She sits across from me, a glass of wine in her hand, already composing the explanation she’ll need to give. Just in case someone asks.
She worked fifty-plus hours last week. She’s managing her partner’s business from home while also moving house, renovating, coordinating care for aging parents, and quietly, privately, trying for a baby while worrying she’s left it too late.
Three weeks ago she had three weeks off alcohol. Today, at a family picnic in the park, kids running, a game of backyard soccer, a Sunday that looks, from the outside, like exactly what it should be, she has a glass of wine in her hand and a justification already forming on her lips. Just in case someone asks.
This is not a woman in crisis. This is a woman adulting so hard she can no longer feel herself underneath it all.
She is not unusual. Each year, hundreds of thousands of Australians meet clinical criteria for alcohol use disorder. Yet according to 2025 modelling from UNSW’s Drug Policy Modelling Program, only 30 to 48 per cent of those who would seek and benefit from treatment receive it. That leaves between 207,000 and 470,000 people missing out annually.
I know this woman. In clinical practice, I meet her constantly. And if you’re reading this, perhaps you recognise her too. Perhaps, in some quiet corner of your week, you are her.
The problem with grey area drinking
What strikes me most is not the drinking. It’s the explanation. The pre-emptive apology for a single glass of wine at a family picnic. That apology is the thing that tells me everything. Because women in this country have absorbed something toxic: the idea that if alcohol is present, we must be the problem.
We didn’t arrive here suddenly. We were invited. For decades, alcohol has been woven into every social ritual, celebration, commiseration, connection. Wine became self-care. The “mum wine” meme became a punchline that doubled as a permission slip. Corporate drinks became the unofficial networking circuit. And somewhere in all of that, alcohol stopped being a thing we did and started being a thing we were. We internalised its persona. And then, inevitably, its shadow self too.
Alcohol is like the frenemy you could never quite read. The one who kept you guessing whether you were in or out, who made you feel chosen when they turned the charm on and small when they didn’t. Then, when they finally showed their true colours, you felt stupid for having trusted for so long. But by then the bond had formed, the kind that’s harder to leave precisely because it was never entirely bad. You know what they are, you just don’t know how to go back to who you were before.
That’s where so many women I see are sitting. Not at rock bottom. Not in an emergency department. But somewhere quieter and much harder to name: exhausted, confused, wondering what happened to the person they used to be before the weeks became a blur of obligations and the Friday night drink became less of a celebration and more of a pressure valve. Less freedom, more cage.
And here’s what Australia’s health system isn’t built to see: that moment. The Sunday afternoon moment. The three weeks without a drink then the “one-glass won’t hurt” moment.
We’re not that bad…are we?
Our system is calibrated for crisis. Ambulances. Emergency departments. Headlines. It is designed, in other words, for the version of alcohol harm that is impossible to overlook. But harm doesn’t begin at rock bottom. It builds quietly, incrementally, in bodies already running on cortisol and caffeine and no time for stillness.
Women in particular are conditioned to minimise. We are taught to cope, to function, to manage. The question “is this bad enough to ask for help?” is one most women have asked themselves at some point, about their pain, their mental health, their grief. Why would alcohol be any different?
What I want to say to every woman holding that glass and already preparing her excuse is this: your concern is valid before it becomes a crisis. Early is not dramatic. Early is actually the whole point.
Because the cost of waiting, to the individual, to families, to the health system, is staggering. More than 40,000 emergency department presentations each year are linked to alcohol withdrawal. Around 70 per cent of people relapse within 90 days without structured support. We are paying for acute intervention again and again while completely failing to fund the quieter, earlier moments when things could actually change.
It’s time to rewrite the story
It’s time to rewrite the story we tell about alcohol harm in this country. The woman at the picnic does not need to collapse before she deserves care, and she does not need to carry quiet concern alone.
Rewriting the story means normalising care-led conversations instead of judgement, asking earlier questions instead of waiting for visible damage, and backing a health system that intervenes before crisis rather than after it. If this feels familiar, that’s not a personal failure, it’s a cultural one.
The call now is simple: choose care over silence, with yourself and with the people you love, and support the push for earlier, properly funded alcohol care in Australia.
You can sign the Rewrite the Story pledge here.