Eight years ago, I got so drunk at a friend's birthday party that I fell over and face-planted on a concrete driveway, cutting my face open and busting my lip.
I'd started drinking early - a bottle of champagne with a friend before we'd even left the house.
Then, at the party itself, my glass was constantly kept full by catering staff. We didn't eat until late, so all that booze hit an empty stomach.
Later in the evening, swept along with the party atmosphere, I started downing shots of tequila. Then I went outside for a cigarette, something I only ever did when I drank. Crouching down to stub it out, I toppled forward and landed face-first.
There was blood everywhere and several people around to witness my humiliation, but I was too drunk to feel any shame or embarrassment.
A friend took me to the bathroom to clean me up, then walked me home and put me to bed.
I sound like a teenager drinking for the first time. Except I was 41, a mother of two and this party was to celebrate my friend's 40th birthday. It was only the next day, sober and sore, that I came to a brutal realisation.
While I wasn't an alcoholic - the issue wasn't as black and white as that - I did have a problematic relationship with booze.
With one in three adults doing Dry January, it might be a good time for a reassessment.
In short, I was a grey-area drinker. Grey-area drinking looks normal from the outside. You have the occasional big night of binge drinking but you also drink frequently at home.
While you're not bedridden with hangovers, you often feel tired and out of sorts, which you start to accept as your baseline.
You're not physically dependent, not the stereotypical alcoholic but, as I had done for years, you may drink in a way that quietly impacts your mood, parenting, confidence and health.
The warning signs had been there for a while, but I'd chosen to ignore them. Like the camping trip a couple of weeks earlier when, while sitting around a campfire with my family and friends, I opened a bottle of wine at four in the afternoon. I hadn't planned on drinking it all myself, yet by half past five I'd done just that. And I didn't even feel tipsy.
Are you a grey-area drinker?
Ask yourself these six questions to find out:
- Do you plan your drinking, when you'll start, what you'll have, how much feels acceptable?
- Does alcohol take up headspace even on days you're not drinking - what you might call 'booze noise'?
- Is it your go-to for stress, switching off or rewarding yourself?
- Do you negotiate with yourself around drinking, making rules you then break?
- Have you ever hidden how much you've had, or felt ashamed of it?
- Do you take breaks, feel better, then slide back fast?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then grey-area drinking could be a problem for you.
You don't have to call yourself an alcoholic to admit alcohol isn't serving you anymore. Start by learning and understanding what alcohol is doing to your brain, hormones and mental health.
Then treat stopping as an experiment, not a life sentence.
I recommend a 90-day break. Before you start, rate your sleep, energy, mood, anxiety, skin, weight and outlook on life. Revisit those scores at the end and decide what to do next from there.
And if your immediate reaction is, I can't take 90 days off, that in itself is a strong indicator you're in the grey area. A one-to-three drinker simply wouldn't care.
I'd always been a big drinker, having come of age in the Sex And The City years, when boozing felt synonymous with female independence and freedom. I was Sarah the party girl, the fun one who could handle her drink.
Then, in 2010, aged 33, I became a mum and alcohol took on a new meaning. It went from social lubricant to necessary reward.
A glass of wine after getting two small children to bed became something I'd earned after a long day of parenting (having stepped back from my director role at a City recruitment firm to be at home with the children) - sometimes shared with my husband when he got home from work, other times poured just for me.
By 2017, my tolerance had climbed so high that a bottle of wine barely registered. I was drinking Thursday to Sunday nights, mostly wine. I wasn’t drinking every day, which helped me tell myself it was normal.
But it was taking its toll. The day after drinking, I was more than tired. I was anxious, overthinking everything and so lacking in confidence I couldn’t face chatting at the school gate.
The tipping point came after that fateful night at my friend's birthday. The next morning I woke to my five-year-old daughter standing beside my bed.
'Mummy,' she said. 'What happened to your face?' The simplicity of her question floored me. I couldn't joke about what happened or pretend it was normal any more - I just felt this wave of shame.
At that moment, I realised I risked my daughter believing that the tonic for life's difficult moments and the only way to guarantee a good time was to have a drink.
That said, I didn't think I had a serious problem - I thought I just needed to have a pause. So I decided to go cold turkey and not touch a drop of alcohol for 21 days (they say it takes three weeks to break a habit). When the 21 days were up, I didn't want to go back.
I felt amazing - happy and confident; I was sleeping well; my anxiety had disappeared; my head felt clear; I had more energy; my skin was glowing; people kept asking why I looked so good.
So I kept going, and that short experiment became 100 days.
But then I began questioning whether I needed to continue with this abstinence. I told myself I wasn't physically dependent, so surely that proved I didn't have an alcohol problem.
So I ditched sobriety, telling myself I'd be different this time; just a glass now and then. But within weeks, I was drinking exactly as I had before.
Some nights, it would be a couple of glasses; others, I'd polish off a bottle.
By now my relationship with alcohol was taking up huge amounts of headspace. It was exhausting. And so, I decided to quit altogether.
Once I stopped, I felt incredible and began to look at my life differently. I retrained as a health and wellbeing coach, specialising in grey-area drinking.
If this all sounds familiar and you've joined the estimated one in three adults in the UK doing Dry January this month, it might be a good time to reassess your own grey-area drinking.
So how can you tell if you fall into this category? Think of drinking on a scale from one to ten.
At one end, a one-to-three drinker can genuinely take it or leave it. Alcohol doesn't take up mental space and they can decide in the moment whether they even want a drink.
At the other end, nine to ten is severe alcohol use disorder where there's physical dependency and people need medical support to stop safely.
Grey-area drinking sits in the middle; roughly four to eight. You're not physically dependent but would struggle to do without it. You tell yourself you're not bad enough to need help even as alcohol starts to affect you. Look at my checklist to see if you too need to rethink your relationship with alcohol.
For me, the freedom of quitting my grey-area drinking has only grown with time. I'm about to turn 50; I look and feel better now than I did in my 30s. I have more energy; better health; clearer skin; confidence that doesn't need alcohol to prop it up. In fact, I wouldn't drink again now if you paid me.