Hello and welcome back to Sober Awkward, where we're doing something a little bit different.

We started this podcast to share our own messy, awkward and hopefully humorous journeys through

sobriety and have always felt incredibly humbled by how many of you have connected with our

stories. But not everyone's journey is the

same as Vicanise. So we put our heads together to figure out a way to give back and let our

listeners inspire each other. Basically, we're taking us to idiots completely out the equation.

We decided to run a storytelling competition, during which we asked you

to share your own inspirational stories of recovery with us. Well, to be honest, the stories you sent us

completely blew us away. They were powerful, moving and truly inspiring. We knew right away that we had to share them. So, with

the permissions of the storytellers, we're going to be sharing one of their stories with you

each week. This is our way of celebrating you. These are your stories, raw, real and full of hope. Welcome to Sober Stories.

This week's Sober Story is called Putting the O back into Sober by Verity.

And this is the final story that I'll be telling on the Saturday editions. I do hope you've enjoyed them.

We were so overjoyed with the quality of the entrance of this writing competition,

and I'm sure that you all would have learnt something or laughed at something over the last few weeks.

So thank you to everyone who wrote in and bravely shared their story with us.

As I sat down to compose this story, the O on my keyboard suddenly stopped working.

That would have been a good enough reason at one time to down tools,

neck a bottle of wine, for starters, and not to complete the task.

But no, an O is quite important in telling my sober story, so I just huffed and sort out my daughter's laptop,

and will hope she doesn't find this and read it until I'm ready for her to.

I've mulled over how I might write my story for some time, and thanks to the encouragement

...