Susannah looked like she had it all together, but she was losing her life to alcohol. It wasn’t the family intervention that made her stop drinking but something much more devastating

From the outside, Susannah Myerson’s life looked exactly as it should. She was building a successful career in advertising, producing TV commercials and travelling for work.

She had a partner she loved, a family who adored her and a life that, by all accounts, was working. And she knew how to play the part.

‘I was the fun one,’ she told Daily Mail. ‘The one who could keep up. The one who always stayed.’

But beneath it, something quieter was happening. Something harder to name.

‘I looked like I had it all together,’ she said. ‘But inside, I felt flat, foggy and disconnected.’

Susannah’s relationship with alcohol began like many people’s do. As a teenager, it was social, rebellious and fun. Growing up with five brothers, she learned quickly how to hold her own, matching their pace and their energy, often without thinking about what that meant for her.

‘I think I drank to fit in,’ she said. ‘To be one of the boys.’

By her twenties, alcohol wasn’t just something she did. It had become part of who she was. Working in advertising only deepened that connection. 

At the time, the industry revolved around connection, and connection often meant alcohol. Client lunches stretched into afternoons, afternoons into evenings, and celebrations were expected. Excess wasn’t questioned. It was normal.

She remembers being flown to New Zealand for lunch, drinking from the moment they boarded the plane, continuing through the day, then heading to a winery before some people flew back that same night. It wasn’t seen as unusual. It was simply part of the job.

There were trips to Cannes, awards nights and week-long stretches where drinking wasn’t an event but the backdrop to everything. At 23 or 24, it felt exciting, a sign she was doing well, living a life most people would envy.

Over time, though, that same environment made it harder to recognise when things had changed. There were no obvious warning signs, no single moment where she could say this is too much.

‘There weren’t many sober people around back then,’ she says. ‘It just felt like everyone was doing it.’

So when alcohol began to move from something social to something she leaned on, it didn’t register straight away. There were no alarms, just a quiet internal sense that something wasn’t quite right, a feeling she chose to ignore.

‘Deep down, I knew,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t feeling 100 percent. But I ignored it.’

From the outside, her life kept expanding. Her career was growing, her relationship was established and she had her own production company. It looked impressive, even enviable, the kind of life people point to as proof that things are going well.

Inside, it felt very different.

‘I was very unhappy,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t even really understand why.’

Alcohol became a way to soften that feeling, to take the edge off and keep moving. It helped her switch off without having to stop and ask harder questions. And all the while, she maintained the version of herself everyone expected to see.

‘The successful one. The social one. The one who had it all together,’ she says. ‘The one who was the most fun at a party.’

Until she wasn’t.

‘I would take it too far,’ she said. And people noticed.

In her mid-thirties, Susannah’s family asked her to come over for dinner. There was nothing unusual about it, no warning or sense that anything was coming. But when she arrived, her father and two of her brothers were already there, waiting. They had asked her there to talk about her drinking.

‘They were worried,’ she said. ‘Really worried.’

It was, in many ways, the moment everything should have changed. But it didn’t.

The conversation blindsided her, and instead of landing, it pushed her further into herself. ‘I was defensive straight away,’ she said. ‘I felt like they didn’t understand what I was going through.’

She pushed back, minimised it and told herself they were overreacting. That they didn’t get it. That this was just life. At the time, it felt easier to protect the version of herself she had been holding onto than to question it.

Looking back now, she can see something else was happening. 

‘That was probably the moment the mask stopped working,’ she said. But instead of changing, she doubled down.

What followed wasn’t another confrontation, but something quieter and more unsettling.

‘They kind of just gave up,’ she said. 

There was no second intervention, no escalation, just a gradual shift that was impossible to ignore. The concern faded into distance, and that, she says, was worse.

‘I could feel them pulling away,’ she says. ‘And that was actually harder than the conversation itself.’

Around the same time, she began to feel it in her relationship too. Her partner was still there, but something was different. He felt further away, less connected, and she could sense the gap widening.

‘I could feel him pulling away,’ she said. ‘And I knew I was going to lose him if things didn’t change.’

And that was the point where it became impossible to ignore.

‘It wasn’t just affecting me anymore,’ she said. ‘It was affecting everyone around me.’

It took 18 months of reflection, but after her family’s intervention, Susannah stopped drinking. She was 36.

The distance and the growing awareness that she was losing the people she loved most helped her make up her mind

‘I remember thinking, how did I get here?’ she said. ‘I’m better than this.’

Stopping, however, wasn’t the clean reset she might have hoped for. It was hard, isolating and at times overwhelming. She pulled back from social events, avoided situations that felt risky and sat with feelings she had spent years pushing away.

‘I felt very alone,’ she said. 

For the first six weeks, she didn’t tell her family. She wasn’t sure they would believe her, and part of her didn’t want to say it out loud until she knew it was real. When she finally told them, their reaction was relief, but also caution.

‘They were happy,’ she said. ‘But I think they were waiting to see if it would last.’

It did. But something else lingered.

At first, she believed that removing alcohol would bring her back to herself. That everything would fall into place once it was gone. Instead, she found she was still performing, just in a different way.

‘I just swapped masks,’ she said.

The party girl disappeared, but in her place came a new version of herself. Controlled, disciplined and determined to prove she had it all together. On the surface, it looked like progress. Inside, it felt strangely familiar.

‘I was white-knuckling it,’ she said. ‘I was taking sobriety so seriously that I’d lost myself again.’

The pendulum had swung from one extreme to the other, from excess to control, from chaos to rigidity. She had removed alcohol, but she was still orbiting it, still defining herself in relation to it.

‘I thought I had to be this version of myself,’ she said. ‘And it cost me being fun, being social, being me.’

For five years, she lived in that space, sober but still shaped by the same underlying patterns.

‘Even when I quit, alcohol was still controlling me,’ she said.  

The change didn’t come until a retreat in Byron Bay, five years into her sobriety. She had expected something gentle and reflective, but instead she was confronted with something much deeper.

‘It forced me to look at my identity,’ she said. ‘I realised I didn’t need to be defined by alcohol at all. Not as someone who drank, and not as someone who didn’t.’

For the first time in years, she felt free.

Now 43, with three children and a life that looks very different to the one she once led, Susannah says she feels something she hadn’t in a long time. Not just stable, but present, connected and grounded in a way that feels sustainable.

‘I have clarity, energy and confidence,’ she said. ‘I feel like myself again.’

Her relationships have changed too. They’ve deepened, repaired and rebuilt in ways she once wasn’t sure were possible. The family who once staged an intervention now see her in a completely different light, and she feels that shift in the way they relate to her.

‘They’re proud of me,’ she said.

And the partner she was driving away? He is now her husband.

These days, she feels more at ease in herself, more willing to show up and more connected to who she actually is, rather than who she thought she needed to be.

‘I feel good in my own skin,’ she said.

That experience has led her to create something she wishes had existed when she was in the thick of it. Not at rock bottom, not in crisis, but in that quiet, confusing space where nothing looks wrong on the outside and yet something doesn’t feel right underneath.

‘I think it’s a silent epidemic,’ she says. ‘So many women are struggling, but from the outside, everything looks fine.’

Her Sober Curious Reset Challenge is designed for those women, the ones who are still functioning, still showing up and still holding everything together, but quietly questioning their relationship with alcohol. It’s not about labels or extremes, and it’s not necessarily about quitting forever.

‘It’s about creating space to actually look at what’s going on,’ she said. 

The four-week program brings together small groups of women for weekly online sessions, supported by daily check-ins and connection. There are in-person elements too, including sound healing, meditation sessions and group meet-ups, designed to replace the rituals that once revolved around drinking with something more grounding and intentional.

At its core, she says, it’s about connection, not just with others, but with yourself. In those early days, she found the loneliness was one of the hardest parts, and it’s something she now sees reflected in the women who come to her.

‘What I’ve found is that being around other women who are going through the same thing makes such a difference,’ she said.

She’s been surprised by just how many women have reached out since launching it. Many of them don’t identify as having a ‘problem’, but they know something needs to shift.

‘Mum is drinking a bottle of wine at night, sometimes two, hiding it, normalising it,’ she said. ‘I was blown away by how many women are dealing with this.’

For Susannah, the goal isn’t perfection or rigid rules. It’s helping women reconnect with themselves in a way that feels sustainable, not performative, and grounded in real life rather than extremes.

‘Getting your spark back isn’t about becoming someone new,’ she says. ‘It’s about coming back to who you were before all the noise.’

And if there’s one thing she wants women to take away from her story, it’s this. Be honest with yourself. Not about how much you drink or what it looks like to other people, but about how it actually feels.

‘What is the mask you’re wearing?’ she said. ‘And what is it costing you?’