Clare Pooley on finding your passion through sobriety

Clare Pooley joins Club Soda's Dru Jaeger to talk all things journalling. Clare decided to change her drinking when she noticed how much her wine habit was affecting her life. She worked in advertising, and her job required a lot of socialising and wining and dining with clients. Drinking was affecting her as a parent, she was gaining weight, and she was struggling with insomnia. She knew that moderation wasn't going to work for her, and so decided to stop drinking. Writing about her experiences was an intrinsic part of her changing her habits. This was done via an anonymous blog for some time.


Who is Clare Pooley?

Clare Pooley graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge and spent twenty years working in advertising before becoming a full-time mum. Realising that her ‘wine o’clock’ habit was out of hand, Clare started writing a blog, Mummy was a Secret Drinker, which has had nearly three million hits. Her memoir, The Sober Diaries was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. Clare’s debut novel - The Authenticity Project, was inspired by her own experience of exposing the rather grubby truth about her own seemingly perfect life. Clare’s talks include a TEDx talk - ‘Making Sober Less Shameful’, a talk for Radio 4’s Four Thought, and numerous podcast interviews.


Try our How To Journal course

If you are interested in exploring more about journaling and how we can support each change, we're drinking Club Soda is short course How To Journal is available at join Club soda.com. If you sign up before the 11th of July 2021, if you can use the discount code journal50 to get the course for half price, or the discount code journalfree to get the course free of charge. How to Journal has been developed thanks to the generous support of Clare Pooley.

Find Club Soda:

The Club Soda Tasting Room is at 39 Drury Lane, London, WC2B 5RR

Find us on Instagram

Transcript

Dru Jaeger  0:00  
If you want to try alcohol free drinks, but you're unsure where to start Club Soda can help you make better choices. And to make things even easier, we've launched some new subscription boxes so you can get amazing drinks delivered straight to your door trial discovery box with our pick of the best alcohol free drinks around. It's packed with seasonal specials, new releases and some old favourites. And if you love wine, try our wine club box, you can explore the best alcohol free wines and wine alternatives. With each box, you will also get an invite to a monthly online live tasting so you can learn more about each drink and we can try these drinks together. So what are you waiting for? Buy the box drink the box Cheers. Hello and welcome to the Club Soda podcast. I'm Dru Jaeger. Club Soda is all about helping you live well by being more mindful about drinking. If you want to choose better alcohol free drinks, make connections or discover how to change this podcast is for you. And if you want even more good stuff, come and find us at join Club Soda calm. Today's episode of the Club Soda podcast is all about journaling, and how it can help you when you're changing your drinking. And I'm really excited about our special guest who's joining me to share her experiences of writing. I have to say, It's not often that I get to chat to a New York Times bestselling author, but I'm delighted to be joined by one today. And our guest today is also award winning her debut novel The authenticity project recently picked up an award from the romantic novelists' Association. But if you've been part of the Club Soda community for a while, you will probably know her best as the author of the sober diaries, which documents the story of how she quit drinking. So drumroll please. Claire Puli. Welcome to the Club Soda podcast. Thank you. It's so lovely to be here. I'm so glad that you've joined us. I'm so so you know your your name will be familiar to lots of people in the Club Soda community, but we always have people joining who are just finding their way, listening to this podcast for the first time. So for those people who don't know, you, tell us a bit about you.

Clare Pooley  2:12  
Oh, well, I used to drink way too much. I started, I started drinking a lot, I guess when I was in my late teens, early 20s. And it was the days of absolutely fabulous and Bridget Jones and the Sex and the City girls and, and the ledet. And it seemed to me that drinking a lot was a not only great fun, but it was part of my sort of feminist duty to keep up with all those guys and drink as much as they were. And I didn't really think about the harm that it might be doing or the fact that it might be a drug or any of those things. It just seemed to me to be what everyone else was doing to as I drank my way through university, I went into advertising. And I spent 20, nearly 20 years in advertising and it was a work hard play hard environment and alcohol was intrinsically bound up in that whole lifestyle. So we had a bar in the office, I had a big expense budget and part of my job was taking clients out and showing them a good time You know, it drinking in restaurants and clubs and all of that sort of stuff. And and gradually, I just started drinking more and more and more because my tolerance increased. So I wasn't one of those people that was often if ever obviously drunk. I just used to be able to drink a lot without anyone noticing. You know, I used to get to the end of the day and I pour myself a large glass of wine to relax and I by this stage I had three kids and it was sort of it was me time it was it was it was what again, what I thought everyone was doing my Facebook and and Instagram feeds were filled with memes about wine o'clock and all that. So I bought a large glass of wine to relax. And that large glass of wine tended to and that turned into three and because my glasses were so big three glasses of bottle and all I knew it I was drinking a bottle of wine a day at the week during the week. And then at weekends, it would be more than that probably two bottles of wine. So about 10 bottles of wine a week, which is

Dru Jaeger  4:26  
obviously a lot of wine.

Clare Pooley  4:29  
And it was almost entirely wine. sort of had this thought that if I didn't drink spirits, it meant that I didn't really have a problem. And if I didn't do well midday then I didn't really have a problem at all these all these reasons to convince myself that I didn't really have a problem was deep in my heart. I knew I had a problem I was you know, I was really anxious all the time. I was in terrible Insomniac, I was massively overweight. I I was wasn't a good mother because I was constantly trying to ask Ate My own children. And, you know, generally I think my life, my life felt like it was stuck in a rut. It just, you know, I'd all of my horizons had got smaller. And, and yeah, life. Life just wasn't what I expected it to be.

Dru Jaeger  5:21  
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the one of the interesting things, knowing a bit about you and about your story is the extent to which writing about your experiences was absolutely integral for you in the process of change. You know, when we think about this business of journaling, I think sometimes people imagine that it's just gonna make some notes as I'm going along, to work out, you know, and keep track of what's going on. And I might kind of scribble about the mount that I drank or didn't drink today, and that kind of thing. But for you, it was something more than that wasn't actually the there was something about writing about your experiences, and about the process of change that actually helps you change. Is that right?

Clare Pooley  6:05  
Yeah. And it was, it was all bound up with shame, to be honest, because one of my most overwhelming emotions when I realised I had to quit drinking, and I tried to moderate by the wave hears and you just couldn't do it. And I just came to the conclusion that that giving up entirely was was the only option. And I but I was really ashamed. I couldn't, I didn't feel like I could talk to any of my friends or my family, or my GP, or even a you know anybody about what a mess I got myself into. And, but I knew I had to offload somehow I knew that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't healthy to keep all of this stuff to myself. I felt like I needed to be accountable as well. So I thought that writing would be a way of doing that. But still, while staying, you know, keeping it all personal. Why I wrote under a pseudonym. So initially, I thought about writing a diary, because when I was little, I'd always written a diary. And I'd always loved writing and but i'd stopped writing for decades because I was too busy, partying hard and play and working hard, and all of those other things of being a mum. So, so I thought about writing a diary. And then I remembered coming back to Sex in the City because I remembered Carrie, and you know, her beavering away on wordprocessor up in

Dru Jaeger  7:37  
those moments?

Clare Pooley  7:39  
Oh, actually, I could be like that, you know, I could I could do this 21st century thing way to blog rather than, than, then a diary. So, so I set up a blog, which given that I'm a technophobe was a bit of a challenge. And I called it mommy was a secret drinker. And I called myself sober Mummy, because, due to the shame, I didn't want anyone to know, it was actually me. And I wrote in it every single day, and I just, I treated it like a friend really, or a therapist. I just offloaded everything that was going on in my head. And yeah, it was incredibly cathartic.

Dru Jaeger  8:18  
I mean, I'm intrigued by this as you know, when you talk about you when you talk about shame, you know, and I appreciate the your blog was was anonymous to begin with, although, you know, obviously, you know, it turned into a book and you you revealed who you were, but actually the I'm wondering whether was the the process of blogging in public even though anonymous, do you think that was chipping away at that sense of shame that you were carrying around?

Clare Pooley  8:45  
Yes, definitely. Because what the blogging did was it started creating this community and was wouldn't have happened if it has been writing in a diary. So So after him, No, I didn't publicise it at all people gradually started to find me and it sort of snowballed. You know, it went kind of viral. And and what I discovered is that whenever I offloaded about some something terrible I'd done when I was drinking, or some weird thoughts that I used to have, or, you know, stuff that I was going through now wasn't drinking, I would get people coming back to me from all over the world going he had me too, you know, I did. So I mean, just to give you an example, I remember. I remember one day talking about how when I was drinking, I'd had this irrational fear of cashiers and, and how I used to, you know, whenever I bought alcohol in a shop, I would go all in and start tearing out the kids and I go, well, we're buying a bottle of wine for daddy. We try not to same shop too often because I thought that the cashiers were judging me. Yeah, and one of the great things about quitting drinking was not feeling judged by a cashier I had so many people come back to me on this blog post saying, Yeah, I feel felt judged by cashiers too, you know, and it's not just you and, and this conversation went on, and then somebody commented, I'm a cashier, and I do judge you. So. So I think that that process of discovering that I was not alone, and what I was going through was the journey shared by so many people was what started chipping away at that shame. And also, I think it's just a matter of time, I think it takes you time to realise that it's not your fault, it's the fault of the drug is alcohol that we should be angry with, and not ourselves. And, you know, now I feel so stupid that I felt so ashamed because I should have felt proud, you know, I was doing something really hard and really life changing. And, you know, really transformative. And, and I should have been really proud of myself instead of hiding away feeling feeling terrible. And that's why I also did a TED talk a year about a year after I quit, or no, two years after I quit drinking, making sober less shameful, because I didn't want anyone else to feel the shame that I'd felt. Yeah,

Dru Jaeger  11:24  
yeah, I think that's it's such a useful reflection, think about actually how shame about our past experiences can actually really hold us back from helping others. Because we don't want to talk about the things that we've been through, because we feel like they reflect so badly on us. But that actually, you know, that means that others you know, and so so, you know, the world is very grateful, obviously, for your blog, and then that got turned into cyber diaries. Because it it's, it's a story about how change happens, and how it's possible. And very often, we don't, people are carrying around those stories privately in their heads. So many people are walking around with these with these journeys of 5678 longer years having having put alcohol in its place. But still carrying this sense of I can't talk about who I used to be. Yeah, and

Clare Pooley  12:23  
Alcoholics Anonymous, have done amazing things for you know, hundreds of 1000s of people over the years and are a fabulous institution. But I think the word autonomous is really problematic, because it, I think it perpetuates that shame. If you feel that you have to be anonymous, that you have to hide your story in church halls and only talk to people who've been through exactly the same thing, then we will we keep we keep up this myth that that there is something terribly wrong with with people who can't cope with their drink. So, you know, I think the more the more we can turn around publicly and say, Hey, I quit drinking, and my life is not only fine, but actually much better than it was before. And that is something that you would want to consider too, even if you don't fit the archetype or mould of you know, the rock bottom alcoholic. Better.

Dru Jaeger  13:30  
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we were talking about this before we started recording about my own experience of changing my drinking, I'm my journey. And this is a bit atypical, I guess. Because actually, my changing my drinking has been really centred around a journey of understanding and living well, with my mental health and the expanded range of emotions that I live with, compared to others, and actually, how alcohol when it has a consistent role in my life, you know, helping me cope, sometimes with very big emotions, actually holds me back. And, you know, impacts on my anxiety contributes to my depression, and actually that I am better, healthier. If I'm drinking less or not at all. And now, you know, I'm someone who does drink very occasionally, but you know, vanishingly rarely, in global terms. And I think there is that as well as this. You know, if we have that image of it's only rock bottom drinkers who can change, we ignore the people like me, people like you, all of the all of us who come to an understanding about the role that alcohol is paid in our life and work out how we're going to live well, whether we're, you know, drinking occasionally or or not at all. But yeah, telling those stories is really important as well.

Clare Pooley  14:51  
Yeah, I mean, there's something I talked about it in the TED Talk, which is that you know, there is this this methyl is understanding that you only give up alcohol if you have to. And, you know, we need to flip that. So you know, so that people can feel that they can give up alcohol if they want to, for all sorts of positive reasons, no negative reason. So you might decide you want to give up alcohol because of your mental health because of your sleep, because of your physical health, you know, all sorts of, there are all sorts of positive reasons why you would make that altogether wholesome lifestyle choice shouldn't be any different from somebody turning around and saying, actually, I feel better without gluten in my life, or, you know, I feel better without red meat in my life, whatever, you know, whatever it is, they're all perfectly valid lifestyle choices that people can make without being somehow seen as as, as strange or problematic.

Dru Jaeger  16:00  
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so you've been you've been sober for some six years now. What's the you know, very often in these conversations, obviously, because of, you know, the flow of people into Club Soda community, it's important to talk about the early stages. But for you, what have you learned as your journeys, as your journeys continued? what's what's been uncovered for you? Beyond year one,

Clare Pooley  16:26  
I guess one of the main things that I learned is that the trends in the transformative effect of quitting drinking doesn't stop it, you know, it keeps going. My second year of being sober was actually in many ways more transformative than the first, you know, the first first year I felt was all about looking inwards, it was all about doing the mental and physical work that you need to go through to get used to a life without drinking and, and a lot of that actually is about learning to deal with emotions that you spent so many years numbing. So learning to deal with fear, learning to deal with anxiety, all of those things, it's very inward looking. And that's absolutely the way it should be. And, you know, I think people often beat themselves up in the first year, because they're not, you know, suddenly taking up yoga or, or, or making jewellery or whatever, whatever it might be. And actually, you know, I always tell people look, it's exhausting just just doing the, you know, doing the, that inward looking stuff is really exhausting. So just on that fit for year one, but often you get to the end of year one, and you sort of emerge blinking. From this stage you've been through, and you sort of think, Well, okay, I'll feel a lot better now. And I've got so much more time on my hands, and I've got so much more energy, and what am I going to do with it, you know, do now and people do extraordinary things. I mean, that's the point at which I decided I was going to look at turning my blog into a book and getting a publishing deal. And I started looking at doing the TED talk and all of that sort of thing. And, you know, couldn't have done that in year one that was, you know, that was just way out of my reach. But by year two, everything suddenly started to feel more possible than it had before. And I got, I think the work that you go through, makes you much more equipped to take big leaps in your life, because you get you get used to dealing with fear, you get used to dealing with anxiety, you get, you get, you start to you, you get a lot more self respect, you know, I spent so much of my drinking life not liking myself. And by year two, I thought actually I'm okay, you know, I've done something really great. And maybe I could do something else really good too. So, yeah, so so I think that that second year and beyond are, if anything even more miraculous than than the first year. So when listening who's in those early days, no, keep going because it really does keep keep on getting better and better. And you know what, the other thing I realised is that it's not a linear journey that you're going on. Often you find it's a circular journey. So, so you sort of you know, you keep taking that one day at a time and you keep plodding along and plodding along. And when you emerge blinking in year two, you realise often that you're right back at the beginning and you're sort of back where you were, when you were a teenager and all that the things that all that promise and, and all the energy and the the skills that you and the passions you had back then you often refined. So, a lot of people find that, you know, the thing they start, they start rediscovering or re or doing in their second or third year sober is the thing they loved as a child which for me was reading and writing. Now that My not only my new passion but my career. And lots of people find that I've had so many so many messages from people saying things like, I remember one lady who said, she wrote me an email saying that she'd read a blog post I'd done about rediscovering your childhood self. And she, she thought that actually her passion when she was a child was riding so. So she found a local stables and did a few ride, you know, new riding lessons and loved it so much that she started working for the stables. And she loved that so much that she bought her own staples. And now is her home, not just her passion, but her career, and she's happier than she's ever been. And I hear that sort of story again and again and again.

Dru Jaeger  20:49  
Yeah, that's, that's brilliant talking of writing. So your your debut novel, the authenticity project came out a little while ago. And congratulations on it. And congratulations on it being award winning escaped her debut novel award from the romantic novelists' Association. Tell us a bit about until tell us a bit about the authenticity project, what's it about?

Clare Pooley  21:11  
Oh, well is kind of inspired by my own my own journey because, and by my journey of writing, actually, because as we were saying, you know, I, what really transformed my life was was writing, writing the truth about what was going on in, in my life in this blog. And if you'd looked at the time, if you looked at my social media feeds, you would have thought that everything in my life was was was pretty perfect, you know, all looked happy and jolly, and you know, fine. But it wasn't, it wasn't at all and, and telling the truth, or being authentic in in the blog is what made the real difference for me. And reading that story then made a real difference for a lot of other people. So that sort of got me thinking, Well, you know, if what would happen if other people started to tell the truth about their lives, and not not on the internet, like I did, but in a sort of old fashion notebook, because I'm fascinated by the idea of handwriting and finding something that somebody has written in and how, how intriguing that would be so so the story is about an old man, 79 years old, called Julian, who's an artist, and he is very lonely because his wife has died 15 years previously. And he writes a truth about his life and how lonely he is in his little notebook. And he leaves it in a cafe on the Fordham road, and is found by the owner of the cafe Monica, who decides to track him down and try and change his life. And she, in turn, writes the truth about her own life in a book and needs it somewhere else. So that book is passed between the different complete strangers or totally different. And they all managed to find each other and change each other's lives in miraculous ways. So yeah, so the authenticity project, is it sort of my story extrapolated?

Dru Jaeger  23:04  
Yeah, like any, any good first novel, some autobiography, and it's also

Clare Pooley  23:12  
one of the characters is a alcohol and cocaine addict. So we see his journey of getting sober. So So yeah, you know, as they say, Yeah,

Dru Jaeger  23:22  
absolutely. Um, so one of the one of the practical consequences of you you having won this award is that you very kindly donated some funds to Club Soda, which we are currently using to fund discount and free places on our course how to journal. And we'll put all the details in the show notes, but basically, between now and the 11th of July. So if you're listening to this podcast, as it's freshly out, you've just got about a week, you can sign up to our short course how to journal is a seven day course. It's all about exploring different journaling techniques, mindfulness and your relationship with alcohol and really giving you some time and space. To think and reflect on how you want to change and envision the life that you want to live is the course it's in seven lessons, but you can progress through at your own pace. And it comes with the support of community of people also doing Club Soda courses. So you can come and share the insights that you have. And hopefully learn a lot about yourself in the process of journaling, considering your drinking beginning to experiment and starting to change. If you are interested in getting a discounted or free place on that course. We're offering this on a on an honesty basis for people who are on low income, so don't let money be a barrier. The course itself only costs 15 pounds. If that's too much. If you use the coupon code journal 50 that's journal five, zero, you'll get the course for half price, or use the coupon code journal free and you'll get the course for nothing. And those coupon codes valid until the 11th. July after that, you know, of course, feel free to sign up, of course. But yeah, so so Claire, thank you so much for your, for your contribution and for making that possible we've had Today, more than 100 people start the course. So I'm really glad that it's it's making some waves and that people are starting to engage.

Clare Pooley  25:20  
No, that's great. I mean, it's the the final step of the 12 steps actually is giving back and is is partly a selfish thing, I think giving back because, you know, keeping connected with the sober community, and telling your own story, listening to the stories of others, you know, all of that, that that kind of thing is what keeps us sober. It's what keeps us remembering why we're doing what we're doing and feeling grateful for where we got two So, so yes, it is it is partly entirely selfish, I have to

Dru Jaeger  26:00  
say it's a it's a very great thing. Um, so So what hints Can you give us about things that you are currently working on? What's in the pipeline for you? Oh, well, I I've

Clare Pooley  26:12  
finished it. Well, when I say finished it, I'm in the middle of editing a second novel, which comes out probably maybe next year, so may 2022. And I can't tell you what it's called, because we're still arguing about the title. I think I've written about the titles so far. And I'm not sure where we're going to end up. So that's coming out in 2022. And I am actually talking to you from a retreat in Scotland, where I've been planning out my third novel, which will be out if we ever get that far in 2024. So, so yeah, so so the publishing publishing process works quite slowly. So so so you know, what you see is always several years behind what you were right. But, but yeah, and I, you know, if you'd asked me when I was a teenager, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you that I wanted to be a novelist, and and here I am, and if I hadn't quit drinking, I would not have got here. So again, if you're listening to this in the early days, believe me it really, it's a process which really can make dreams happen.

Dru Jaeger  27:31  
I was gonna say, I mean, if you if you imagine yourself sidling up to your former advertising expense account, drinking self in your younger life, do you think she would have believed that this was possible? Um, no, I,

Clare Pooley  27:54  
I don't know, she, she might have believed that. One day, she'd write a book somewhere off in the in the future, because, you know, it was always it was always a dream, but it was one that I never got any closer to, to, to making happen while I was drinking, but I don't think I would have believed that I could actually enjoy life without alcohol in it, you know, I've had to, when when I realised I had to quit. And you notice, like, I keep saying had to quit, as opposed to choose to quit, because that's it, I never would have chosen to quit. I thought, too. And, and I thought my life will be over I sort of my thought process went along the lines of, of Okay, you've you've had all your fun years now. And, and it's not about you anymore. It has to be about your family, your kids, and putting other people first and not being so bloody selfish. And, and, and that's just the way it's going to be. So suck it up. And that was that was the way I felt about it. I didn't feel at any level of you know, yay, this is going to be so exciting. That came later. So, so yeah, so that's, that's the bit I really want to believe is actually life would be better. And not not worse.

Dru Jaeger  29:26  
Yeah, absolutely. There is something amazing is that about the nature of these kind of big life choices that we make? You know, people from the outside might look at them and say that we're being brave, or that, you know, we might, you know, sometimes that language sells, but actually, in my experience, when you do come to those Big Crunch moments, there's something just inevitable about the choice. You know, I almost like I don't have a choice. I can't do anything else except change. And I think that I think so many of us do come to that point. Whether we drink or drugs or whatever, just go, I've got to do something now. It's just and, and, and it becomes an inescapable fact. And you're right, it doesn't feel particularly joyful in the moment, because it's just, this is just this big thing, which is happening right now.

Clare Pooley  30:15  
And by then you're often too tired. To be, to be joyful about it. And, you know, I felt like it was a set of weighing scales in a way. And that, you know, I got to the point where the joy of drinking was, was never outweighed by the pain of drinking so, so when I started drinking in my teens, the joy is definitely outweighed the downsides, you know, I don't remember having particularly bad hangovers or doing anything. So they're getting out of control in a really tragic way more, more than a few times. So so it was, you know, it was all about the joy and rated about the pain and over time that that those scales just gradually gradually gradually started shifting until I got to the point where it was almost all pain and very little joy. And and that's that's the point at which you realise that there is just no point anymore. There's a great quote by the, the writer who wrote Bird by Bird, which is a fabulous book on on write in life, and I can't remember her name now. But she talks about how she quit drinking, and she quit drinking because she couldn't lower her own expectations faster than her own behaviour. Which is lovely.

Dru Jaeger  31:43  
Yeah, that's good. I like that. Clay. If people want to connect with you, online, where can they track you down?

Clare Pooley  31:50  
All sorts of places. So I'm in I'm on Facebook, under the name sober mummies. I have a page called sober mummy. I'm on Twitter as at sea Puli writer, and I'm on Instagram, at Claire underscore Puli. So all of those places.

Dru Jaeger  32:10  
Brilliant. Well, congratulations again on your latest book. Thank you so much for your financial contribution. Just a reminder, if you are interested in exploring more about journaling and how we can support each change, we're drinking Club Soda is short course how to journal is available at join Club soda.com. And if you sign up before the 11th of July, if you use the discount code journal 55 zero, you'll get the course for half price, or if money is a barrier to change for you. Don't let that be the case. You can use the discount code journal free and you will get the course absolutely free of charge. Claire, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure. It's been lovely chatting to you as always Drew. All right. Cheers.

33:12  
This podcast is brought to you by Club Soda. You can find out more about what we do on join Club soda.com and on our social handles at join Club Soda