Finding Your Way Back to You - with Mel Bampton
Sober Awkward
Victoria Vanstone
4.8 • 533 Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is alcohol confidence, connection, and a doorway back to yourself, or is it a liquid barrier that keeps you further away?
In this episode, Vic is joined by Australian broadcaster and former Triple J presenter Mel Bampton. Now 15 years sober, Mel has come full circle back to radio after spending years rebuilding her life around yoga, surfing and sobriety. Together, they explore one powerful question: how do we make our way back after losing ourselves to alcohol?
Mel explains how alcohol can feel like a shortcut back to playfulness, imagination, and that light, giggly version of us we lost somewhere between school rules, expectations, and being told to “behave”. They talk about how drinking can seem like it’s giving you freedom, when it’s quietly taking pieces of you away, and why it can be so hard to notice that loss of self when you start young.
They also dig into timing, the moment you know it’s time to stop, the shift from chaos to clarity, and the surprising truth that sobriety can be less about becoming someone new, and more about returning to who you were before life made you small.
There’s tequila, hangovers, bins full of glass bottles, silent discos in the jungle, and a full-circle comeback story that proves this, even if you’ve taken the scenic route, you can always find your way back to you.
Enjoy!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, the kettle's boiled. Excellent timing. I'll just make myself a quick cupper, take a deep breath and pretend I know exactly what I'm doing. Right, let's get started. |
| 0:15.5 | Have you ever woken up on a Sunday morning with massive anxiety and said to yourself, I'm never drinking again, |
| 0:22.6 | only to find yourself waving 50 bucks at a barman by happy hour. Do you ever wonder why everyone |
| 0:27.8 | else can stop at one while you end up at a dodgy after party holding hands with a weird bloke called |
| 0:32.9 | Disco Dave? If so, it might be time to take a closer look at your reliable social crutch alcohol. |
| 0:40.0 | On this podcast, I investigate my own deeply dysfunctional dealings with booze and find out what |
| 0:45.4 | it's really like navigating this alcohol-drenched world, one fizzy water at a time. |
| 0:50.6 | I'm going to open up a shame shed of humiliating drinking stories to help you understand why |
| 0:55.4 | waking up with one eyebrow missing and a kebab sticking out of your top pocket might actually |
| 0:59.9 | be negatively impacting your health. So what happens when you put down those cheeky pints and |
| 1:05.4 | finally let go of those rewarding mummy wines? I guess we're just going to have to wait and see. |
| 1:11.7 | I'm Victoria Vanstone and this is sober awkward. Right, here we go. I'll get this party started, |
| 1:26.0 | tea party probably, more like it. Anyway, every time I come sit down to do this podcast, I feel like I have literally had the most hectic morning in the whole world. There was a forgotten tennis racket. There was a forgotten laptop. And then I lost my phone. So actually, I've been at the school three times this morning and all sorts |
| 1:45.4 | of annoying things. So anyway, I made it. I'm here. I'm in my kids' bedroom as per usual with |
| 1:50.8 | chaos surrounding me. I'm not even going to, I might take a photograph of it actually just to prove |
| 1:56.0 | that I'm not making this up. It is a total mess. Basically, I'm allergic to cleaning. I don't know if any of you |
| 2:02.8 | know, but I have a dust allergy. So if I try and clean anything up, especially clothes, I sneeze my |
| 2:08.4 | head off anyway, that's my excuse. Today's episode is all about finding the way back to you. And honestly, |
| 2:16.3 | I think this is one of the best parts of sobriety. |
| 2:20.4 | I didn't realize it at the time, but when I stopped drinking, it actually wasn't about removing the |
| 2:26.6 | alcohol. It was about slowly, awkwardly and often very painfully, finding my way back to me |
| 2:33.5 | and finding out who I was before booze even showed up |
... |
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