cheating line this is true what constitutes like what you're okay with and also in the same token like I mean obviously for anyone who followed across social media I had a completely nude man with his cock out at 10 a.m in my lounge room what was my lounge room it was the airbnb's lounge room and it was great and it was fantastic we drew him it was all very like funny and fun and light there was nothing sexual about it but at the same time i wouldn't do that on a normal saturday i wouldn't be like what are we going to do today bondi walk and then maybe just have a nude man in my lounge room that's not matt with all my girlfriends removes it from the google removes that from the google account i have a question for you kate now

this is a real hypothetical and the reason why i ask this is because i know that this has happened to people before and then they've had to decide what they want to do for their wedding whether they even want to go through with their wedding if you were in a relationship and your partner went out on a box and cheated on you whether it was with a stripper whether it was with someone else because he was like yeah one last dig boys and boys what would be your reaction to that finding out that he took that as a you know a get out of jail free card to do whatever the fuck he wanted to on his box night oh would you still go through with the wedding that is such a loaded question um oh wow see and this is the predicament that a lot of women have been in i'm

sure a lot of men have been in this position as well i shouldn't just say it's like one gendered but i guess the thing is it puts you in such a impossible situation because you have just spent you know x amount of years or x amount of time investing in your relationship well then you've also gone through the process of organizing a wedding usually your bucks or your hands is usually quite close to your wedding date and then they've gone and done something that to you seems completely out of character something that you probably thought they would never ever do and I guess my big thing is and the more I think about it is that I think if somebody has the propensity to do that to you on their bucks then they have the propensity to do it at another point

in the relationship I don't think that it is necessarily just this is the one and only time and I would never ever do it again I think that it's something that they are okay with they've allowed themselves to be okay with that behavior and I would I mean I'm not saying that I would break up with them and not go through with the wedding but I would think like fuck we need to go to some counseling now like there is something very very wrong here that you think that this is how this night was supposed to play out oh it certainly wouldn't be me giving the tick of approval and like play on whatever let's pretend it didn't happen but I think it would be depending on so many different factors what happened did you just kiss someone drunk that I can probably

get over did you sleep with someone because there's a lot of prior thought to that that would be a lot more concerning what if they went and slept with a sex worker I would care less about it being a sex worker than I would if it were another person that they had an emotional connection with like a girl from work or like a friend that you know was supposed to be coming to the wedding or something that would be an absolute the wedding is off look I mean I hope I'm never in the situation to actually have to contemplate this but would I throw away my entire relationship due to one night of someone stepping out and like infidelity coming from one night realistically and if I was asked this question in my early 20s I would have been like absolutely

not I'd fucking break up with him like done now that I'm older and I think I just have a little bit more of a realistic expectation on relationships I don't know whether I would throw away everything that I'd work you know that we had built together because of one night of stepping out it's so hard isn't it because a part of me I know and a part of me would say well no I would want to call it off but then I know what I would actually do if I was in the situation which would be I would be like okay let's I would be very very very angry and then I would be like well let's work through it because that's what we're committing to doing that I think I don't know these messages that I received it made the whole conversation very interesting and it really got me thinking

because obviously this does happen to a lot of people and so many women have experienced this at their bucks parties out at their hens parties whatever that situation was and however it unfolded I also just want to very much like reinforce and preface this whole conversation once again with like I trust Matt completely there has never been one second of me that was worried about like there was not a part of me that was worried about Matt's bucks but when I received these messages it made me realize how worried other people are when their partners have gone on bucks or when their partners have had their own whatever that situation looked like so I would like to know if you are somebody whose partner cheated on you at their bucks party or

maybe they've gone to a bucks and they've stepped out of their relationship what happened after that did you stay what was the aftermath how did you get through it did you get through it did you go through with the wedding I'd like to know tell me maybe we can talk about on next week's episode that is really interesting and it also makes your hen's weekend seem very low-key compared to what these people expect goes on at hen's parties it was so fucking low-key but actually do you know what that leads us into what we're talking about on today's episode this is an episode i'm so excited about because it's something i've wanted to do for a very very long time we're talking about our relationship with alcohol not so much being an alcoholic but just how we interact with

alcohol socially how we use it as a crutch to be able to communicate how we use it as a crutch to be feel outgoing in social situations and i guess the reason why i wanted to do this is because for me personally, I think that in my twenties, I had a real issue with alcohol as in I would drink to the point where I would get blackout drunk. I had an alter ego. We called her Rara. I was the life of the party, but I really used it as a crutch to be able to be outgoing in situations that made me feel insecure, where I was like not enjoying being around new people or where I felt judged or where I didn't feel like I quite fit in. I would have a few drinks and it would give me the confidence that I was looking for. And I guess I, at the time, never, ever, ever would

have thought that I had a problem with alcohol. And the reason why I wouldn't have thought I had a problem with it was because everybody else in their 20s was doing the same thing. But I guess as I've gotten older and I've looked back on that time in my life, I've looked back on how it affected some of my relationships, how it actually upset and impacted some of my boyfriends at the time who didn't like my drinking, how I had relationships end because I'd gotten so fucking plastered and behaved so badly when I was in my 20s it really made me think about how much we normalize binge drinking and how much it can truly impact our relationships I also think that it reflects on the way that we view and let's put this in air bunnies alcoholism or alcoholics you

know we we kind of view it in such a black and white level where it's like no you either like you're a normal person who drinks or you have a huge problem with alcohol you're the type of person that will have a shot of alcohol is the first thing that they put into their mouth every morning. You'll be hiding alcohol around the house. And that's just not the case. I think that there are so many people

and especially like something that you really elucidated for me quite a while ago was this mummy wine culture. And it was something that I had never considered before because it's so normal to be like, oh, let's have a glass of wine every night. And like, sometimes that will turn into having a bottle of wine or two bottles of wine.

Totally. And don't get me wrong. Like I still enjoy a glass of wine. Like you will very often see me on social media of being like, I hit 3pm and I'm having a glass of wine. But I now know that it is a glass of wine for me. And that's where I draw the limit. Even at my hen's party, for example, everybody was in bed by 11 o'clock. It was so fucking tame. And then I found myself wanting to justify to people that I still had a really good time. I would say, no, we had so much fun. We had such a good time at my

hen's, but yeah, we didn't really drink that much. You know, everyone went to bed early, but it was still really, really, really fun. And I guess it's because we have normalized so much that in order to have a really good time in quotation marks that there has to be a lot of drinking that that's kind of synonymous with really enjoying yourself exactly what you said earlier keisha something that i think is so important to this is that we do put people into camps you're either fine with alcohol or you're an alcoholic but i think if you are binge drinking on a weekend or if you use alcohol as a means to cope to be able to like be entertaining and confident around your group of friends then maybe you're not an alcoholic but you may have a problem with alcohol and that's a very

hard thing to identify when we normalize it so much. That's the conversation we wanted to have today. Now we have two interviews, which we're bringing you. One of them is with someone who so many of you will be familiar with. Her name is Elena Saucier. So Elena was on Matt Agnew's season of The Bachelor and she is completely sober now and has been for 11 months. The reason why she decided to go sober is because her drinking, although it was not, she by no means was an alcoholic but her drinking and binge drinking on a weekend was impacting her relationship and it was impacting the way that she and her partner were communicating and she was worried that she might actually end up losing her relationship because of her partying then the

other woman that we're speaking to is a woman named danny carr and danny has a very different experience in terms of her relationship with alcohol and she talks very much to this mummy wine culture and how that escalated for her after she became a mother and they're two very different stories but really interesting takes on the way that we socially interact with alcohol well i know that this is an episode that you have been wanting to do pretty much as long as i've known you i think i have been fighting for this episode for like two and a half years but because it was something that was personal to me because i really you know i think brit so much she's always sort of said that she never had an issue with alcohol she was never really a partier in her

20s whereas like i can solemnly say that it was very much the opposite and so for me i was like I've had a bit of a revelation especially since having kids about how different my perspective now is to alcohol well I think that everyone will get something out of this because I would fall more probably into Brit side of the camp when when you said you wanted to do this topic I was like oh that's great but I would not consider myself having a problem with alcohol at all like I love a Saturday night out and I don't really experience too much anxiety but I really liked how much this like hearing you guys speak about it how much it made me kind of hold a mirror up to myself and I don't think I will go into a situation where one of my friends tells me oh hey I'm not drinking

tonight in the same way that I did before listening to this because I have so much judgment yeah I would I would always be disappointed I'd be like oh oh okay to me that just immediately meant that the night wasn't going to be as fun and I've realized through listening to this that that's not the way I should think about things anyway we'll get into that very shortly there is something else we wanted to speak about first Keisha came across a very important very in-depth very well research study and we have a few feels we love we love a study here and we particularly like one that tells us how long we should be having foreplay for how long is that okay if you're going to say how long you have foreplay for what would you say put minutes on it we've spoken about

this though and I'm in the small category of people that I mean I'm in the smaller percentage that I'm not as much of a fan of foreplay and that's because I don't want any foreplay you stick it in dry you just want to definitely not dry you just walk in the door and go for it we've spoken about this and i feel like everyone is getting to know my internal body a little too much right now but i am one of the 10 of women that have penetrative orgasms so i don't get orgasms from foreplay i don't know if we have spoken about this you and i have we haven't on the podcast oh shit okay we have now sorry guys welcome to the inside of my vagina we also go very deep on last episode as well what were we talking about we were talking about dirty talk

yes yeah you're a good little girl with your penetrative orgasms i get more pleasure out of actually having sex than i do out of foreplay wow so apparently 10 of vulva owners will have orgasms in the same way as me 80 of vulva owners have orgasms clitorally i don't know if that's a word but it is 100 yes so i would assume that they would enjoy foreplay probably more because like well yes and no because like I mean you can also have clitoral orgasms which means that you don't not that you need to have foreplay but you just kind of stick a hand down there whilst you're having sex and then that's what gets you over the line right like you don't have to have all the leader okay I would say if you were to pluck a

number out of thin air I guess the big question is what defines foreplay like touching I'm going to say touching is the starting point of the foreplay okay from the embrace I would say 10 minutes eight to ten minutes okay all right so I mean you have sex for seven minutes I've never timed I would say the foreplay goes for as long as the sex interesting is that normal well there has been a proper study done so this particular study uh they studied 152 heterosexual couples so it could be very different for other couples and they found that they had a longer duration of foreplay than they did of intercourse I mean I'm not surprised well another thing is that of everyone studied, they basically all said that they wanted more foreplay than they were

actually getting. Who wanted more though, the guy or the woman? Both genders did. They both wanted it. However, women thought that men wanted less than what they actually want. So according to this, guys are wanting more foreplay. The ideal time is 18 to 19 minutes. I know that a lot of people, we've done the maths before, a lot of people are having sex for half an hour. It's a lot of time that's a lot of time for sex if you're having sex say five days a week just say you are right that's two and a half hours two and a half hours of sex for some people are when you're new and fresh in a relationship actually do you know what though when I was new and fresh in a relationship we'd have sex for that long too yeah and do it five days a week and you always make

time for what's important we did put this out to the brains trust and we asked you the very important question of how long is your foreplay how long are you having foreplay for five percent of you said none or very little. And I'm pretty sure that was Keisha. No, but to be honest, there was 12,000 people who answered this. So 5% of 12,000 said none or very little. 56% of you said zero to 10 minutes, which was the majority. So I'm sitting in the majority. 34% of you said 10 to 20 minutes and 5% of you said 20 minutes plus, which I think is super interesting. So for the 56% of us that land in the 10 minute category, a vast majority of that potentially are wanting to be longer you know what I think is really interesting about this you know when

you're in those situations and so if someone was to say to you hey how long have you been doing this for and you'd be like I don't know five minutes and it's been 25 it's the opposite of doing a plank or running on a treadmill I think our perception like how do we know how do we actually know is it because we start the Netflix movie and then we go oh we've got to rewind 15 minutes also how are they doing it in this study were they making people time their foreplay like because then surely that would change your foreplay because you're thinking about foreplay. I mean, science has to be vigorous.

It has to be reliable, okay? So maybe that is what they did. Okay, well, let's get into, on that note, let's get into our favourite part of every episode and that is accidentally unfiltered. Okay, I'm going to kick it off. Actually, no, Keisha, you can do me the honours. Back when I was 18, I broke up with my boyfriend of two years.

He was devastated and one night he decided to leave a love note and a candle at my front door. He rung the doorbell and took off down the street to where he was parked. Oh, bless. I know. He's got a broken heart. He loved her. What he didn't know was that two of my neighbours were watching the whole thing

and thought some boy was lighting something on fire at our house. As they saw him running off, they took matters into their own hands, crash-tackled him and held him down until they found out what he was doing. The poor thing was put under a citizen's arrest. He had a broken heart and a broken leg. Bless him. The dumb things we do when we're going through a heartbreak, like it's like he left a little memorial for her at her front door.

It was a memorial of their love. Like why would you think that that would work? Like how's that going to get someone back? Could you imagine? Let's put ourselves in his shoes right now. Could you imagine just how pathetic you would feel with your arms held behind your back, probably dislocated shoulder, as the neighbors are like, who are you? And why are you lighting a house on fire? And he's just

like, I'm just still in love with her. Okay. Probably as pathetic as this person would have felt last night, my boyfriend and I had sex quite late. So when we were done, I just chucked all the sex toys on the floor this morning. When I woke up, I made the bed. And so then I picked up all the sex toys and I chucked them back on the bed. That was me reminding myself that I needed to wash them. I went to the gym, I came home and then there was a knock at the door. It was an air conditioning guy that was coming to look at installing some air con before christmas i led him into the bedroom completely forgetting what was on the bed he walked in did a double take at the bed to see all the sex toys still laying there laid out across the bed so many of

them he then turned around and looked directly into my soul and proceeded to say i go to the same gym as your boyfriend i then had to fumble my way through trying to explain that the toys were from last night and that i wasn't trying to imply anything so she thought that he interpreted that as that he wanted she wanted to have sex with him i literally wanted someone to dig me a hole and push my body into it and cover me over you wanted the batteries to go flat on your soul how many sex toys have you got i mean good for you sister she's definitely having more than 10 minutes okay i can understand that you would want your air conditioner to be fixed after that because I would have been sweating like a beast.

Okay, with all that out of the way, let's get into the chat with Eleanor. As we said, guys, we are talking about alcohol and our relationship with alcohol in this episode. And we wanted to interview two different people with two different stories because we realized that everybody's relationship with alcohol is very, very different.

And one of the big things we wanted to highlight on this is that you don't need to be an alcoholic to have a problem with alcohol. First up, we're speaking to Eleanor Sorsia. Eleanor was from The Bachelor, as you guys already know. and she has a very interesting story around why she decided to go sober and how being sober has had a really positive impact on her life. You first came to our screens on Matt Agnew's season of The Bachelor which for anyone playing at home that doesn't know he was the astrophysicist he was

like the first hot geek that The Bachelor franchise had. For anybody who can remember back to Matt Agnew's season that is the very first time that we met and I had to pick so I went on there with Matt very heavily pregnant and I had to pick a girl out of the girls that were left there for Matt Agnew to have a date with. And I picked you. And you picked me. You were the person. And then unfortunately he didn't pick you in the end, but you know what? We all know how that season turned out. I wasn't. Everything happens for a reason, right? Well, then Eleanor and I, we met the first time and like, we're going to brush over this. We don't need to revisit it. We were on Bachelor in paradise together and it's it's something that we look we did it we put our feelings out there

it wasn't for us but after that you and I went on to become pretty good friends we we used to hang out all the time we lived around the corner from each other we used to train together I actually knew your now partner Tom I think a little bit I just met him just before you so I feel like this is all this synergy that has come together you were like instrumental in me actually meeting Tom in the first place because you were, like, the only mutual friend we had on Instagram and he, like, slid into the DMs and I was like, okay, the unknown, and then I saw that you guys were, like, mutual friends. So I came straight to you being like, is this guy insane?

Like, what's the vibe? And you trusted Brittany's opinion on that? I did. I did and she was right for, like, I don't know if she's often right but she was very right. So I was like, you literally made me go like, okay, cool, I can go on a date with this guy. So thanks.

So what you're trying to say is you've been the happiest you've been in your entire life. thanks to me so you're welcome do you know what elena we start every single episode with our guests the same way we ask for what is called an accidentally unfiltered story it's where you tell us your most embarrassing story but because of the topic of this conversation that we're having we want to ensure that your funny story isn't about alcohol yes okay no no that's easily done because yeah i've done a lot of you're like yeah i've got a lot of like i got both sides of the spectrum a lot of stuff happens without alcohol hit us i'm gonna have to say okay this

is probably like the most horrifying story just because of like public humiliation but me and my family and my ex-boyfriend and everyone were in Bali at the time I was like really on my high horse and being like I'm the picture of health and wellness kind of thing and I was like nothing could touch me essentially like everyone started dropping like flies with Bali belly and were like just so so sick and I was kind of the only one who didn't get sick and I was doing the same things and I was kind of like I was really like I was serious hero mode I was like I have a really good resilience and my immunity is really good and blah blah blah I was banging on anyway so like everyone kind of moves on past Bali belly I think that I'm like unscathed we get to the airport

and we're in the line to like basically the customs line and I start to feel so sick and essentially what happened was and then I was wearing pants which I never do wait when we you say pants you mean underpants or just like pants pants pants either or no no no like like long kind of like flowy pants for travel whereas usually i'd be traveling like in my little like denim shorts like whatever but for some reason i decided to wear my sister's pants and we're standing in the line and i shit myself like full diarrhea shit myself running down my leg in the line at customs about to board a plane could you not go to the bathroom no because sometimes it just it's so violent it happened so fast like i didn't even know if it was happening i literally

smelt it before i felt it usually we know that line is whoever smelt it dealt it but you smelt it before you felt it were you able to get onto the plane no no so the worst part of it all was it already happened everyone in the line is basically being like what is that smell and my mom my sister like dying but also just dying of embarrassment but of laughter as well because being like what we told you so i had to then go and get through the line everyone was like what is this disgusting smell i had to go into duty free buy like wet wipes try and clean it up i had to borrow then my sister's shorts the whole entire flight i smelled like like feces like there's no other way around it could you see anyone else like on the plane questioning that

smell you know and you have to like you know how you have to join in you're like oh i can smell it too oh god someone's farted i had to be like oh but like it was so clearly me like the stench was so like barley belly is another level right it's like your insides from the top to the bottom coming out oh yeah it's like you're possessed by the devil and the gates of hell have just been unleashed and also i'm running to the toilet every two seconds so like oh i wonder who who stinks like shit the person that's living in the toilet we say this all the time that like whenever we ask people what their most embarrassing stories are i would say 90 of the time it has to do with shitting themselves so it's very relatable everyone has one you are not alone

maybe in that circumstance in a customs lines in Bali. Oh no, you were alone then. Everybody has done some variation of that. Okay. The reason why we have you on the podcast today is we wanted to speak to you more about your relationship with alcohol and how and why you decided to be sober and to stop drinking. Can you tell us a little bit about your sort of backstory when you first tried alcohol, what it was like for you in your twenties? So in my twenties, well, I first tried alcohol a lot younger than that so I mean just to give a bit of background like I grew up in a family basically a European style family where alcohol is celebrated it's like very normalized like we have a glass of red wine with dinner that kind of thing not saying that my parents introduced

me to it earlier but it's always been around and not in a bad way like it's a happy memory kind of thing but I must say the first time I got drunk was probably in my teens and I just remember the first time like most people throwing up passing out mom getting called that kind of vibe and then from then on I must say more often than not like I would drink and then pass out and my mom would get a call whereas like my sister didn't have that so much she would just kind of go out with her friends and get a bit drunk and mom would kind of never found out but I would always like do or something would happen that my mom would actually have to get called and then I'd be picked up and like just decided to decorate her brand new car every single time with vomit let's

be specific not with the other option no with vomit and then cleaned it up whilst I continued to vomit kind of vibe my parents were pretty brutal so like that was kind of my first thing and I think sort of into my 20s and at university and stuff so I don't want to just talk about the bad side the bad bad side of my drinking experience because there was two sides I had the very much like sort of having a glass of wine five times a week to relax or just to have dinner and have a glass of wine because it's just how I grew up. And then there was another side, which was probably the side that drove me harder to stop drinking. But I do truly believe that regardless of this happening, I would have stopped drinking because like even the one glass or two glass a night

didn't fit in with the health and wellness sort of lifestyle that I live. The one scary thing that used to happen to me that kind of started in university was I black out but I don't pass out so I black out like it's obviously normal for you to have like periods of amnesia sort of when you drink you have little bits when you're like I remember this but I forgot this a little bit but then it came back to me whereas I am like a functioning blackout drunk so like I could lose up to like five hours of my night and when I say entirely functioning and when I talk to like people about it they'll be like but you were fine like you were like hey my name's Eleanor how are you it's not like I'm stumbling around like I'm so functioning and I have my wits about

me and I'm sending messages that don't have spelling mistakes and that kind of thing so I love that that's also the basis of it like the punctuation was impeccable like I was functioning well you know me I'm like a grammar freak that also is interesting because the people around you probably were also drinking so they're not I'm gonna say that you were probably drunk-ish but to them they were like yeah drunk-ish but fine and the reason why I say this is because that is exactly what would happen to me when I was in my 20s and I was like and we'd call it white wine rara I would go through periods where I picked fights with my then the guys that I was seeing and I would wake up the next day and literally not remember anything but had this real

anxiety around what the fuck did I do? Because there would be a block of time, like two hours from some point in the night, the memories would get hazy. And then I literally just wouldn't remember how I got home. Isn't it funny how alcohol affects people differently? Because I could be like, if I think back to the most drunk I've ever been, and I've had those times for sure, I never forget my night. Did you find that it was with different drinks? Like, did you find that some drinks affected you in a certain way and some drinks didn't, or was it just kind of didn't matter what you were drinking, it was the same outcome. That's really interesting. I feel like for me, it was kind of always the same alcohol. I think it was a volume thing, but because I was

blackout, I don't realize how much I was drinking because I continued to function and continue to drink. So I don't know if I was mixing drinks or whatever. Sometimes it would happen faster than other times, but I find that really interesting because my friend the other day was like, when I drink vodka, I blackout, like my memories blackout and I won't remember my night at all, but it doesn't happen when I drink other alcohol. So I think a lot of people, not a lot of people, I've actually read that it's actually about 40% of people experience these blackouts, but I think it might vary based on the alcohol that you have. Well, you also hear a lot of people talk about, I don't know what the term they coined, but like

violent spirits. And when I say violent spirits, I mean, when some people drink hard liquor, they become violent on that where they wouldn't become violent on a wine or a vodka. I wonder like what's and that might be interesting for us to do a bit of a deep dive in it but like what's the anecdotal research around how different alcohols affect you but for you Eleanor when you were having these periods and you would wake up the next day did you think I have a problem with alcohol at that point or were you just kind of like oh this is like I feel guilty about it what were your feelings the next day when you would wake up after these blackout periods it's a tough one because I always it never really sat right with me like this is quite a hectic example but

like I look I never drank I never wanted to be because I think there's this whole rhetoric and story around people that stop drinking and it's like oh my god why like what happened in your life that forced you like as if I had to hit rock bottom for me to stop drinking where it really wasn't that way it was just that like I would go out and maybe once a month I would totally have like this four hour period that something happened and sometimes I would do something that was really crazy and I'd have no idea until someone kind of like jogged my memory and would be like no this happened and I'd be like but how like that's not me some of my friends make a joke about it but I'm like it's actually quite a scary thing it's like an alter ego and I have friends that will be like

yeah my alter ego comes out and I'm like cool sometimes she's fun but sometimes she's really destructive and it's actually quite scary so like the times that I realized how detrimental it was was when someone was holding me accountable so when I was single I would go out have a big night Like in my mind, it was a fun night and I didn't have anyone the next morning to say to me, look, you did or said this thing that was really unacceptable. But when I was being held accountable, when I was in relationships, I would say probably every single boyfriend of mine was like, you got a bit weird last night, or you said something really horrible, or you were really flirty with someone else, or you just did something

that was so out of character and the regret and the shame I would feel from it. Cause I'd be like, but I wasn't like, I wasn't there. like I physically was like I'm I can't believe that that's me and obviously I've the scars there like I've hurt that person and they're going to start thinking like well how often are you going to use this excuse of you blacked out so you said something horrible or you blacked out you're flirting with someone else and also how far can that go like I've slept with people and had absolutely no idea that I slept with them and they would come back to me the next day and be like you came over and you slept with me three times and you were totally lucid and i'm like what oh

that's a scary thought isn't it it's terrifying so i started getting to the point especially in my relationships and especially with tom when i was like i think this is the love of my life and i was sort of doing these things very rarely but still doing them but i was like imagine if i went out and slept with someone else blackout drunk whilst i'm dating this man that i love so much and I know it's within my capabilities because who knows like I could do that what were the conversations that followed because I mean to go sober is something that you have to make that decision on your own you know somebody else can say to you these are the things that you're doing or these are the consequences it's having on the relationship but what was that like

when Tom say or your past boyfriends were the ones to hold a mirror up to your behavior and say hey this is what's happening how did that make you feel or what were your initial reactions to that well I think in past relationships I mean I don't think I was this is no excuse but like they were all very like a bit more like casual I still heard a lot of people and I have so many regrets about that but I think with Tom because it was so serious with Tom and because I was so I'm so in love with him and I really realized the disparity between what I felt towards him in the sober light of day and what I was doing sometimes when I was drinking and there was just such like a divide between the two and I was like I really don't want to hurt this guy but he was really understanding

Tom's quite like softly spoken so he was never like you did this and it's unacceptable he would just bring things up with me like slowly but surely and then I started thinking more and more about it and I think yeah he held a mirror up to a huge degree but at the end of the day yeah I made I made the choice and also Tom doesn't really drink when I first met Tom and he was like I used to judge people so much for not drinking I was like imagine going on a date with someone and they don't drink like my sister and I used to be like oh we just walk like we just wouldn't be able to it wouldn't fit in with our lifestyle and then I met Tom and he didn't really drink and I genuinely used to like judge him for it I'd be like oh this is a bit boring like I want to have a glass of

wine like whatever but he sort of made me more sober curious in that sense but he didn't ever drive me to stop drinking. I remember when you guys got together maybe it was in the first six months I don't know how deep we were but for those playing along at home Tom's an Olympic sailor like he's into his jiu-jitsu he's very fit very healthy he's an athlete he's also very kind very softly spoken he's so gentle he would never get angry or yell at anybody I used to imagine him being like I couldn't try and start a fight with this guy because he's too nice like you know what he would never he would never fight back but I remember you saying to me one day we were going for a walk and you just said Tom and I fight all the time, but it's only when I'm drinking. It's only when we've

been out. Like the only times we have arguments are when you've been out together, you were on the drink. He probably usually wasn't. And Tom said the same thing to me too. He's like, Eleanor wants to argue with me when she's drunk. Yeah. Was that where you realized when you were like, this is actually going to affect my relationship? Was there a point where you were like, I could actually lose this person if I keep up this attitude? Absolutely. Absolutely. And like, I never want to keep going back to this like blackout thing because that became less and less just as I I started sort of moderating with Tom as it was but even if I'd had a couple of drinks I just noticed and I think I've noticed this in a lot of people but we normalize it it's like

oh I had a few drinks and I just I had a fight with my I mean not often do I have a night out where someone doesn't fight with someone cry do something stupid and it's like oh well I was just drunk and I'm like I think that was also me but maybe a little bit more extreme than some like I'd say 70% of the time every single anxiety insecurity everything I was feeling would come out and be amplified by like 500 and I'd wake up the next day and be like what you know like why did I bring that up in that way but I think that that is so unbelievably relatable because I don't think that there's many people who would say that they never picked an argument with their partner when they'd had a few wines which was over something had they been sober that they it

wouldn't have upset them in the same way or they wouldn't have interpreted it in the same way and I think you know obviously when we have not the ability to process a situation in this in the right way or we can easily take things out of context and like I even know for myself like it makes me a little bit confrontational like I want to like I just want to egg on with Matt a little bit you know just to get a rise out of him but it's a behavior that you wouldn't do if you were completely sober. And when I guess for you, even though you weren't having this like blackout periods, even though you had kind of gotten to a point where you were moderating, but still maybe it was impacting your relationship and it wasn't just this like happy drinks time, even though

that's kind of socially what we're led to believe. What was the turning point? What was the day when you were like, you know what, fuck this. I don't want to do this anymore. And how did you navigate that initial process? So I started, as I said, I started moderating because I was like, okay, well these blackout periods it's just not worth the risk to my relationship and also like the anxiety and the dread and the guilt that I felt the next day was I can't even explain it and I've explained it I've sort of felt it throughout my entire life and I had a lot of regrets around that around hurting people and doing things that didn't fit in with who I was at my core so I started moderating right but people don't realize that moderating is sometimes the probably

the most exhausting thing to do it's like I never realized that actually the most freeing thing that I could do is actually stop entirely so I started moderating and I just be like okay one two drinks whatever so I did that for about like seven months but I didn't actually have more than two drinks what do you mean Eleanor when you say just to clarify what do you mean when you say the moderation is the exhausting part so at one stage I was like okay well I'm not going to have more than two drinks let's just do a couple of months but you just don't have so it's like I'm not telling myself no but I'm not saying I'm gonna I'm not gonna go over that because I still have my wits about me but it's like you go into a party or a social situation you're like you're always

thinking about like your next drink and not in like a destructive way but just like okay I've had my one drink but there's four hours left to the party so when do I have my second drink and like how do I feel and I just I felt it so much more exhausting than actually just walk into a party having a non-alcoholic drink and just rolling with that like the decision making process and then it's like oh well maybe I can just have another one another one another one like I just didn't realize that it could just be a lot more relaxing to actually just say actually just don't have alcohol just try that way so I think I've always been really sober curious I used to look at people that did stints of alcohol and obviously I'm into health and wellness and nutrition and everything

so at the end of the day and i hate like sounding preachy but like i sit there and i shun like using parabens and my shampoo and i shun having too much sugar and i meditate and i do ice baths and i do all these things and then every night i to relax i put a neurotoxin into my body like at the end of the day that's what it is it's a toxic substance and i ingest it and i was like how does this make any sense and I didn't realize at the time how much of an impact it had on like my sleep and my confidence and little things like that but in the smallest little ways like my brain fog at work the next day or just my ability to be more resilient in situations or my confidence or my dietary choices and that kind of thing or even just in using it as like a social crutch I think so many

of us aren't aware how much we walk into a situation and then the first thing we do is oh we'll get a drink because having a drink in our hand makes us feel a little bit less alien in that room. We feel a little bit more confident, but what we're actually doing is we're reinforcing that to be confident, you have to have a drink in your hand. It gives you a security blanket, doesn't it? Like just to even, cause you're like, what do I do with my hands? Absolutely. And there's, and there's nothing wrong with that, but what you do when you, if you drink to relax at the end of a hard day, if you feel like you need to drink in a social situation to have confidence or to be more likable what you're saying is that you are not enough and I think by stopping drinking I was

saying everything I need is within me like I'm a little bit more fortunate in that I'm naturally like quite a confident bubbly person but some people don't have that they have like serious social anxiety or it's really daunting to do certain things like go on a date and that kind of thing and I understand that alcohol can be so useful but everything you have inside of you that alcohol unleashes is already inside of you you just use alcohol to unleash it whereas like there's probably way better and I've learned way better long-term strategies to be able to bring those things out of you that already exist it's not like alcohol puts your personality into you and then it comes out do you know what I mean like yeah it's so true and I don't think I'd ever thought

of it like that before but you know one of the things that I think most like a lot of people can struggle with when they actually make that decision or they you know for anyone who says I'm going to have a night off alcohol. It's how other people react to that. And it's like you said earlier on that you originally thought I would never date a guy who doesn't drink. Yeah. How boring, you know, and we can do that to our friends. Even if one of our close friends says, oh, I'm not drinking tonight. The peer pressure that they will then receive, whether it's from, you know, us directly or whoever else saying like, oh, just have one with me. Come on. Because there's this almost a sympathist that unless everybody else is drinking alongside you,

you can't have fun with that person absolutely and like that's been the hardest thing of all personally there's been like not one downside to stopping drinking I can't even begin to explain how it's transformed my life but the biggest downside is something that's beyond my control and that's people's judgment of me and that's been the hardest thing because it's really ostracizing and people do judge you even though now there's this huge sober movement that's starting to come out a lot more research is coming up around it even light moderate drinking is being linked to all these brain changes and that kind of thing but even so it's really ostracizing and so at first i can't remember if you guys but at first i sort of took people along on my journey

on my instagram and i was very like i probably went a bit too extreme i almost became like one of those hot like fucking like even now i've been on your journey yeah like the like alcohol is a neurotoxin it is but when you say that to someone it just sounds so like you're a devil it's like you're preaching but you're not but the reason for that is as well as because it is so conditioned into how we socialize and because it is so normal for all of us that to have someone tell you that it's not normal that you know it's like it's very othering you're you're the one that is being othered it's like oh well actually I mean here she is getting crazy again talking about not drinking what a boring like you know what I mean like because it makes other people feel bad like

is there judgment loaded into that are we the bad people because we still drink you know and even for myself like I can recognize that I had a real problem with drinking in my 20s which I would have thought it was social drinking I thought I was so much fun but when I look back on it if I had a friend who was drinking like I did in my 20s I'd be like oh she probably has a drinking problem but because you're 20 years old you never think oh that person has a drinking problem it's just part of what socializing is at that age but I guess I even now as somebody who can recognize that have still been guilty of saying to friends just have one drink like come on have a margarita with me and then you know go home so I've been guilty of that as well even though I know where

that line is and can be drawn for some people no totally and like I think this really hits home for me but alcohol is the only drug you have to justify not taking that's a really sad thing and it's like cigarettes in the past they used to be cigarettes like cigarettes was literally linked to like having a relaxing and good time it filled our tv screens and now it's like okay more and more research came out and now it's seen as not a good thing and i truly believe that down the line that will probably happen for alcohol like even all the advertisements about drink responsibly that's all funded by drinking things like smirnoff and everything they fund those advertising campaigns it is so many aspects to it but yeah like the hardest part is people judging and

ostracizing you and also this association that you have to hit rock bottom to be able to make that decision whereas like if I just go well I prefer it this way and then they see me socializing and staying out till 2 a.m even though I'm not drinking and they're like oh and I think it makes people question their own drinking habits and people don't like that and so how did it change the relationship for example I mean like all your relationships in terms of your friendships and your family but specifically your romantic relationship with Tom did you see just like huge changes and huge improvements that was actually crazy like that's been the craziest change there's been a huge amount of self-growth but my relationships is huge and my relationship

with Tom specifically so I actually never told myself I was going to stop drinking entirely I said do it for a month and then see how you feel like just do nothing for a month because I've done the moderating and I was like okay well that's a bit exhausting let's just do nothing and I was in Europe at the time so it was really hard like I probably chose the worst time to do crazy time to choose to start it yeah I was like no time like the present no time like the present literally surrounded by alcohol at all times and I did it for a month and I felt so good and my relationship and my moods and my energy and my sleep and everything improved so much I literally felt like the young me again it's so hard to explain but I felt like a child

it was so extreme and everyone around me noticed not to a huge extent but they were just like oh you seem really well tom was like we have not really had a fight for the last month we've had little things but our recovery has been so much better and then i just never drank again like 11 months later i still hadn't had a drink and i was like oh my god like so i never told myself no because i just i'm not a big fan of saying i'm a fan of trying things out but never say you won't have chocolate again never say you won't have pasta again like i hate those like strict things but I just was like try it for a month and then just and then month went into month went into month and the benefits just kept getting bigger and bigger and outweighing the negatives which

at first were really tough like it was really tough to navigate a world without alcohol I came from a family that we would have a glass of wine at 5 30 p.m almost every night because it was just like our culture so it was really hard in terms of where you're at now 11 months down the track how do you navigate those conversations when you say meet someone new or you are going out with friends like did you ever receive that pushback or are you at a point now where it's easy for you to say I don't drink and that's it this is probably the saddest part and something that doesn't fit in with who I am I pretend to drink I think you're gonna say that I could see you getting like a non-alcoholic why rolling with it I've lost a lot of people in the process and there's probably a

good thing because i've become and i've also become more precious with my time and who i give my energy to and some of people have been really understanding like my sister has been my rock her drinking is probably she used to drink like quite a lot during the week she probably drinks like one drink a week now like which is it was just insane for ali yes for ali yes but in my entire family yes like yes but it's so hard to explain to people and i just don't want that to become i don't want to become that girl and unfortunately it's just the way it is and i think down the line we'll probably it will become like down down the line it will be one of those things like cigarettes we will be like oh wow i commonly people used to just like smoke all the

time in planes and it will be like i think eventually we'll get to that point but it's a long time from now but at this point in time i do get ostracized if i don't drink and i just don't like the focal point being around me and why i don't drink so sometimes i do just say look i'm just driving. Sometimes I just go, yeah, I'll have one. And I genuinely will have one or two sips of the drink because I grew up with wine, right? I love wine. I'm never going to say to myself, actually, I'm never going to have a sip of wine again. And it's not a slippery slope for me because I'm very much in control now that I've done 11 months without it. Like I never feel the urge. To drink glass. Yeah. Do you think that you need to be an alcoholic to have a problem,

like a genuine problem with alcohol? Almost the opposite. Like alcohol is an incredibly addictive substance, right? Like it causes a change in our brains. It relaxes us short term, long term, it actually makes everything way worse. Some people say to me, they're like, I just, I think I have a body that doesn't tolerate alcohol. I'm like, nobody has a body that tolerates alcohol. I think that maybe you can have genetic predispositions that make you more likely to be addicted to things. But I truly, I hate this whole thing about like, oh, I was an alcoholic. If you, if anyone looked at my drinking, they never would have thought it was problematic apart from the fact that maybe I had that blackout thing, which actually I found out a lot of my

friends experience as well, but it's just laughed off as a drunken night. Whereas I had a boyfriend that was incredibly loving and supportive. And I just, if I hurt anyone or do something that doesn't sit right with me, it causes me a lot of anxiety. And maybe other people are more fine of just being like, oh, whatever happened to happen, like, let's move on. I by no means was even near alcoholic. And I don't think a lot of people are. I just think the alcoholism thing is so outdated and so fraught with so many misunderstandings. I think the same thing. I think it's really important to drive home. And Laura and I've had these discussions that I think it's a common misconception that you have to be an alcoholic to seek help or want to be

better or want to make the changes or have a problem or impact people. You definitely don't. you could maybe drink once in a blue moon, but that blue moon could be like a total binge drinking where you black out, where you make mistakes, where you hurt people. That's also a problem with alcohol. Absolutely. And like, even just the reliance, like at one stage, I really was just having a glass of wine at night or whatever, but it was still having small impacts on my sleep and my mood and my ability to wake up and go do my gym class the next day. Like there was little things and that also I wanted to cut out. So it never was a breaking point for me. And that is exactly the reason why we wanted to speak to you because I think that too often the stories are so extreme

that they're unrelatable and that is what reinforces to people that they don't have a problem with drinking because we can compare ourselves outwards and say oh well but my drinking is not as bad as that person so therefore I'm not I don't have a problem that person has a problem yeah so it's really quite amazing to speak to someone who's within the age group of the women and the people that we speak to but also someone that's so identifiable with their story because I think that so many of us listen to what you're saying and go oh fuck I do that too to actually go ah yeah this is you know and maybe this even if it's like you know one or two people who go okay actually alcohol does have an impact on my relationships it has made me not be the person I

want to be when I'm around my partner and we go out on a Saturday night we're in a group setting and then you know I have regrets the next day or wake up with anxiety whatever it is if someone's listening to this and they're having those thoughts and feelings what would be your advice to someone who wants to try going sober i would say and like this is to do with anything in life like from if your relationships are suffering because about you might not even realize it's because of alcohol if your energy is a bit low if you just want to make better diet choices and improve your fitness if there's anything like that in your life and you do drink alcohol regularly i would try and never see it as a permanent thing just do a month without it even two weeks I would be like delighted

but I think you have to do a month to really see the changes it probably took me about three months to like actually reach my like peak I feel amazing but a month was also quite pivotal so if I could say to anyone that if they're struggling with their relationship with alcohol but even if they're not like if they're just struggling with their fitness energy anything like that take a month off and just see how you feel like see it as an experiment like an exciting experiment like find other ways to cope there's so many amazing non-alcoholic drinks on the market or even for that month if you do just want to spend more time by yourself and become a little bit more antisocial that's okay too hello that's me i'm like everyone leave me alone i know like a dream like an excuse like

an excuse to be antisocial i'm like sorry sorry i'm not drinking so i'm at home alone i've got to binge watch this series like I have to also like have a way out of social situations I found little ways to like especially when I was starting I was like I always needed an out so I always needed like a non-alcoholic drink to like start with and then I always needed to know that I could leave a social situation if I wanted to and the great thing obviously when you're not drinking is you can drive and that kind of thing but I never would have put myself in a situation where nine hours on sydney harbour on the island where everyone's actually shit-faced like i would never put myself in that situation because it's like try and remove yourself slightly from the triggers

but immerse yourself in social situations and see how you go and also just see it as a one-month thing and then just journal every day which is what i did and see what changes what positives you experience and then at the end of the month you can just make a call you might go back to having one glass of wine you might go back to exactly how you were but I think you'll never know if you don't try I love that thank you so much for coming on today I just think you brought a different perspective a very well very young relatable perspective that's what I think and that's exactly what we wanted because we want everyone out there that's listening to be like hey maybe maybe I'll try that maybe that's me maybe that's my friend and also just to normalize

like I think there's so much stigma around people who just choose not to drink like it's like why do we other than so much why do we treat them like they've got fucking the plague well i haven't seen elena since she gave up that's why it's such a weird reaction that we all have and it's unpacking where that comes from i think is like it's quite interesting the thing that i keep going back to is like everything you need is inside you i found my like inner child again by stopping drinking alcohol like i've got in touch with pieces of myself that i thought actually didn't exist anymore and they've all come back and that's like the coolest thing that I've ever done and if that's one thing that people could do then I would just be like let's not demonize alcohol because I've

done it before I've been on the opposite side where I've demonized people that didn't drink alcohol and it's horrible but I just think you need to like question your relationship around it and maybe do a trial where you just stop drinking and see how you feel next up we are speaking to Dani Carr and Dani Carr is the host of a podcast called How I Quit Alcohol. Now Dani speaks a lot around her relationship with alcohol in terms of mummy wine culture and why becoming completely sober is something that really changed her life. Dani, welcome to Life Uncut. Hi, how are you? Thank you so much for having me. I'm so, so honoured and stoked to be a guest on your podcast. How old were you the very first time that you drank alcohol and like how in those formative

years, did that impact you and become part of your life? Yeah. So I was 13 when I started drinking and all my friends were from a country town in central Victoria called Castlemaine. And it's just kind of what everyone did. Everyone was doing it. So we got some booze from a girlfriend's sister, went down to the Western Oval and hooked in and got pretty smashed actually that night with a group of people. And that was it. That's where we got started. That's what we did every weekend. And I think straight away, there was this sense of, oh my God, I fit in now. I'm a bit cool now. It kind of felt good to be free and not self-conscious, not to be shy.

And it just kind of set the wheels in motion for decades of binge drinking. I think it's growing up in the country too. I'm not sure where you guys grew up, but we had nothing to do. We were so bored. And it's funny now, I haven't drunk for four and a half years now and having some separation, I've done a lot of work on myself and I realized I just had this deep need to fit in. And so if everyone else was doing it, I was going to do it as well. And I guess it just became more and more of a problem, you know, and as you get older and you meet new people, it just keeps getting worse

and worse, just keep drinking. And for me, it was, I think I'm actually really quite shy. I'm a bit of an introvert, even though if you had have met drunk Danny, drunk Danny was so, you know, she's so loud and boisterous and really annoying aren't we all no one would have guessed that I was shy and kind of so unconfident and still am but now I'm able to become aware of that that I'm having this feeling and it's okay so meeting my husband Ash and I'm a musician as well and I guess the whole music industry thing there's so much alcohol involved just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and so then before you know it you're having these huge blackouts and whole nights just like what the how happened? How did I get to bed? And then having kids. And then, you know, it just grows

on itself. Just going back to your 20s, because I kind of want to follow this timeline a little bit more. What was your relationship with alcohol like in your 20s? You said that you were someone who was like really introverted. Were you using it to mask those feelings? Were you using it to have the confidence to hang out with friends? Absolutely. Yeah. Because I think not being confident and being a little bit introverted, I just was never aware of that. So it was just like I'd be in a social situation, feel uncomfortable, but not even really being aware of what that was just like, I don't feel right. I'm just going to drink. Cause I know that that makes me feel a bit better. And then suddenly I'm not so self-conscious. Yeah. I actually like resonate to this so much

when I was in my mid twenties. And that for me was like really the years where I found my relationship with alcohol was the worst where I would go out and literally get blackout drunk and not remember like wine drunk and people had it. My alter ego was Rara and it just kind of became part of my persona. Yeah. She had a name. It just became part of like, that was like, that's what Laura does. That's Rara, you know? And I will never forget. I went to dinner this one time with my obviously ex-boyfriend. We had just gotten back together and with some of his friends and I got so fucking drunk, like so unbelievably embarrassingly drunk and everybody else was drinking as well. But my tolerance to it, my understanding of how much I could drink,

especially when it came to wine I would just guzzle it like it was water and I can remember the next day he was like why do you do this and I didn't understand why and I was really defensive at the time and really like there's nothing wrong with me like whatever I'm having a fun time but looking back on that when I was 24 25 like I realize now I did it because I did not fit in and I felt so self-conscious about not fitting in with his friends that that it was like a bit of a protection for me. Like I no longer even had to think about what I was doing because I thought I was being fun, you know, and it just kind of escalated. And I guess we live in a society that in so many years normalizes that behavior. It normalizes social drinking. It

normalizes binge drinking as being like, it's just the fun thing to do. It gets away from you before you realize it's a problem. Absolutely. It's so relate as well. And also a feeling of sometimes like, I'm not good enough. Like I'm not good enough for these people or they're so beautiful, especially as my husband's career got bigger. And then you sort of meet famous people for want of a better term and feeling so, so self-conscious, so not good enough. And just, okay, what am I going to do with this? And just mask it just by drinking. And then suddenly I'm okay. I can talk to anyone. I'm having a great time making people laugh, but I had no idea that that's what I was doing. And same thing, like the next day waking up going, God, how did that

happen? Like, why did I get so drunk? What can I remember? And never putting two and two together that it was actually because I just wasn't comfortable in myself. Totally. So you did marry blues musician Ash. Did you find when you went into that world, like you just said, all of a sudden you're meeting these other people that are famous, they're cool, they're musicians, they're artists. Was the drinking culture and drug culture ingrained in this musician lifestyle? Or was it more so that you just needed a coping mechanism going into that lifestyle? I think a bit of both. And because Ash is in that kind of blues root scene, there's a lot of, you know, yoga and green tea, which also goes on backstage.

Bit of A, bit of B. But there's also a huge drinking culture and depending on who you're hanging out with or what bands they're in, I guess different things show up. So of course, there's always drugs and there's you know a lot of booze and it's just expected of you you know it's with music I guess it's it's funny though I used to think it was just music but I think there's so many sectors where there's so much alcohol pushed on you at work but being a musician or being in that industry it's like it's expected of you you know you're expected to turn up and drink you're expected to be half cut before you do your job no one bats an eyelid no one questions it would you have ever classified yourself at any period of your life as an alcoholic or do you

would you have just said, I just had a binge drinking problem. I had a problem with alcohol, but you wouldn't have ever categorized yourself as extreme as alcoholism. I definitely Googled it quite a few times. Like, am I an alcoholic? Which is if you're Googling it, you know, there's something's not right. Yeah. But that was to do with these big blackouts that I was having. I could go weeks without drinking, no problem, but I'll get the, I call it the can't stops. You know, I'd have one or two, but then suddenly that one or two, that was my intention was eight or 10 drinks later. So I just couldn't stop. And so I guess it's, what's classified as a gray area drinker. Now that's

the kind of new term that people are using. It's where I'm a problem drinker, but I wouldn't classify or qualify to be an alcoholic that needs to go to AA or something like that. But I think that this is so important. And this is the reason why I wanted to speak to you, because I think we socially, we put people into two camps. We say you're either an alcoholic and an alcoholic has to be someone who their life is falling apart, right? That's kind of what we think, like I'm not an alcoholic because like I still, you know, I don't drink Monday to Friday, I only drink on the weekends. I still go to work. Yeah, I hold down a job, I have a great relationship, whatever it is. We have these two camps. Alcoholic feels so extreme, so therefore everything else

feels okay. And I look, like I said, you know, in my 20s, I would never ever have considered myself to be an alcoholic and I still don't look at myself and say I was an alcoholic in my 20s but I was getting blackout drunk and I did have a problem with alcohol but there's not really another label for what that sits as and that's what feels so uncomfortable for people and I think it's also why so many of us struggle to identify that actually we have a problem with alcohol that's why so many people struggle to make a change because it's not quite bad enough to classify myself as that we were also around a lot of people who were really extreme drinkers One of my best friends was a daily drinker who had to go into AA and it was always like,

well, if I'm not as bad as that person, I'm still okay. But knowing deep down that this is not okay. I don't feel okay. And what was it like for you when you were having these blackout episodes? Did you have anxiety around it the next day? Did you question like, what the fuck did I do? What the fuck did I say? Like, how did you recover from those periods?

Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Not only because, you know, when you wake up and you're like, I know I was a dick last night. I just know I busted so many dick moves. At what level of dick was I last night? You're like you don't even want to know.

Your friends tell you things that you did and you're like, fuck, just don't tell me. I can't even be told because I hate myself so much right now. Yes, and so many and just, you know, it was just like I'm not learning this lesson, like it's just happening all the time and then drink dialing people and there's so many stories of just, you know, like going through your phone, who did I text, who did I call?

Oh, the messages the next day. How long did I call for? You know, what did I do? And getting to the point towards the end where I was actually becoming scared before I'd even drunk. Like, what am I going to do this time? If you're going drinking frequently enough that you have to call your friends to say like, oh my God, what did I do last night? Was I embarrassing? And seeking reassurance for your behavior, then you have a problem with alcohol. Like, but I do think that it's so normalized that so many of us go through these periods of life in our twenties or our thirties or whatever it looks like, where that's just an acceptable part of being young and socializing

and making friends and partying. And just on this next day anxiety, there is a name for it, hangxiety, you know, hungover anxiety. Did you ever experience it to a point that was almost a level of depression? A lot of people get the blues the next day. They get very, very low, very, very sad. And I don't think they link the two. They're like, why do I feel like this? Did you ever feel that way? Or were you just more worried about what you were doing the night before? I definitely had times where I would, yeah, stay in bed all day. And I guess that's depression, right? Where you've so depressed. Yeah. That I couldn't get out of bed, depressed, embarrassed, anxiety, all of those things. What is your understanding? I know that there's like the

term of it, mummy wine culture is something that exists in Australia. What are your thoughts or feelings about mummy wine culture? It's really handy for women to have that connection, I guess, when they get together and have the drinks for the kids, because they're kind of craving some kind of connection. They want adult conversation. You know, I totally get that. But then how does it look for the person when they've gone home and they've left the park or wherever they are with their friends? And if they, if you're kind of continuing on drinking after that and you can't stop, that's when it becomes a problem. It's not a problem for someone if it's not a problem, right? But you know, in yourself, if you've left drinks with the friends and you're keeping on

going and you're kind of struggling with your kids or you're needing the alcohol to get through the night with your kids or if you can't remember putting them to bed or if you can't remember feeding them the night before then the thing is to say that some people go wow that's really full on but that's actually the case for a lot of people it can just be you know one or two glasses too many a bit hazy like i can't quite remember putting them to bed at night and it's not that's not alcoholic behavior that's just really common for women who are drinking just to cope did you have a key moment and aha moment that you thought, wow, this has to change. I have a problem. This isn't right. And I don't want to live like this anymore. Yeah. I think there was definitely a

series, you know, leading over the years, there was so many of these signs and so many things showing up for me that it's like, okay, you really need to stop. You need to stop. And I'd wake up and say, that's it. I'm not drinking anymore. And I'd have a few weeks off. Never drinking again. We've all done that. We've all said that. Oh, totally. And then you have the few weeks off, you're like, no, I think I'm good now. Now I'm going to learn to moderate. And then of course it never works. But the final time, the big last binge that I had, I was meant to be looking after some friends' kids. We were living in Bali at the time. And I was meeting them at this restaurant to go and pick up their kids. And their kids were coming back to my place.

We're going to watch movies. And I was going to put the kids to bed while those two went out for dinner. These friends went out for dinner. And so we met and then we're like, oh, let's just have a I can like you yet. So I don't know why, but I just started drinking double vodkas. I don't even know what happened. We were having a great time. And then next thing I know I'm in a taxi with everyone. Like we're all in a taxi going back to my villa and I just fall out of the taxi, vomit everywhere, vomit all over my shoes. The kids are watching. Then I remember being inside and my daughter holding back my hair while I was vomiting. And I remember telling her that it was to something that I ate. Oh, mommy must've had something bad to eat. I'm so sorry. And passing

out and then probably waking up at around 11 and my friends whose kids I was meant to be looking after there, they've obviously stayed to make sure everything was cool with my kids. And I was just so embarrassed, just so mortified. And I just thought, oh my God, I've done it again. Like how did this happen? And I've let them down. I've let my kids down. I've let myself down. I didn't even want to come out of the villa like they were out by the pool having a good time but I was just so I remember texting them going oh my god I'm so sorry I don't even know how this happened and I thought then I've had enough like I've just had enough of this this has to change and it's all fun while it's happening like we were having a good time that day and you know

lots of laughs and blah blah blah but I was just sick and tired of waking up going what the hell how did this happen again and so luckily a friend of mine said had said a few weeks earlier that she was going to take a year off and so I was I rang her the next day I said I'm in I'm doing this year off with you starting the next January the 1st I think this is in October so I had a few months to prepare my husband Ash was like yes I'm doing it too Scott the bass player from the living end he was like I'm in as well and his girlfriend was in as well so there was a few of us decided to take a year off. And then four and a half years later, what physically happened? What was the response within yourself emotionally and physically when you decided to quit? Was there

a level of withdrawal? Did you find it really hard? Did you have any sort of relapse? No, I've never drunk since. So that's one good thing. No, I had no withdrawals or anything like that. What I had was, interestingly enough, at first it was like, oh, this is ridiculous. This is too hard. I don't want to do this. How am I going to do this for a year? This is going to be so boring. And then of course, all those things that I'd start to think about myself and who is going to like me, everyone's going to think I'm boring, you know, all those things. That's the doubt. But I just thought, well, I just have to do it.

One thing we all figured out pretty early on was this is going to be tough if this is the mindset. So then I worked really hard. We all did on changing our mindset about it. So it was, you know, I started a gratitude practice. I started positive affirmations. I started, you know, really good input, listening to great audio books and listening to lots of good positive stuff that made me feel good. And just keeping on reaffirming to myself that this was a

great choice and thinking about how good I was feeling. What about your friends though, the people around you who would go out drinking with you or you were the life of the party too? How did they respond to the decision? Was there anyone that kind of, when you said, I'm not drinking now that they're like, go on, just have one. Oh yeah. Everyone. I had people like saying, I'm calling bullshit on this. Thanks for the support. Yeah. And other friends going, Oh God, I can't wait for this year to be over. Like, thank God, you know, and looking forward to getting to the end. And they were like, yes, you beauty, you know, we've got Danny back, but I've definitely lost friends or friends that I saw so much of that we were so close that I literally have not

been invited to their houses since. That's pretty confronting. Do you know what though? And this is even like me checking my bias. Recently we went out for dinner, really good friend of mine, one of my closest friends so we planned this like really great night out for all of us we had a babysitter and he wrote and said oh I'm not drinking just FYI tonight and my first thought was oh boring should I even bother having a babysitter if he's gonna not come and have a drink like am I getting a babysitter to go out and have a drink with someone who's gonna go home at nine o'clock like and it clicked like I had it it was like that momentary flash of a thought and then I had to stop myself and I was like what's more important the only reason why you

want to go out with him is because you're going to have a margarita with him or because you want to see him like what was the more important part of what tonight was supposed to be and I think that we so many of us have this bias like think about now everyone listening like the amount of times that you have or a friend has said I'm not drinking tonight and then it's almost like you're not worth going out with or that's like oh I can't be bothered that's going to be a boring night because the expectation is that we all have to drink to have a fun time firstly good on you for being able to check yourself like that because so many people would probably respond and just go oh no, too boring. And I've definitely been one of those people. Like Ash and I would have some

friends that didn't drink or didn't drink much. And it was just like, oh, boring. Like we have to have dinner with them tonight. So I can understand as well, having been in that position myself, that of having that kind of bias against people that didn't drink, we thought they were boring. But that's not to say that I don't still enjoy a wine. And I think for me, it's the ableism that comes with it. It's like, I want somebody else to do it. So therefore I don't feel so bad about it you know they allow me to also then have a few margaritas and I guess that if I'm out with someone who's not drinking I will match that you know I won't drink as well

because I don't really think it's a great time to like get drunk on my own so I guess in that moment I was like looking for someone who wanted to match my energy around it but then I had to think like well why do I want to do that at all in the first place like what am I going to get out of it I've got to go home to two kids who are going to be asleep and then wake up the next morning with a hangover that's the fucking to be drunk that's a fucking terrible time the first year that you had off, what were the significant changes that you felt in your life after going sober for a period of time? Once like the friends had accepted that that's where you were at, what changes were happening for you as a person? The biggest changes I had was not waking up

hating on myself. And like I said, I was putting in so much positive input that I was really starting to change the way I was thinking about myself and just my whole world around me. Like having a gratitude practice was so huge. It was life-changing. I think I was actually quite dark and quite negative before and same as with Ash. I don't know, our relationship got so much better. To be honest, we were on the verge of probably breaking up because alcohol was starting to impact our relationship so much, just arguing and just feeling crappy and being in a bad headspace.

And so the relationship was getting better, just happier, so much happier for the better. And what about the physical changes like skin, hair, energy levels? Because I know like when I go through phases, there are obviously phases where you end up drinking more, summers, party, whatever. I know that when I just go through a couple of months like that, I noticed that I look different. I'm always puffy. I'm always swollen. My skin's not as good, things like that. Did you notice a big physical difference once you had sort of weaned yourself

off it? Absolutely. Like my skin got a lot clearer. My eyes got a lot clearer, lost a bit of weight. Ash lost a ton of weight, which really sucked because he wasn't, he lost like 15 kilos and just de-puffed and he looked incredible. And I didn't lose that much weight. So I was a bit like annoyed about that. But yeah, I just felt so much better. So I think that, you know, comes across when you're feeling so much better within yourself, you kind of look better. What were some of the challenges that you faced when you were going sober? Apart from just like friends, what were the biggest hurdles that you had? Definitely the friends stuff. That was the biggest trigger, feeling a bit lonely at times. You know, if you're not being invited to

things. That thing, you know, I spoke about where I felt uncomfortable at social situations or at like an industry thing and kind of having to navigate my way through that was difficult at first. How do you sit with that when that's been like such a crutch for you socially to be able to show up, to be extroverted, to be able to be the life of the party? How do you navigate this massive shift where you're like, okay, cool, we're going to do this and we're going to do it sober? Yeah. Well, first I was turning up to parties and still like getting on tables and dancing and and forcing myself into this. And then I've kind of realized now, actually, I don't want to do that. I don't need to do that anymore. I don't need to prove that to myself, but what I would

do initially, like getting to a party and feeling uncomfortable, I would just make sure I had a drink on me, like a non-alcoholic drink. So I'd turn up to a party perhaps with like a six pack of kombucha or some alcohol-free G&Ts, something like that, just to get me through or to make sure as soon as I got there, I had something in my hand, I ordered a drink straight away. So that kind of was like my little shield and then just trying to I guess not go for too long like get out of there really quickly if I needed to. So for anyone wanting to quit alcohol anyone out there now that's just having a little rethink about their life choices or their alcohol consumption what are the tips that you have for them? Getting alcohol-free drinks like getting a ton of

alcohol-free drinks in your fridge. Oftentimes we're looking for a different state either we're drinking because we feel stressed or we're drinking because we feel anxious so finding a way to make yourself feel good that's not the alcohol they're some of the key things that you can do just to get you started the biggest part of that and I think it comes back to something that we've kind of touched on but haven't really said it is boundaries right like when you have a really great sense of self when you understand like what is important to you in life when you have gratitude all these things that you have described it all comes down to asserting some boundaries in your life and the big thing about having boundaries if you're someone who's never ever actioned that before if

you're someone who's a people pleaser, if you've kind of just gone with the flow, especially in social settings, oftentimes when you do start asserting boundaries in your life, you do lose friends because those relationships were built around you compromising your boundaries. Those relationships were built around you sacrificing a little bit of yourself to make that other person happy. And I think that that very much can be related back to alcohol and drinking. If you're the person who's the life of the party and then you're invited to the party all the time, you're also playing that role and you're playing that character for your friends of entertainment but how does that then make you feel at the end of the day absolutely some people might drink and

they don't have a problem and they feel fine about it the next day but if it's starting to make you feel bad about yourself or it's impacting your life in any way like your mental health your physical health your relationships then it's definitely worth starting to have a look at it like our values can go out the toilet when we're drinking alcohol you know and thinking about what are my key values? What are my core values in life that, you know, what makes me really happy and what fills my cup? And oftentimes alcohol, you're not living in alignment with your values when you're drinking a lot of alcohol. And so starting to feel like if I'm waking up and it's just not sitting right with me anymore, let your friends know, like I'm taking a break for a while,

or this is not working for me anymore. And I need you all to respect this. And if you're not going to respect it, then see you later, because what's more important than how you feel about yourself, Your own relationship with yourself is the most important thing you've got. And so if you're doing things that are compromising that relationship with yourself and you're not feeling good about yourself, then it's time to evaluate. And if people around you don't like that, then they need to go. All right, guys, you know that we never finish an episode without our suck and our sweet, our highlight and our low light of each and every week.

And Britt is still not here. Producer Keisha, what was your suck of the week? my suck of the week is related to my favorite thing in the world and it's Delilah do you know I feel like people are confused whether Delilah is Brittany's dog or your dog do you know that one time I got sent a message saying it's so nice that you and Britt have a really similar dog and you called it the same thing why would anyone think this too what probably because I post so many videos of Delilah so because Britt is away I have Delilah at the moment and I absolutely as we all know I'm obsessed with her I just love her to be fair you do have the same coffee table as

Brittany the same like rug as Brittany I feel like you do have a lot of things that are the same so if you were to buy an identical dog and name it Delilah people might believe that that makes you sound like such a creep however lately I have been having really really really bad sinus problems and I'm starting to think that there is a potential that I'm developing an allergy to her so I'm trying all of the things I'm trying all of the antihistamines and it probably has a bit to do with the fact I let her sleep in bed with me but I have woken up every day for the past two weeks I'm talking like 13 sneezes in a row and like I'm very puffy and I'm really worried that I'm actually getting an allergy to it would that impact your like want to have her in the

house if you're allergic to her no I will medicate myself until the cows come home okay what is your sweet my sweet is that I mean I did walk in and Keisha's trying to brush the dog's teeth well i only found out that you have to brush dog's teeth from you a couple weeks ago yeah you have to brush your dog's teeth yeah so i'm trying she doesn't like it but you know we'll get there we'll get there we're working on it uh my sweet is that i read this silly thing the other day and it was all about how you should romanticize your life you need to find joy in the little things you need to like romanticize your own life and make it out as though you know you've got this great life it's kind of like a movie right so i had bought this smeg drip coffee filter

is that what it's called it's a coffee machine and it's one of those drip coffee machines because I absolutely love a drip coffee and it has been the highlight of my week sir wait so how are you trying like how does this link into you because you know how like you know visualizing your life you know like all the rom-coms and you see her like pour herself a coffee at the you know every morning and she sits down and she drinks the coffee and it's all very sweet and cute that's not what I look like but that's what I'm pretending I look like and I very much enjoyed it since romanticizing my morning coffee wait is romanticizing your life the same as manifesting your life like are you thinking about money raining down on you at the same time that you're romanticizing about your

morning coffee no I think it's more I don't really know how to describe it I think romanticizing your life is meant to be a little bit more like enjoying the simple things yes but also kind of finding them sexy and like that you you know it's just that fucking espresso machine you know what if I were to fuck an appliance it would right now be my drip filter coffee machine well we all know mine's my robot vacuum cleaner so it's fine we all have our vice and this is my robot vice because I can set a timer on it and it waits for me in the morning like it makes it in the morning before I wake up this is a great question to throw out there if you have a robot that's that's like a not like any robot like a robot vacuum cleaner some sort of tool in your house that's definitely

not something you should have sex with but if you could have sex with it because you love it so much what would it be like is it your toaster is it your i don't know i want to dry it would be some people's i would fuck my dryer yesterday i was at my next door neighbor's house i'm not kidding this is the most 2022 thing i've ever experienced he said hey alexa start and he said a name and i was like what is going on here he had named his robot vacuum and he was telling another robot to start the other robot and it did start and I was like which one would you choose to have sex with then that's the real question all right my suck and my sweet so my suck for this week my week's been really good I'm actually having a really really great week and sometimes I feel

like I shouldn't try and find like why are we trying to find the negatives when the week's been so great but I'm just gonna say it was Marley turfing a juice on herself in a plane in a really small space with another person sitting next to me you also had a delayed flight which by an hour that did suck with two kids stuck on a tarmac for an hour but do you know who I think has had a more sucky week than me it would be the woman who was sitting next to me who had to bear witness to my children absolutely destroying the plane that's the person I feel the most sorry for so let's just say that that was my suck my sweet for the week is that I came back from Magnetic Island it is the most fucking beautiful place in the whole world i do not know why more people don't go there i do

not know why it's not busier i mean don't go there because i love that there's no one there but my dad lives on magnetic island which for anyone who doesn't know is in the north coast like queensland i love that you know you're like asking the question at the same time it's just off the mainland of townsville and it's this beautiful island it's like covered in all these huge granite rocks like these round boulder rocks it looks like something off the moon like it's a really special looking place it's also got the biggest population of koalas wild koalas in all of australia they're all just concentrated on this one island so i was driving down to the little hotel that we were staying at because my dad's place is just a two better and there was

just a koala in the tree next to the road just chilling out eating some gum leaves it's just the most fucking beautiful place ever and this sounds like an ad but it's not because magnetic island is so like set in the 80s that no one would ever pay me to do an ad from there but like tourism queensland if you're interested but also like a hashtag just go because it's fucking great how do you find wild koalas because i feel as though koalas are kind of like they're a bit of a gaslight bear oh yeah nah they're not nice they look cute super cute don't like you also have chlamydia you can't catch it from them though are you sure i reckon you could please for anyone who's like what the fuck is she talking about there's a specific there's four

strains of chlamydia one is the sexual one that you know we're more familiar with but there's a special one that only koalas get i don't know if it can jump species well i don't think that Anyone should be trying to catch it, put it that way. But no, it sounds so crazy. I don't know how we got here, but there is a chlamydia epidemic in the koala population, but not on Magnetic Island. Magnetic Island, place to be.

Chlamydia free from 93. I don't know where that came from. Anyway, guys, that is it from us. We hope that you loved the episode. We hope you got something out of this. You know, it was a bit of a different chat for us today, but it is something that I think is really important. And we really hope that for anybody out there

who has had these thoughts or maybe are sober curious and are wanting to try it that you feel like you have the confidence to do so and you know what to do tell your mom tell your dad tell your dog tell your friend and share the love because we love love We'll be right back.