Why sobriety/ endings / boundaries still hurt

What Healing Doesn’t Spare Us From

As we come to the end of the year, I have been thinking a lot about what a year this has been. I moved to Lisbon towards the end of 2024 – I left behind 15 years of London life, but I didn’t fully leave behind all the shit that no longer served me. I definitely packed that up in a suitcase and dragged it along with me. Wherever I go, there I am. (HAHA..) There has been great joy. And there have been moments that felt excruciating. 

A bumpy fast forward to July 2025, I decide that I need to get sober again. I also decided that a friendship that I had tried to resurrect from the dead was better left in the past. 2025 was the year I transformed my relationship with my hormones and my body, I brought myself back from the noose that PCOS felt like. I healed a lot of my janky habits with food, I got really clear on my routine, I showed up for myself even when I didn’t feel like it. I took my health into my own hands and kept going for answers. I read a lot. I had some hard conversations with my husband to be. But I also held onto some really really bad habits. Clung to them, you could say. One of them being alcohol and the other one being shitty friendships. Finally, I gave up and I gave in.

July 2025 was a sort of breaking point for me. It wasn’t anything particularly dramatic, but some part of me just felt like I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t keep playing the caretaker, the therapist, the mother in my friendships. And I suspected some part of me only felt real value when I was playing one of this roles. I felt drawn to these codependent enmeshed dynamics like a moth to a flame. Did I truly want the best for my friend, or did I just want to appear the rescuer, the knight in shining armour, the hero? 

If anything, 2025 taught me to let things fall apart. I have just turned 5 months sober. I didn’t think that that would ever be possible for me again. Being sober in my twenties was different, in my thirties it felt like… a total defeat and also a rising. The lesson with this friend was handed to me by the universe again. Not feeling seen or known was a reason I returned to this friendship. I thought quantity equalled depth. This was someone who had known me since school. It had spanned years, and had had a 7 year break in between. The grief feels immense some days. Debilitating. Vast. I lost her once and then I felt I had lost her again. But I also knew that I couldn’t keep doing it. Some part of me kept whispering that this wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t honest and it wasn’t reciprocal. 

Moving to Lisbon also gave me distance from familial dynamics. I have a better relationship with my mum now. And I truly understand what a boundary is now. Even if it feels wobbly at first, and scary AF, my somatic work has taught me how to tune in to my nervous system. To know when some days are going to be a little slower than others. And days when I need to have a big cry and a lie down. My scans show a MILD ovarian form of PCOS. MILD. MILD she screams. That is through the nutrition, the supplement and the lifestyle changes I have made. I know for a fact that kissing goodbye to alcohol was the final ribbon to tie on this box. I decided to train as a hormonal health practitioner alongside my somatic work, because I believe that knowing our hormones, our cycles & nervous system is fundamental for women to be able to flourish in the world. Not just to get by. 

But looping back to the title of this post, sobriety/ endings/ boundaries still feel really f**king painful and hard sometimes. What healing has not and never will spare me from, is pain. Parts of me will always want to return to anything that promises me temporary oblivion because sometimes it feels SO much easier, and sometimes that part shows up and runs the show. But I can tend to her now, and pat her on the head, smile and say it’s okay, I get you need to be here today. And usually that puts things to rest. Allowing that part to be with me, but not totally destroy me will be the greatest work of my life (Does that sound dramatic????)

Audre Lorde wrote about pain as something that must be spoken, named, and transformed, not silenced or endured in isolation. So I give voice to my pain today, I name what feels unnameable. I let myself feel like I am in the mud because I know that I will feel great joy and gratitude again. 

For 2026, I have a little page of goals (hey, I’m an Aquarius). But I also have many intentions. I intend to be honest, I intend to keep going, I intend to trust, and I intend to build upon the deep and vast relationship I have with myself. And I hope to help my clients do the same. To me. To Us.