Laura Dockrill: ‘The older I got the more I was planning my week around drinking’

Two years on from giving up alcohol, Laura Dockrill and Ciara McDonnell compare notes on the most surprising byproduct of sobriety: joy

Laura Dockrill: “Having a feminist mum and growing up with a matriarchal background I thought that drinking pints and being that funny loud one in the room was an act of feminism, if that makes sense?” Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Vulnerability is humankind’s greatest superpower. When we take the shackles off our hearts and tell our deepest truths to the world, it resonates. If we are brave enough to share the darkest sides of ourselves, we give other people a shard of light to dance in.

I am a person who feels a lot. I have spent my whole life feeling like a baby chicken with no feathers — that energetic shield to protect me from other people’s emotions seemed to be completely absent. At once wanting to be a part of the world and at the same time hide away from it, I felt slightly outside the circle of where I should reside. Until, I discovered alcohol.

From my early 20s until just over two years ago I enjoyed a dance with booze that I believed facilitated my existence in the world. A crutch to a social situation that would ordinarily give me a panic attack, or a facility to let some steam out of my internal pressure cooker, drinking was the lid to my pot of life. Alcohol gave me the vehicle to be able to morph into the person that I thought people wanted me to be.

My decision to stop drinking did not come from one specific rock bottom moment. I don’t have a dreadful story to recount or a dark secret to unfurl. Rather, my decision came as a result of my commitment to look — entirely unblinkered — at my whole self.

The journey so far has been illuminating and challenging. I have had to face uncomfortable truths about myself and my behaviour patterns, and I have come to a place of deep compassion. I have gotten to know myself inside and out; the pieces of myself that I would have disappeared down the rabbit hole of tequila shots have been laid bare on the floor in front of me, forcing me to accommodate them.

On July 26 of this year, I was cresting a wave of gratitude and wondering why more people didn’t speak about the exquisite joy that comes with freeing yourself from something that has unwittingly held you captive. And then, on that very day, Laura Dockrill wrote “I am two years sober today. I spent my whole life trying to be a punk only to realise that I was one all along.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

This is how, at 7am on a Thursday in October, I found myself sharing heart truths and bearing my soul with a woman who looks as near to a real-life Disney princess as my brain would allow me to compute.

It’s unlikely that you don’t know who Laura Dockrill is, but just in case, here are the cliff notes. Author, illustrator and poet, Dockrill achieved worldwide fame by accident in 2018 when she was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. The singer Adele, who is her best friend and godmother to her son Jet, shared a blog post that Dockrill wrote about her experience and suddenly, she was viral. What followed was a bestselling memoir called What Have I Done, and a podcast called Zombiemum. Dockrill is the very definition of a truthseeker, and that’s where our conversation begins.

Growing up in London with parents who were punks and a strong vibrant mother who set the tone for her daughters by bucking the idea of quiet womanhood, alcohol was a tool of celebration at family gatherings. 

“Having a feminist mum and growing up with a matriarchal background I thought that drinking pints and being that funny loud one in the room was an act of feminism, if that makes sense?” 

Her skewed sense of feminism informed her belief that women who chose not to drink were boring or harking back to Victorian times. “I remember thinking as a child, ‘that’s not what I am’. Of course, now I know that’s not the truth. And the more you learn about writers and artists and poets, especially female ones, you’ll find strong links with alcohol.”

Laura Dockrill: “I remember feeling like something wasn’t right. The older I was getting, the more I was planning my week around drinking." Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Laura was never a messy drinker. She didn’t get blackouts, she was never sick from too much alcohol, she was not the person who needed to be poured into a taxi at the end of a good night. But, before becoming pregnant with Jet, she found herself beginning to be at the mercy of booze. “I remember feeling like something wasn’t right. The older I was getting, the more I was planning my week around drinking. I would pre-plan my week around the days I would be drinking and then my diet and exercise regime would be based around whether or not I could or couldn’t have alcohol.” Then, following the birth of gorgeous Jet, a diagnosis of postpartum psychosis dwarfed any worries around alcohol.

“Throughout my recovery, one of my biggest symptoms was insomnia. I didn’t want to take sleeping tablets after having to take antipsychotics. I remember thinking that I didn’t know anyone who took sleeping tablets but I knew lots who would drink a bottle of wine to sleep. And that felt normal to me.” Under the advice of a psychiatrist, Laura began to self-medicate her lack of sleep with a nip of whiskey at night. The nip turned into two whiskeys a night, which became two triple shots a night, and so on.

Married to her childhood sweetheart, musician and producer Hugo White (they met when Laura was 14), this came at a time when they as a couple were trying to peel back some semblance of their old life together. “[After my illness] we wanted to spend time together going to gigs, going out with our friends and being together. When I was ill, I felt such a need and want to get back to that I really romanticised alcohol as being the wax that made our wheels spin.”

One of Laura’s turning points came during a visit to a local pub with friends. At this stage a public figure of sorts, she was approached by a woman who wanted to share her fears about becoming pregnant following a history of depression. “I started telling her about my illness and I just felt like I didn’t listen to her concerns. I just gave a kind of TED Talk that she didn’t ask for. I woke up the next day and all I wanted to do was hunt her down and apologise for stealing the floor and saying too much and not listening to her. It was a big deal for her to express her depression to me and I just felt like I rampaged over it.”

When I decided to give up drinking, the most seismic changes in my life came through my closest relationships. Where before alcohol would have knitted us together, facilitating us to ease any cracks in our foundations without spikes of hurt or reparations, its lack thereof demanded pristine communication and no stone unturned. My closest relationships before remain my closest relationships now, though in deeper iterations than before. The same is true for Laura. “I really feel that this has brought out the part of the side of my personality that I really treasure, which is I’m the oldest sister, I’m a mother hen. And our house has started to become a hangover house where they can just come over on Sunday morning and just lay there and not say anything, and I’m gonna go, ‘let’s do CBT. Tell me about your anxiety. Have some spaghetti bolognese’.”

And so, to joy. Unequivocal, spiralling, ecstatic joy. Letting go of alcohol has brought an immeasurable bounty into Laura Dockrill’s life. She has recently returned from a trip to DisneyLand with Hugo and Jet, where she felt the glee of her son skyrocket through her veins. There is a photograph from the holiday that shows Laura beaming from inside out, and she says the person she recognises staring back at her is that 14-year-old girl who fell in love way back when.

“Being there, with Hugo and Jet doing that thing was everything to me. When it came to going home, I just couldn’t leave. I was screaming and laughing, and I enjoyed every single second of it. And I was seeing other couples in front of us on the rides with pints in plastic cups, and I was like ‘that would have been me — any excuse to blend parenthood with alcohol’. And I would have missed out on so much.”

Laura Dockrill: “I thought self-compassion was going for a massage. I didn’t know that it was actually soothing yourself, holding yourself." Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

These last two years have been a retrieval mission for Laura Dockrill, just as they have been for me. I have located and restored pieces of myself that were too painful to show on the outside until now. For Laura, it was learning and embracing the idea of self-compassion. “I thought self-compassion was going for a massage. I didn’t know that it was actually soothing yourself, holding yourself. So, if I’m having a difficult day, I’ll just put my hand on my chest and think ‘you didn’t drink. You could have drunk today, and you didn’t’. And it’s just that little, small gem that I can hold on to at the end of each day.”

Vulnerable, raw and feeling life with such a deep sense of self, Laura Dockrill may not realise it, but she has opened the door for a new conversation around alcohol. In a world where we are obsessed with self-care and doing things ‘right,’ it’s those of us who stumble and are gracious enough to talk about their fall that aid others on their path. The weight of being human is a heavy one for many, and the more we explore the twisty turny pieces of ourselves, the more we get to know the nuggets that allow us to meet our true selves. Weaving magic with words and the spirit of a Disney princess: watch this space.