Our Story
This is personal.
The Addiction Project didn't start with a plan. It started with conversations between two friends about what was happening in our lives.
We’d both grown up around alcoholism, but experienced it in very different ways. As we spoke more openly about our families, loss, and our own struggles, we realised just how much of our lives had been shaped by addiction — and how rarely we’d actually talked about it.
Toby’s story
When I was young, I never really questioned my dad’s drinking. I remember sitting around family friends’ tables with him asleep in front of us while everyone else carried on talking. We’d make jokes about him falling asleep. I thought it was normal.
Alcohol was always there. A beer when we went out, drinking at home, drinking socially. Growing up in the UK, so much of everyday life seemed to revolve around alcohol that I didn’t really have anything to compare it to. It wasn’t until friends started making comments and my mum spoke about his drinking that I began to realise there might be a problem.
My dad was a great dad during my younger years. Our relationship only really began to change as I got older. At the same time, I was struggling in my own ways and making choices I’m not proud of.
My dad wanted better for me, even while struggling to look after himself. As we both dealt with our own problems, our relationship became increasingly difficult. His drinking became more apparent, his memory deteriorated and frustration increasingly turned into anger.
In 2024, things reached a breaking point and I made the decision to leave home. For the best part of a year, my dad and I barely spoke.
Eventually, we started rebuilding our relationship. When I came back properly, I could see how much he’d deteriorated while I’d been away. Then he lost his brother — someone who had been more like a father to him — and his drinking escalated dramatically.
In August 2026, I picked my dad up off the floor after a fall. He was unconscious, he’d hit his head and was bleeding but still didn’t want to go to hospital. Eventually, I manhandled him onto a chair and from there took him to hospital.
We went into hospital because he’d fallen. We came out knowing something much worse.
The doctors told us that years of alcohol abuse had severely damaged his liver. If he continued drinking, we could be talking about months rather than years. Even if he stopped, much of the damage was already irreversible.
That was the moment something changed for me.
I’d spent years watching addiction affect my family while facing struggles of my own. I’d been frustrated with my dad, distanced myself from him and then pivoted to trying to help him. Now I was facing the possibility of losing him.
I can’t undo what’s happened, and I can’t make his decisions for him. But I can decide what I do with my own experiences.
I’ve been fortunate to grow up around sport and a community of people I’ve been able to talk to, lean on and learn from. I’ve realised how important that has been for me, and how many people simply don’t have it.
I don’t have all the answers. But I know what it’s like to love somebody with an addiction while facing struggles of your own.
If being open about that makes it easier for somebody else to talk about what they’re going through, then something positive can come from it.
James’s story
During my childhood, my dad was simply my dad. I didn’t know what alcoholism was. When I was young, he was the best dad you could ask for. We had a good childhood, family holidays, big Christmases, time with our cousins and a lot of happy memories.
He had struggled with alcohol from a young age after losing his own dad as a teenager. Then, in 2009, he lost his business. He spent years trying to rebuild what he’d worked for and provide for his family, but the pressure took its toll. Depression became a bigger part of his life and, over time, so did alcohol.
There wasn’t one moment when I realised my dad was an alcoholic. It happened gradually. As I got older, I began to understand that drinking wasn’t simply something he enjoyed. It was something he depended on.
It changed our family. There were good days and bad days. You learned to read the room, avoid certain situations and sometimes just ignore what was happening. For a long time, I think we tried to push through it rather than really deal with it.
At the beginning of Covid, my dad was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He went through surgery and chemotherapy and, after around a year, was eventually given the all clear. It should have been the beginning of something better.
He never made it to his final surgery.
My dad, Ian, died when I was 22. Alcohol had played a huge part in what happened.
For a long time afterwards, I don’t think I properly dealt with losing him. I carried on. I kept busy and put things somewhere in my head where I didn’t have to talk about them. But strangely, when I thought about him, the memories that came back weren’t the bad ones. They were the good ones.
My dad was more than his addiction. He was my dad.
He was the man who worked endlessly to give us everything he could. The man who gave me a good childhood, loved his family and was there for the people closest to him. He was also someone who became incredibly unwell and eventually lost himself to alcohol and depression.
Both of those things are true.
As I’ve got older, that’s changed the way I understand addiction. It isn’t as simple as telling somebody they need to stop. And understanding why somebody is struggling isn’t the same as excusing the damage it can cause.
I’ve seen what it does to everyone around it, partners trying to hold families together, children learning to hide what’s happening, and people who carry those experiences for years without ever really talking about them.
I was one of those people.
This is personal
Our experiences with addiction are different. One of us is living through it now. The other has already experienced the loss it can leave behind.
But those experiences are what brought this project together.
Toby already knew what James had been through with his dad. So when things began getting worse at home, James became someone he could confide in — someone who didn’t just sympathise, but understood what it was like to watch addiction change someone you love.
Those conversations became more frequent as things got worse. We spoke about our families, our own struggles and the different ways addiction had shaped both our lives.
The Addiction Project didn’t come from thinking we had the answers. It came from realising that the conversations we were having with each other were conversations thousands of other people probably needed to have too.
We were already friends. We already loved challenging ourselves and seeing how far we could push ourselves. The idea was simple: take something we were already doing and give it a purpose.
If our challenges give people a reason to pay attention, we can use that attention to start conversations. And if those conversations help even one person feel able to talk about what they’re going through, then we’re doing something worthwhile.
That’s where The Addiction Project began.
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