This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi and welcome to this naked mind podcast. This is Annie Grace and I'm really excited because this is like one of my first people I really met after putting my book into the world who is also kind of doing the same important work in the world. So welcome Lee. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you very much for having me, Annie. So Anna.

Yeah, and so Lee has he's a CEO of a business called the Truth about alcohol, the founder of it, and it's been very cool. I've been watching kind of Lee's journey. He's been watching mine. We've exchanged lots of things. You are the first podcast I was ever on.

Yeah, I like to dig the episode out and send it out on Instagram as a throw throwback. I don't know, throwback Thursday or something. I'll make something up, but I have actually been thinking about doing that. So maybe you will be the first person.

Yeah, it was my first podcast. I was super nervous. I listened to a bunch of your podcasts is the night before one by you interviewed Laura from club soda. And so that was the first time I'd ever heard of Laura. And yeah, it was just it was really cool.

So, yeah, it was. So what I love to do though is just to start with your story. So back right up and tell it tell it all.

Okay, the story. Where do we start? So I'm going to I'm going to do a bit of pop fiction. So I'm going to jump in and out. So I'm going to take you back to me being 18 years of age and I'm in Cyprus, I a napa, which was a kind of a cool place to be at the time.

And I went with a friend and his girlfriend that tells you so much about the the depths I would go to to get a party and I went out on the second night that was there in Cyprus, Annie and I had I was blind drunk, I had taken far too many drugs and I blacked out. And I woke up the next day in hospital, completely terrified in pain like and I had this little

beauty there. And I should see it. Oh, wow. I can't see that. I had 28 stitches in my arm. Dr said that I was lucky to be alive. I was millimeters away from severing my brachial artery. I'd been stabbed and beaten. And I was in a blackout state. So as you can imagine when you've just been cut, you just arrived at Cyprus, you have no idea where you are. You're on the second day, you're blacked out. Someone's taking your arm off nearly nearly.

And somehow I managed to get to hospital. I have no idea how got stitched up and then went home the next day.

And the reason I'm starting there, Annie is that was when I was 18 and I didn't become someone who doesn't drink alcohol until 35.

I dined out on that story for many, many years. I turned it into a very, very humorous time, almost like a lads joke that I told everyone about how cool it was the time I got stabbed in Cyprus.

And I want to start there because I think that that just goes to show the power of the system and how we turn life, threatening, painful experiences into pleasurable experiences in order for the dissonance to keep at bay. And so we can keep on drinking. Okay. So I thought I'd stick that in there. But I was born in 1975 in Manchester in the UK. My mum was 18.

And my father was from Hong Kong and he disappeared before I was born. So my mother actually gave birth to me on her own. Nobody would go in the labor room with her. So I was alone right from the off.

Apart from my mum, obviously. And then my mum very quickly met another guy who became my father or my entire life. And he was not very loving man. He didn't really know how to love typical old school northern English guy.

So straight away, I don't have a really good father figures there, you know, in both sides. About 10 years of age, we move from Manchester to the South Wales valleys. If anyone's ever heard of Tom Jones, the singer, and Tom's from South Wales. And that's where we moved.

And the people of South Wales, they hate the people from England, right. So straight away, you're subjected to xenophobic slurs. Plus I'm the only Chinese person in the valley.

And kids being as they are, you can imagine my upbringing there was very, very difficult. And I entered this paradox in my teenage years of really wanting to fit in and doing anything to fit in and anybody listen to this story will be going like boom, yeah, okay, I was exactly in that spot.

I really desperately want to fit in, but at the same time for me, and I think this is one of the reasons I was able to stop drinking is I also held on to this desire to be very different.

You know, so it's this battle of I need to fit in, but I like the fact that I'm different because it's giving me this edge. I like the fact that everybody hates me. I kind of liked it back then, you know.

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