Thank you everyone, I appreciate the encouragement.
Matron, I think I am like you in that when I don't drink I feel so good I forget that it can feel so bad. Then it gets dangerous.
I feel sad for my friend. She was so brilliant and beautiful and amazing in her 20s and 30s. She walked into any job she wanted and she always did well at work because she is so clever and quick and assertive and charismatic. She and her first partner bought a house in London when I was struggling to make rent every month in a shared flat. I longed to be like her: beautiful, confident, successful, with an incredible lightness of touch. She never got bogged down or stuck with things like I always seemed to. I always seemed to be seething under the oppression of a stupid boss, or a noisy neighbour, or a crap boyfriend or something. She always seemed to be able to do anything and laugh anything off.
I'm not going to tell her story on here because it isn't mine to tell, but like me she is now separated with two small children, and like many women, coming out of a relationship with children has absolutely shafted her financially. She's feeling blocked and thwarted, and doing the kind of pound-by-pound nail biting budgeting that I always used to do and she never used to need to.
This is why I was feeling so good - good enough to slip - yesterday. At lunchtime, I set up a spreadsheet for my monthly outgoings on the basis that I'm single, and it looks like it works. If I'm careful, it looks like it works. I was flooded with a sense of power and relief when I clicked those obedient numbers into place. I need to cut a proper deal with P and have advice that it's fair. but to me it looks like it's ok and it works.
I pulled up all my old spreadsheets of the times I have done that before. It was always me, and I always did it on my own, and when I was bricking it - like the spreadsheet I did that had preschool childcare for two children in it - I was bricking it by myself. I looked at them and thought: nothing changes. Still me, dealing with things, on my own, facing up to the numbers. That sounds like a negative thought, but it wasn't. I was thinking: I can do this.