BE COMPLETE
Alison Canavan
words by Ross Pollard
It's a warm evening and we're sitting in a restaurant on Oxford Street, the restaurant is one devoted to health and wellness and it's right in the heart of London's fashion scene on the Soho side of Oxford Street. It's the perfect metaphor for Alison Canavan who swapped her very successful life of a fashion model in New York for one with much of her time now devoted to being one Great Britain & Irelands most respected Wellness & Mindfulness practioners as well as a best selling author.
Her story isn't like many others that I've heard, yes there is the addiction, the single parenting, the fight against depression, but it's much more than that. It's easy to paint the traditional pictures of stories of redemption and follow old narratives, but WIth Alison there is something different, the journey she's been on for six years wasn't about beating those struggles, it was the germination of a seed that had laid dormant in the soil waiting for the right moment to grow and reach toward a bright sun.
Sometimes the events that are dragging you down, reliance on alcohol & drugs, a surprise pregnancy and other issues suddenly create a clarity and a coalescence to make the next step. "There was definitely a day when I was at my mums, it sounds a really stupid and mundane thing that happened. I genuinely sat at the side of my bed and just breathed out and felt different for the first time"" says Alison of the moment she'd returned from Manhattan to her native Dublin that she realised her path would be different from now on. "I was broke & I was living with mum, I had nowhere to live and I was a single mum".
She'd gone home to see the family when she found her life was about to change dramatically, having been home a few days she found out she was about to become a mother. She's very candid about the life she had flown away from, an apartment in a great area of New York with a small dog and a glamorous life of industry parties and fashion events, signed to a very successful modelling agency and working a lot. It was a world she'd rapidly come to know and inhabit since being discovered at just 15 in Dublin. However she describes it as a culture of crap now.
"I was in the fashion where everything was based on what you looked like, your next job, your boyfriend, what people think of you", the younger Alison was a very different person to the one I'd come to interview and it was the younger version that had developed the addictions, "people were well aware of my drinking, when I was young it was fun to be party Ali".
Once she discovered she was pregnant she quit drinking and people around her thought having a child had changed her, but the realities were still there, she recounts a story of her first night out after having her child and how despite not having drank for 9 months old habits instantly returned, "I came home really trashed and Mum came in and I had my head over the bowl and she said nice to see you've changed".
"I had to be stripped of everything to truly find myself''