At first glance, Michelle Stalimeros appeared far from someone struggling with alcohol.

She wasn’t indulging daily, nor was she stashing away bottles or waking up craving a drink. Her life was painted with the colors of a successful career, a healthy relationship, and an active social calendar.

Yet, her weekends often concluded on a similar note.

They ended in blackouts she couldn’t decipher, nights blurred into oblivion, and a profound sense of shame that lingered throughout the following week.

For years, Michelle believed these experiences highlighted a lack of self-control or a personal weakness. But now, with the clarity brought by sobriety and overcoming burnout, she perceives a more intricate picture.

Reflecting on her past, Michelle realized her drinking wasn’t about the intoxication itself. It was an escape, a way to numb her senses, offering a fleeting sense of freedom from the relentless pressures she had long endured.

Michelle grew up in New Zealand as the oldest of six children in what she described as a chaotic household. Her mother was a heavy drinker and alcohol was woven into family life as something adults used to cope, unwind and soften difficult moments.

By the time Michelle was old enough to drink, she had already absorbed two powerful messages: that she needed to hold it all together, and that alcohol was a normal way to let go.

She left home at 16 and started drinking young, first in the way many Australian and New Zealand teens do, at parties, sneaking access to alcohol, using fake IDs and joining in with a culture where drinking felt less like a choice and more like a rite of passage.

‘I grew up thinking that’s just what you do,’ Michelle told Daily Mail. ‘Drinking is a rite of passage into adulthood.’

Underneath that early drinking was something deeper. Michelle describes herself as shy, introverted and hyper-aware from a very young age. As the eldest daughter in a home that often felt unstable, she became the responsible one, the babysitter, the one who noticed everything and made sure everyone else was okay.

Her mother worked nights, and from around the age of 12, Michelle was helping collect the younger children, feed them, bathe them and keep things running. That overwhelming sense of responsibility followed her into adulthood and into the workplace, where she became known as someone dependable, conscientious and unwilling to let anyone down.

What she did not realise for many years was how exhausting that constant emotional vigilance had become.

‘I was always on,’ she said. ‘I always felt like something was going to go wrong.’

Alcohol gave her a break from that. Not a healthy one, as she now knows, but a powerful one. It quietened the internal scanning, softened the tension and allowed her to stop monitoring herself so closely and become, for a little while, the lighter, freer version of herself she longed to be.

‘I didn’t drink to get drunk,’ she said. ‘I drank to feel uncontained.’

That feeling became particularly seductive in adulthood, when alcohol was everywhere. Networking drinks, Christmas parties, fancy dinners, work functions, catch-ups with friends and weekend celebrations. It was easy to blend in and easy to tell herself this was just what everyone did.

And in many ways, it was.

She would go out for dinner with friends and they would drink a bottle of wine before even ordering food. Then someone would suggest going somewhere else. Another bar, another round, more drinks. Many of the people around her were big drinkers too, which made it even easier to dismiss what was happening as normal.

But her body was telling a different story.

As she got older, especially into her late 40s and early 50s, Michelle’s drinking began to collide with burnout, anxiety and what she now suspects was perimenopause. It was the perfect storm.

The blackouts became more frequent. She was still functioning, still talking, dancing and moving through the world, but whole chunks of the night would disappear. The next morning she would wake with a pounding head and a deep sense of dread, trying to reconstruct where she had been and what she had done.

Sometimes she would check her bank history and realise she had been to bars she had absolutely no memory of entering. Other times she would scroll through her messages and watch, with horror, as they became increasingly incoherent as the night went on.

‘I would just hate myself for a week,’ she said. ‘Then once I’d fully recovered, I would do it all over again the next weekend.’

From the outside, though, she still did not fit the stereotype many people associate with serious alcohol problems. She wasn’t drinking daily, she could stop for stretches of time, and she was still showing up at work and in her life.

In fact, Michelle says the only people who truly saw how distressing her drinking was were the people who lived with her.

Michelle’s husband, who is not much of a drinker himself, became the one carrying the quiet weight of it.

When Michelle said she would be home by a certain time and then disappeared into the night, he was the one left waiting, watching the clock, wondering if she was safe. If seven o’clock came and went, he would start to spiral, unsure whether she was still out with friends, had made it into an Uber, or needed help.

There were nights when friends would call him to come and collect her because she could not get herself home. Other times, he would be trying to piece together her whereabouts through increasingly garbled text messages, attempting to track her down while she became less and less coherent.

‘I felt really sorry for him,’ Michelle said. ‘Every time I went out, it was stressful for him.’

The impact didn’t stop there. It followed them into their mornings, into the quiet parts of their life together. One of Michelle’s favourite things had always been getting up early and going for a walk with her husband, something simple and grounding that they both loved.

But after a big night, she often could not get out of bed.

She remembers mornings where she would wake with a pounding head, overwhelmed with shame, unable to move while he went on ahead without her. Eventually she would force herself up and walk to meet him, crying the whole way, every step heavy with regret.

There were weekends away that were overshadowed by hangovers so severe she could barely function, unable to eat, needing to lie down while time together slipped away.

For her husband, it meant living with a constant unpredictability. Not knowing which version of the night he was going to get. Not knowing if an easy evening out would turn into something stressful and chaotic. Not knowing if the next day would be lost to recovery and regret.

Still, because so much of it happened in socially accepted settings, Michelle found it hard to trust her own distress. Other people would brush it off. We all get a bit drunk sometimes.

You weren’t that bad. It was fine.

Those reactions made her doubt herself even more.

The shift came not through one dramatic rock bottom, but through burnout.

After years of pushing through at work, Michelle became so depleted that her doctor told her she needed to stop and take a break. She went on a mental health care plan and took two months off work, using that time to begin understanding what was happening beneath the surface.

As part of her recovery, she completed Mental Health First Aid training, later becoming an instructor. During that training, a section on how anxiety, depression and substance use feed into each other hit her with startling clarity.

‘I just had this epiphany,’ she said. ‘I’ve been feeding the monster.’

Alcohol was not helping her cope. It was the thing keeping her stuck.

She spoke to another woman in the training who had been sober for five years and, by the end of that session, Michelle had made up her mind. She has not had a drink since.

This June, she will mark three years alcohol-free.

What surprises her most is that once it clicked, sobriety did not feel like deprivation. It felt like relief.

She sleeps better. Her relationships are stronger. She is calmer, clearer and more present. But perhaps the biggest shift is the clarity she now has about herself and her life.

‘The biggest thing is the clarity,’ she said. ‘The clarity to know what I really want, to get to know myself, who I am underneath all of that performance.’

These days, her life looks very different. Her mornings are filled with long walks, and she is working on her own passion project at a gentler pace, drawing on everything she has learned through burnout, sobriety and recovery to help others navigating similar struggles through her platform, Nostos Nest.

She says she no longer misses alcohol, or even thinks about it much. The early ‘firsts’ were difficult, but over time the desire faded. Now, she feels about alcohol much the same way she feels about smoking, something she gave up decades ago. It simply no longer fits.

Michelle believes many women wait too long to question their drinking because they do not fit the stereotype. They are not drinking every day or visibly falling apart. They are simply doing what everyone around them seems to be doing, all while quietly struggling.

‘I think a lot more people have problem drinking than the statistics really say,’ she said.

For women in particular, she believes the danger lies in how easily alcohol becomes a reward, a release and a coping mechanism all at once. A glass of wine at the end of a long week. A way to unwind. A way to get through.

It can look harmless right up until it doesn’t.

And that is what makes Michelle’s story so powerful. She did not need a single dramatic moment to realise alcohol had become a problem. She simply got honest about what it was costing her.

‘I don’t miss drinking,’ she said. ‘I’ve developed the ease and groundedness I once chased through alcohol, without needing it to get there.’

For a woman who once believed alcohol was essential to coping, relaxing and belonging, that may be the most extraordinary change of all.

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