Author: Jessica Duenas

In this episode:

Link to Spotify.

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault.

Sara, a survivor of sexual assault, struggled with substance abuse to escape her pain. But realizing its temporary relief and the dark path she was on, she eventually embarked on her recovery journey. (Sara shared her story anonymously with me and asked that I change her name to protect her privacy.)

Resources:

Ian’s Dedication

Original Blog Piece Cited

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas:
Hey everyone, in today’s episode, I wanted to just take an opportunity to do some storytelling. So Bottom List of Silver, originally, like the project in the first place, started back in February of 2021, and I had maybe five months over. And I knew that I wanted to dedicate myself to telling people’s stories the same way that Ian, my boyfriend who had passed away, told his story. To learn his story, go to bottomlistofsilver.com. I’ll link it in the show notes. but I do have a page on my site dedicated to him in memory of him to learn more about him. So check that out. But back in early 2021, I would interview people and then write their story and post it on my blog. And so kind of just wanted to go back in time and pick one of those stories and read it to you because again, I think that there’s so much power and connection and the more stories that we hear, the more that we realize that we are not alone in the struggles that we are dealing with. So this story names have been changed, but this is Sarah’s story. And her sobriety date is actually September 23rd, 1994. I still believe that voice telling me that it was my last chance to this day. I knew it was my last chance. Sarah reflected on her sobriety date. After listening to her story, I stared at my phone in shock. How? How have you stayed sober continuously for 26 years? That’s an entire lifetime. I could barely get through a couple of weeks at a time last year. Sarah paused for a moment. I could hear her breath drying in as she braced herself. Well… Let me tell you how it started. It’s a long story, because I’m old as fuck. Oh, another note before I continue with her story, significant content warning for sexual assault. So just that heads up, and obviously substance and drug abuse, but this is bottomless to sober, so you should know by now that we’re gonna talk about substance use. But just to put that out there, content warning for sexual assault. I’m gonna go ahead and continue. Well, let me tell you how it started. It’s a long story, because I’m old as fuck. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Sarah’s upbringing led her to believe that the only acceptable and valid family structure was the one she was brought up in. I definitely related to some parts of her experience when she talked about her childhood. She was bright, looked good to others, all around excellent behavior and grades, and was an award-winning student. She was the type of child that any parent would be proud of. The only facet of her childhood that I couldn’t relate to was that she was a dedicated athlete. to what felt like a laundry list of sports. I mean, she was ice skating, swimming, she did it all. She should have walked around feeling good about herself. Right? Well, shocker, she didn’t feel good about herself. Sarah and her mother had a turbulent relationship wherein Sarah desperately sought her mother’s affirmations, love, attention, anything really. What she actually received was the opposite. Sarah’s mom was usually too busy for her. She was on the phone. always telling Sarah to go away. Sarah paused her story. At this time, she did wanna clarify that despite what she was about to say about her upbringing, that her parents took care of her physical needs. And I remember at that time, I laughed because I knew that feeling too, right? Of like, you having to always explain that your parents did the best that they could with what they had, and that is absolutely what Sarah was stopping to do. And you know, I recognize that, right? Like I also carry scars from my childhood. And at this point, the best way for me to be at peace about my past is to accept that my parents, and frankly most parents, honestly you listening on here, they probably tried their best given the circumstances they were in. And that’s not true for all parents, I absolutely recognize that. There are some really cool fucked up people out there. But in general, if our parents were majorly flawed, oftentimes they were still working within the constructs of the wounds that they carry too. So anyway, she proceeded to explain that she grew up with a roof over her head, food on the table, but at the end of the day, she felt perpetually ignored or in trouble. That didn’t make sense though. So, and I asked her, I was like, so wait, how are you in trouble if your mom wasn’t even paying attention to you? And she took like another deep breath and she started. I remember being threatened to be taken away to an orphanage when I was five. That was the beginning. when getting in trouble started happening for me. I had a tantrum, and while in the shower, my mother dragged me out to the car, wet and naked, shampoo still in my hair. She had a suitcase packed, telling me that she was gonna take me to an orphanage. I shrieked in terror and threw a fit. Ever since, I always felt and believed that I was bad, you know, just bad, that I wasn’t enough, I wasn’t good enough, that nothing I ever did after that was good enough. Sarah carried those same feelings with her into middle school and then into high school, where the awkwardness of teen behavior did nothing to help her, right? Like nothing to help her feel like she belonged. There was gossip and kids constantly turning their backs on one another. You know, that really just didn’t provide Sarah with any kind of secure relationships with her peers. Her teachers loved her, but that was about it. And around this time, you know, Sarah discovered cigarettes. She was 12, and within a week of her first cigarette, she discovered marijuana. She actually calls it pot, so I’ll probably call it pot as I move forward with this episode, but she discovered pot, and then she also discovered alcohol. So by the age of 12, she had found cigarettes, marijuana, pot, and alcohol. Well then, correction, she had backtracked. Her father would also, when she was little, would actually let her have a nightly beer and an orange juice glass from the time she was three. Right? And so… Um, she, I remember her telling me, you know, I want more, I want more that she would say that when she was like a little kid to her dad about the beer in that little orange juice glass. So, you know, for her, she felt like she’d always had that feeling of craving since she was little. And Sarah participates in 12 step programs. So you know, she uses the language phenomenon of craving, right? Um, so anyway, so Sarah learned to sneak around with alcohol after that. And now in terms of Sneaking I remember when she was telling me about that like I knew that all too well Some of the things that she did she replaced liquor with water in her parents bar She would fill nail polish bottles with liquor and then she would also snatch her dad’s beer when he wasn’t paying attention I’m really she was just doing anything that she could to get to get to a drink and you know And I remember her telling me this and you know It’s like I couldn’t help but laugh because it resonated so much and it was just like she was probably my first interview for this project And just hearing that story and feeling so seen was wild. And you know, Sarah’s much older than me. Like I said, she’s been sober for 20 something years at the time that she told me this story. So for me to see someone who felt like almost like she could be my mom telling me this, it was just really powerful as an experience. So anyway, so I had told her, it’s so funny to me how we’re all so good at hiding things when we need to. We can be so creative. But it’s true, right? Like if you struggle with substance use, alcohol use disorder, you probably are a really innovative person to get to your substance, and that’s pretty wild. But, you know, too bad that those same smarts don’t sometimes save us from our own addiction. So anyway, I’ll continue. Older teens and adults started to take an interest in Sarah once she crossed over to drinking and using drugs. Suddenly she found herself to quote her, not giving a shit. She said, I didn’t care if my classmates liked me or if they didn’t like me. I just started partying really hard. It was the 70s. People would call them the freaks and that’s what I was. I was a freak. The feeling of rejection that Sarah experienced from her mother and her other peers quickly disappeared. Alcohol and drugs started to give Sarah feelings of power, a sense of belonging and a false, a very false sense of maturity. I mean, she described the relief that she felt of no longer worrying about anyone else, of their judgments, and she felt like at that time that she was in control of herself and of her feelings. But of course, you know, that feeling was only temporary. That relief was temporary. We know that now, right? So Sarah, she started to hang around gas stations back then with girlfriends. You know, they would just wait for the creepy uncle types who would be willing to buy them alcohol, right? Like, ooh, you see young girls. You’re you’re a pervert, you’re a creepo, you’re gonna buy them some alcohol. So they waited for men like that to buy them alcohol. And any and every party that she was invited to and she attended, there was always using and drinking. And she would use and drink whatever she was offered. So at that time there were things like Quaaludes, which are examples of tranquilizers. I forget if they fall under barbiturates or benzos. Pot, alcohol, and then… I had to stop her and ask, so where was heroin in all this? Because I’m asking her this in like 2021 when I interviewed her. And for us in this day and age, I’m recording this in 2023, we all know that everything is all about opiates, at least that’s everything in the media that we see. And so I was just curious, like, so where are the opiates in all this? So she responded, what did she respond? I just lost track of my notes, I hear you up. So yeah, so I mean, I was curious about the 70s and early 80s because of course, you know, today overdoses with opiates are just so prevalent. And so her response was, you know, that heroin got really big after Big Pharma got everyone hooked on pain pills. And she noted that was way after I got sober. So back then, you know, when she was in active addiction, people died from drunk driving, on occasion from suicide, but not from overdoses, at least not like today. And I decided to go do some research. So she was spot on, right? So according to the CDC, in the United States in 1980, the number of people who died from drug overdoses was 6,100 in 1980. By 2019, it was 70,630. Then out of that number, 49,860 had specifically died from opiates, whether it was a combination of pain pills or heroin. But those are wild numbers. So in 20 years, well, more than 20 years, 30 years, from 6,000, 6,100 to 70,000, that’s a lot. So anyway, drugs and alcohol, they had become so instrumental to Sarah’s life that she really leaned on them. And unfortunately, she leaned on them even more after surviving what would be anyone’s worst nightmare, which would be surviving sexual assault. So again, This may be a time where you need to stop and like leave this recording and that’s fine But if not, I’m going to continue telling her story So while on our liquor run she had run into some older friends who invited her to a boat party And you know, there were over a hundred and people who had crowded this boat and they were mostly older kids So, you know Sarah drank there’s whiskey. She drank that quickly. She smoked some pot and really all the while There was somebody at that party who was targeting her And to read what she wrote or read what she said, she had said, this guy came and grabbed me. He pulled me off of the boat and it was dark. It was night. I had a swim meet earlier that day and this girl on my team had French braided my hair. I left the French braids in. Anyway, I remember I escaped from this guy. I got back on the boat and hid from him. He came in there and he found me and he dragged me out. I was screaming, screaming to all these people, help me! And nobody would help me. They just let me, they just let him take me away. He took me out there and he raped me. Then this other guy raped me. I think I knew who one of the guys was, and possibly the other guy. And they were in on it together. My heart broke for her, and I was scared to ask if this was even her first time being sexually active. And it was. And she continued. They beat me up. They ripped my hair out. I was covered in dirt, in pee, their pee, grass stains, mud. They tried to shovel gravel down my throat to keep me from screaming. I was left there for dead, and someone from my neighborhood found me and dumped me on my lawn. My brother found me out there, carried me inside, put me in my room and closed the door. I came to the next day. My parents never noticed. They didn’t even know. I woke up torn up. I think that was my first hangover. I was 14. That was the first time I felt true fear, horror, how awful everything was. So I put my clothes on, snuck out, and went back to the gas station to get more liquor. I went to another party, did acid and Quaaludes. I knew then I shouldn’t go around these people anymore. My soul told me not to, but I would do it anyway. After that, I left my body mentally every time I had sex. I just felt like men were always going to take it anyway. I hated it. And though I don’t share the horrifying experience that Sarah had described, I recognized. somewhat, you know, the feeling of the pain, the dread, and the need to drown a terrible feeling out. I recognized the need to cope through oblivion, the feeling of knowing better, yet being driven to do the exact opposite. I absolutely recognize that. Needless to say, Sarah’s behavior continued to spiral. And once again, she was betrayed by friends and nearly drowned when she drunkenly fell off of a boat and into a river while hanging out. You’re gonna drown by the time we get to you, they shouted. Panicked that even her swimming experience couldn’t save her, she felt herself swallowing water and was prepared to give up when she heard a voice reminding her to do the dead man’s float. So Sarah survived, but her risky behavior led others to think that she wouldn’t live to her next birthday. So they contacted her parents. Sarah’s mother and father acted like they were shocked. And maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but… Sarah ended up in treatment and got sober for the first time. I remember that I, you know, like me, Jessica, I was terrified my first time in treatment. And that was being a grown woman. By the eighth time that I went, I was just tired of it. But what was it like for a teenage girl? To Sarah? It was okay. You know, she was a teen. She got used to it. And being a sober high schooler, she said wasn’t bad. She had a tiny circle of sober friends and they did normal teenage things. She remembers that she’d go to meetings with people who now have over like 40 years of sobriety. And things were steady for Sarah and she got to finish high school, she kept her good grades and she got to start college. But getting to college, right, it wasn’t too long before things started to fall apart again. So Sarah managed to stay sober for the first semester of freshman year. But the day she moved on campus, literally semester two, Day one, right, first semester she stayed home. Semester two she had moved on campus. As soon as she got there she got drunk. And this time around, Sarah didn’t go back to drug use though. She just stuck to alcohol. So I had asked her, I was like, well you knew that being sober worked, so why did you go back out and drink? Mind you, I asked her that knowing damn well why she did. Because she struggles with addiction. And I feel like so many times when we struggle with addiction or if we weren’t really ready, right, we weren’t in a place where we were ready, nothing we ever do seems to make sense. And so her response was, I wanted to fit in. When I was younger, I didn’t want to fit in with my peers, but this time I did. The classmates that she hadn’t cared for in the past had now grown into actual binge drinkers and partying college students. So they had become Sarah’s kind of people. So, you know. The other thing too was that at this time, Sarah knew that she had a problem, it’s just that she was ignoring it, right? So while in college, she started having run-ins with the police and despite like her having increasing numbers of arrests, about six of them were actually for public intoxication and what felt like never ending community services that judges just kept giving her and she also nearly got expelled from school, despite all these things, right? Like she didn’t stop drinking and. How common is that for so many of us, right? Like we go through so many consequences and we still keep drinking. It’s the nature of addiction. Addiction is incredibly baffling and really, really hard. And so I, well, I’m sorry, y’all, I lost my spot. I found it. So, you know, and she was horribly sick every morning and she barely took nights off of drinking. And really like at this point in her story, In my mind, I thought she was gonna tell me that she dropped out of school, right? Because she had been constantly getting arrested and all of that. But she was funny. She was like, no, girl, like, I’m smart. I still got good grades. I was on the dean’s list. And she was also on the dean’s list for her conduct, AKA when she’d get in trouble, she’d go to the dean’s list. But academically, she was good. So, you know, again, it’s funny because how many of us are successful Outwardly right and so it’s very easy to hide that we’re struggling or that we have struggled with alcohol and other substances So she’s just another person another high achiever with a major addiction And you know, it’s funny too because in reflecting if I wasn’t naturally bright myself I also don’t know that I would have ever even finished schooling either Like I got by because a lot of things academically were easy for me and you know, that’s basically the same thing with Sarah She was getting by because she would take night classes to accommodate her drinking schedule. And yeah, she eventually graduated with arrests and all. And you know, as she described, you know, her life after college, she was like, I don’t know what living like a normal person was. You know, she was telling me, she was basically describing the old school dot matrix printer that it would like print her arrest record. and it would be like page after page after page that it was like attached to each other. I didn’t even know what a dot matrix printer was. Like I had to Google it. And I like looked up a YouTube video to hear what that sounded like. So she said that, you know, you all have to Google that. And actually I’ll put that in the show notes too. And you can hear it and it’s such a funny sound. But again, it’s just like when I looked it up and I saw what felt like almost like an artifact, right? Like a type of a printer that doesn’t exist anymore. The big light bulb moment for me was that people, despite us being from different generations, addiction is still addiction, right? And so there’s still so much to be learned from people across age groups. And that’s what to me was just so powerful about her story, that the undercurrent remains the same, right? Our experiences might be our own, but addiction remains the same. So after college, Sarah met her husband, who she stated became her new drug. She still drank not as much. And I think the reason why her drinking decreased, right, was because she was now getting validation from her husband and not just the bottles. He joined the military and they were living a really nice life in Florida by the beach and she felt like it was like a, but for her it was actually more like a return to her childhood. So things looked really pretty on the outside for her marriage, but on the inside she felt really far from it. She was still living in fear and she was telling me that she was still having that emotional and spiritual emptiness. And even when she would skim her yearbook, she realized that even though her classmates described her as joyful and cheerful, that she knew she had a void then that she always needed to fill. So while she was married, you know, she was a periodic drinker instead of a daily one. And even though she could stay away from alcohol for periods at a time, when she had that first drink, once she had it, she couldn’t stop, right? And it was like, Sarah basically required an intervention just about every time she drank in order for her to stop. She wanted to seek help, but her husband at the time discouraged her strongly. He would tell her, you don’t have a problem, despite the fact that he would get angry with her every time she got drunk at his suggestion, right? Because then she couldn’t be his designated driver. And Sarah knew better, but she just felt like she was ignoring what she knew because she valued her husband’s word at the end of it all. even when he became verbally abusive toward her. And she lived with low self-worth, so she suffered in silence daily until one day he abruptly divorced her before he got stationed in Japan. And once he abruptly left her, she got back to Kentucky, and her drinking picked back up. So at that point, her drinking escalated. So Sarah started drunk driving, she would lose cars on weekends. she would wake up with a sick feeling in her stomach, you know, just dreading the unknown, right? Like had she hit something, you know, she vaguely remembers near death experiences. And then in July of 1994, which is a few months before her sobriety date, she actually got her first DUI. She really should have gone to jail, but on her fifth court date that September, the arresting officer didn’t show up, right? And so that DUI got dropped, or dropped down to a misdemeanor. Now… Did Sarah stop and think, oh, maybe I should stop. This is a great opportunity, right? Fresh start? No. You know, that night she got drunk and she drove to celebrate getting out of the DUI situation. But that was the night of her last drink. So she remembers that she woke up in the morning at home. She didn’t know where her car was. She really didn’t remember much of the night before. However, she was incredibly sick and she had dragged herself into the bath and she could barely hold herself up, right? Like she sat down in the tub and as that water washed over her, that same voice that saved her from drowning years ago, right when she had fallen off that boat when she was drunk, that same voice had spoken her again. And what she heard was that voice saying, “‘This is your last chance. “‘You better take it.'” And you know, Sarah said, “‘I believe that voice to this day.'” I knew that was my last chance. And she is a person of faith. And so she said, you know, it was the voice of God. And that was September 23rd, 1994. So the Tuesday after she went to her first meeting since her teenage sober years. And interestingly enough, her reception was not a warm one, right? Like the people at that meeting were not warm and fuzzy to her. But she decided then that she would be sober. despite other people’s attitudes or behaviors towards her in that space, even if they didn’t reach their hand out to help her, she was gonna stay sober anyway, and she was going to stay alive. She had gotten through the worst of times in the past when people betrayed her, and she was going to stay sober, even if it was just her and God carrying her through. For her, it was a moment of clarity, and she thought to herself, well, this is the end, right? I literally have nowhere else to go. I couldn’t drink, I had no other choice. Am I going to do this? or not do this. And yeah, it had been at the time of her, that interview had been 26 years. So for now it’s about 28 years of sober living for Sarah. And you know, we were running short on time in terms of our conversation, but you know, I had to also ask her about what it’s like for her living sober, right? Cause she did share a lot about her life drinking, but I was like, man, you’ve been sober for longer. thing you drank, so like tell me about that. So you know, she jokingly was like, well that her first motivation to stay sober was just the desire to stay out of jail. She was like, that’s the easy reason. But then she seriously, she was like, you know, that her first two years sober were the hardest. So if you’re listening to this and you’re like, what is it like to live a sober life? Again, this woman has been sober a long time. She described her first two years as the hardest. And at 105 days sober, she had looked at herself in the mirror. And it was the first time that she could actually see herself, right? Like she was actually present. Her soul, body and mind had basically what she feels like they converged for the first time. Um, it was St. Patrick’s day and you know, the other days that people and other days that people like to celebrate by drinking, they weren’t easy to get through. And she remembers that she was salivating and craving, right? Like, again, she was early on 105 days is really early on. And she remembers, you know, that she got off work at five and she was definitely like, about to say, F it, and get off the expressway to go to a bar. And in my mind, I thought she was going to tell me that this was maybe a point in her story where she had like a relapse or something, right? But no, she said that while she was driving, she remembered someone telling her in a meeting to, you know, pray for cravings to get removed. And basically she had like decided to focus on driving and praying because she was driving and praying. she didn’t pay attention to the exit and she missed the exit that would have taken her to the bar and that helped her. And so you know, a couple other things that were really important, you know, for Sarah staying sober isn’t all about socializing and like being in fellowship or in connection with other sober people. She definitely recognized that in her 26, now 28 years of sobriety that being around other sober people is very important. But for her, it was actually really important to break her co-dependent tendencies. And she realized that she had spent her entire life using everything external to bring her internal joy. And so she was always, that joy was always fleeting because it was never from within, right? And so for her, outside of, again, in her 12-step program, she worked with a sponsor, but then also she worked on really building a spiritual base. And for her, she also worked a lot on her connection with a higher power. So again, if that resonates with you. food for thought, right? Like something that you can take away to help you. But Sarah definitely recognized that sobriety is not easy and she wants, when she talked to me, she wanted to make sure that anybody who heard her story understood that, right? We of course did not get to cover in detail the 26, now 28 years of her sober life, but she’s definitely acknowledged dealing with life on life’s terms. She’s dealt with death, heartbreak, loss, ailments, she’s really lived through all of that and she’s stayed sober. For her, the biggest thing about sobriety means having power and you know it means knowing that she is enough, that she has freedom, that she has peace. Anytime that she’s been triggered, the biggest thing that she says or she asks herself is, if I drink what will my life look like in six months? And then whatever, basically whatever trivial thing was triggering her becomes insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Whatever is going on, you won’t remember what pissed you off in six months. It’s not worth it. It’s temporary. I asked myself every day, what is worth more than my peace and serenity? And nothing is. I’m willing to give up everything to have peace and serenity. And when I heard Sarah say that, honestly, I felt inspired myself. You know, it was hope for me. I literally had at the time of this conversation, given everything up in December. just to have my own peace and serenity, right? Like I walked away from a 13 year teaching career. I left Kentucky, I had done all these things. And hearing a woman with 26 years of sobriety essentially say the same exact thing, let me know that I needed to keep doing what I was doing. And that maybe one day I’ll be like her, you know, with 20 something years, telling my story to a newly sober person. So, you know, after all that she’s been through and lived through, how does Sarah feel moving forward? And her comment was this, and I’ll quote her directly. If you’re a victim, you’re never free, you’re never happy. Everything you feel is always dependent on what someone else does, says, doesn’t do, or doesn’t say. I don’t wanna be dependent on other people for my happiness anymore. I learned to write a new story. I mean, I always used to tell my story with a negative connotation. That was who I was. I always framed it as something that kept me from succeeding. I was held back by self-pity because I kept blaming everything that happened. Telling that same old negative story kept me stuck in it. I tell a new story now. My story is now about me living how I want things to be. I firmly believe that anything is possible with God. There is power in our words. If you say you can, if you say you can’t, you’re right. Even if things aren’t how I want them to be right now, I’m still going to speak them into existence in the way I want them to be. And so I hope you enjoyed Sarah’s story. Again, she participated anonymously. So her real identity is a beautiful secret that I get to keep for myself. But I do hope that you enjoyed her story. Again, check out the site for other stories. There are much older posts on the bottom of the silver blog, which are people’s individual stories. And again, if you wanna share your own story with me, don’t hesitate to reach out. Thanks so much for your time and I will see you on the next episode.

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In this episode:

Link to Spotify

I discuss my experience of having alcoholic liver disease (ALD) and answer common questions. How did I know that I had it? What was the treatment? What were the signs of ALD?

Resources:

TikTok on ALD

NPR – Sharp, ‘Off The Charts’ Rise In Alcoholic Liver Disease Among Young Women

Bottomless to Sober – Workshops, Writing Classes, and Coaching

Transcript:

Hey, so for today’s episode, I wanted to talk about ALD, alcoholic liver disease. I have a couple of posts on TikTok that had gone viral in the past, and it’s funny because I still get recurring messages and questions from those posts. And I thought, you know, I have a new platform, so let me go ahead and talk about it here. So first to give you context in terms of what, because one of the questions, first question I get is, well, what did your alcohol consumption look like? So I’ll tell you. From when I was 18 up until my divorce in 2017, I drank, I didn’t drink every day. I was definitely a heavy drinker when I drank. So definitely a binge drinker, but I didn’t have opportunities to drink daily because I lived with my parents or I was living with my then husband, you know, ex-husband now. And so living with other people, in those days always kept me sort of in check, right? So I only got to binge drink on occasion, but I wasn’t able to drink how I wanted to drink. I got to drink how I wanted to drink come my divorce, which was 2017. And at that point I transitioned to daily drinking. So the daily drinking went from 2017 to about 2019. And so I’ll talk a little bit about that. So when I started drinking on a daily basis was when I lived on my own, and that was about a bottle of wine a day. Bottles of wine on average are about five servings, let’s say five servings of alcohol, which is already heavy, right? So the CDC states that for women, heavy drinking is eight drinks or more in one week. So I was having five drinks in a day. So five times seven is 35. So that’s already four times the amount of what. they state is their limit. And that’s the CDC specifically outlining heavy drinking. They, you know, so we already know there’s tons of newer research that is pointing to the fact that just one drink a day is harmful, right? Like one is not necessary. With that being said, let’s talk a little bit about tolerance and dependence, right? So if you think about your central nervous system, it’s got a general set point, right? Like there’s a certain place where everything is balanced. But then if you introduce a mind-altering substance like alcohol or anything else, right, your brain is going to counter it because it wants to establish that equilibrium, that homeostasis, so to speak. So if I’m drinking the five servings of wine a night and I’ve made it a habit because I’m doing it every day, what my body is going to start doing is my body is going to, A, counter it with that same energy, But then B, my body is smart. The brain practices neuroplasticity, which means its ability to learn, right? And because it’s learned this new habit, it’s also going to prepare to receive that amount of alcohol. So it’s going to overcompensate, which means that by it overcompensating that opposite action, it’s gonna take more alcohol for me to feel the way that I felt when I drank the five glasses of wine, the one bottle. which means that over time, I had to go from the one bottle of wine to the bottle of wine plus a shot, plus the bottle of wine to a half pint. And then eventually I was like, oh, you know what? This wine is actually rather inefficient. So I’m gonna stop drinking the wine, give me the liquor. And then it was from the half pint to the pint to the fifth. By the time I was drinking a fifth of alcohol, a fifth of alcohol is about 17 units. So that’s 17 drinks in a day. And that was probably by late 2018, early 2019, that I was drinking that much. So I probably, at the time of my diagnosis of alcoholic liver disease, it had probably been about a solid nine months or so of drinking that extreme. But overall, heavy drinking for about a period of two years. So that’s one of the questions that I get often. The, and the… Yes, so the next question that I often get is, how did I know that I had alcoholic liver disease? I mean, the way that I officially knew was when I got the blood work back that told me that I had alcoholic liver disease. But what I will say is, how I knew that something was wrong, that feeling was kind of always inside of me, right? And the thing is that I always had… the ill feelings, I always had the side effects of alcohol. It’s just that over time, they were just getting worse and worse and worse. So I don’t know because obviously I wasn’t taking an enzyme test every day to tell you when, what I was feeling went from bad hangovers to actual alcoholic liver disease. But what I will do is go through kind of like what I was feeling and going through. So as my alcohol consumption stayed consistent on a daily basis, right? Things that I started to notice was I was waking up with shakes. So my hands were shaking. They were shaking to the point that if I wanted to drink a cup of coffee, I would have to grip the cup with both hands to hold it steady enough so that nothing would splash or spill as I lifted it to my mouth, right? To give you some sense of that. I was a teacher and I have this very clear memory of I was helping my co-teacher with doing measurements and I was holding a ruler out. And when I was holding that ruler out, that ruler kept shaking. And I had a student say, Ms. Duenas, why is your hand so shaky? And I mean, I covered myself immediately. And I was like, oh, I drank so much coffee. It makes me so shaky. Sorry about that. Can you come hold this for me? And that’s how I covered myself. Insane, right? But that was the reality of how bad my hands were shaking. Another symptom that I dealt with was my digestive system was messed up. So what that looked like was waking up with nausea, vomiting bile. Like I would sit there and gag over the sink and if something came out, it was like green and nasty and like it felt like acid burning. That’s what it felt like. And then I would feel this also throughout the day. So I had a really hard time eating and even the most delicious of foods, they really lost their flavor for me because I had no desire to eat them. So I was also losing weight, but I still kept the belly because when you have liver disease, you also retain fluid. So my belly was full of fluid, and then my feet and my ankles were swollen, my fingers were swollen. And I remember with my feet, if I wore sandals, it was almost like you were baking bread and there was a string tied around your foot and you could just see like the little crease of the sandal straps cutting into my feet and my ankles. That’s how swollen my feet were getting, right? And my fingers, I mean, I couldn’t wear any rings because it was just like my hands were always so swollen. My cheeks had also been swollen. If you look at old photos of me, I look like a little woodchuck a little bit because my cheeks were just so poofy all the time. So there was a lot of swelling even though there was weight loss. Another thing that was affected was my vision. I, if you look at pictures of me from about 2018 to 2019, you will see that I was wearing prescription glasses. Now I went to the doctor about two weeks ago, this is August, 2023 as I’m recording this. And I went to the doctor about two weeks ago and my eyes were checked and my vision was 2015. Normal vision is 2020. So my vision is even better than your standard good vision, right? Other, another really weird symptom that I had was coughing. I had the worst cough ever. It was like I was hacking. There had been a few times that I was sent home early from work. I was sent to urgent care. I had gotten prescribed asthma inhalers. I had done all sorts of breathing tests and doctors couldn’t find out what was wrong with me. And of course I wasn’t disclosing that I was drinking heavily. And the only thing that made my drinking feel better was drinking. alcohol. That was the only thing that would make that cough go away. And so I think I’m covered just about everything. Oh, and the other one, of course, bruising. If I bumped into anything, I would get a nasty bruise. And the other thing too, actually, I think that’s it. Yes, I had like a brain fart. So yeah, the heavy bruising, the weight loss, the swelling. the shakes, the nausea, also going to the bathroom, everything was runny, right? So like if I went number two, it was just straight up like diarrhea. There was like nothing solid ever coming out of my body. Right? And so I felt horrible. Suffice it to say, like all that is to say, I felt horrible. And I knew that I wasn’t doing well, but instead of taking that as a sign of, oh, maybe I need to go. get some help and explore what I have going on. I did my research and I found a medication that is typically used to treat alcohol withdrawal, but it has different purposes. And I got that to address my withdrawal symptoms. And what did that do? That enabled me to drink for more time how I wanted to drink, right? So when I would wake up in the morning, instead of missing work, because my withdrawal symptoms were so bad, I could take this medication and then go to work and function. And again, and I did more than just function. I excelled at work. I was, this was the year that I won the Kentucky State Teacher of the Year award. So even though I was drinking a fifth a day, I was still being a really phenomenal educator, right? It was the weirdest like split personality type of thing. And I kept that up because I had figured out how to manage those withdrawal symptoms. But again, my body… was going through so, so much. Again, like I said it earlier, right? You have a set point that you’re at, and then you introduce a mind-altering substance, your body’s going to counter that. And when your body counters that, what you are going to feel in your body is the complete opposite of everything that mind-altering substance does. So in the case of alcohol, if alcohol was relaxing, the counter to that is going to be huge waves of anxiety, right? that nauseating feeling in your stomach, the shakes. And then when you drink the alcohol, the shakes go away, hands become steady, et cetera. But again, because my body had gotten in such a habit, it needed more and more to create that sense of ease. And so it really wasn’t creating a sense of ease because again, my body would counter it so hard that all the withdrawal symptoms were incredibly, incredibly strong. So come August of 2019, I finally have my annual physical. And when I go to the doctor, my blood work comes back. And then I officially know, right, that I have alcoholic liver disease. And so there’s two enzymes that are tested when you get your liver checked. The first one is ALT, the second one is AST. Each of these essentially are enzymes that if your liver is damaged, these enzymes leak out into your bloodstream and it’s found, you know, obviously throughout your body, right? And so for example, what is normal to find in the bloodstream of ALT is anywhere from 13 to 69 units per liter of blood. In my case, I had 160 ALT as a reading. So I had 160 units per liter of this liver enzyme flowing through my body because my liver was that damaged. Then with AST, the normal range was 15 to 46 units per liter. And in my case, it was 429 units per liter. That was nine times higher than what it was supposed to be. Nine times. So that goes to show you how hurt, how injured, how sick my liver was. that these enzymes were all over my body because my liver wasn’t well. So again, if you are feeling like you are potentially at risk of having liver disease, I strongly encourage you to go check with your doctor. Their treatment, what they prescribe for you may be different than what was for me, but what worked for me, because the other question I get is, well, how did you fix it? all I had to do was stop drinking. And I say that saying, oh damn well, that all I had to do was stop drinking is a really hard, I think, thing to do, right? Like, let’s be honest, it’s not that simple to just quit drinking because we’re talking about a crippling addiction that caused the liver disease, right? It’s not that simple to just, oh, oops, and my mic just fell. It’s not that simple to just like, oh, you know, stop drinking and that’s that. because obviously the liver disease is a physical manifestation of a problem with huge psychological roots, right? Because alcohol is just a symptom of whatever else we had going on. But that is what worked for me. I didn’t have to take any additional medications. I didn’t have to do anything else. I just had to stop drinking and stay stopped. Other things to note that are really important. So when I got this diagnosis, the doctor made it pretty clear that probably within six months to the year, I could have developed cirrhosis. Now, the wild thing about cirrhosis is that once you get that diet, alcoholic hepatitis can heal, right? What I was dealing with was liver damage, but the liver is a really resilient organ. So my liver had the chance to heal. But if I had gone farther down the line, farther down that spectrum into the area of permanent scarring, which is cirrhosis, at that point, there’s no coming back from that. Now, some people with cirrhosis can live longer lives, right, if they stop drinking and stop additional liver damage, there’s ways to manage also adjusting your diet, etc. But if you have cirrhosis and you keep drinking, you are cutting, you’re counting your days essentially. And so that’s what the doctor had warned me of. So with that being said, a couple other things that I wanted to mention, right, another question that I had was, Oh shoot, what was that question? Oh, well, I don’t drink a fifth a day, so I should be good, right? That is one of the great questions that I get. And no, it doesn’t take a fifth. It takes a lot less than a fifth to cause liver damage. So first, any recent resource from 2022, 2023, in terms of alcohol consumption will tell you, especially if you’re looking at anything coming out of Europe or Canada, will let you straight up. No, just one is a problem, right? Just one is a problem. The CDC defines heavy drinking, which I’ve said it already, but to reemphasize, as eight drinks or more per week for a woman, 15 drinks or more per week for a man. So somehow biologically different if you happen to be a woman listening to this, right? You already are at a disadvantage in terms of alcohol consumption because your body handles it less well than men’s bodies do. I mean, nobody’s body handles it well, but women’s bodies… really don’t handle alcohol well, and it has harder side effects. With that being said, there was a, well, an article from NPR that I actually was a part of, the article was titled Sharp Off the Chart’s Rise in Alcoholic Liver Disease Among Young Women. And that article was showing that something drinking up to a bottle of wine a day increases a woman’s chances of liver disease severely enough to require hospitalization. And even binge drinking can put a woman at risk of liver damage to the point of hospitalization. Right? So it doesn’t, you don’t have to be to the extreme of where I was drinking a fifth a day. For you, it can be as simple as that bottle of wine a day that seems really classy and cute. That can be enough. And so that is just really, really important information for you because there is this conception that you have to be much older or drinking so heavily to get sick. And it actually does not take that much. Again, if you think about my time period of heavy drinking, my time period of heavy drinking was only two years. And I was 34 years old when I was diagnosed with alcoholic hepatitis. So I was very young, had not been drinking heavily for that long. And honestly, I probably was already having liver damage at about a year of drinking heavily because I remember feeling sick. only a year into drinking heavily. It’s not like it didn’t take that long. So in terms of what do I do with this information, right? You’re listening to this podcast. So step one is you do need to address the drinking. Now, what can that look like? Obviously I do provide coaching support. What that looks like is also encouraging you to find community. It is incredibly hard to get sober on your own and you don’t have to do it on your own and you don’t deserve to do it on your own. You deserve to feel welcome in a part of a space where you aren’t the only one in your world dealing with this, right? So I encourage people always, and my clients always to find community. But then also there’s a lot of work to be done. Is some of this work to be done with a therapist? Do we have old history that we need to work on healing? And if so, I absolutely recommend getting a therapist. Are you needing support with action plans and accountability and support and looking at different routes to recovery and get a coach? I would say schedule a session with me and see, let’s see what we can do together, right? Aside from that, do you need medically assisted treatment? There is absolutely nothing wrong with getting on medication. So all of these different things are questions to explore. It’s food for thought. And I believe that I, at this point, I’ve covered everything that I really wanted to say in terms of the alcoholic liver disease, but it can get better for many, not for everyone, right? If you go far down enough to cirrhosis, you can’t necessarily bounce back from cirrhosis, but you can still manage cirrhosis. And I think that that’s the other important thing, that if you’re listening to this and you’ve got a diagnosis of cirrhosis, I want you to understand that you have the power to make it worse or you have the power to manage it where you’re at, right? So I think that there’s still a lot of power even with that diagnosis. But if you have alcoholic hepatitis, you absolutely owe it to yourself to give yourself a shot to heal that liver. Because today my enzymes are absolutely normal. I had a physical a couple of months ago and I don’t remember the exact numbers, but my numbers were both for the ALT and the AST. They were both within the healthy range. Right? So there’s absolutely that opportunity to bounce back. um, you know that weight that I had lost, I have gained it back, right? Um, I’m healthy. I have a very healthy appetite. And so my vision is perfect. You know, I don’t scar. I go to the gym and lift heavy things and bang into heavy things all the time and I’m not bruised up like I’ve been in the fight. So there absolutely is hope in getting alcohol free, getting sober and staying away from that damn poison. It takes very little alcohol to cause a lot of damage and it’s just not worth it So if you’re needing support again reach out my website is bottomless to sober.com I have other resources that are not just coaching so check them out and Yeah, I if this was helpful to you, please share it with someone else. Thank you so much

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In this episode:

Link to Spotify.

In this episode, I discuss the power of looking at your past as full of learning experiences rather than letting shame and guilt overpower you. You’re the best source of knowledge for how to navigate decision-making moving forward. It’s a matter of tapping into yourself to be able to do so.

Resources:

Poem – I have been a thousand different women

Bottomless to Sober – Workshops, Writing Classes, and Coaching

Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas:
Hey everyone. So this is the part two to the self-compassion theme. I just felt like making it into two separate episodes. So in this episode, I wanna focus on the self-compassion for ourselves based off the things that we did in the past, right? And understanding that we are in different places today than where we were before. And again, that a huge block to anyone’s recovery journey is going to be that self- I don’t even know what the word is, but just being hard on yourself, not forgiving yourself, being resentful towards yourself, being embarrassed. And really it comes down to shame and guilt, right? If you are trapped in shame and guilt, you’re not going to make as much progress as you would if you practice kindness towards yourself. And so I’ll actually want to start off by reading this poem. It’s been kind of all over the internet in the past couple of days. It’s written by Emery Hall. And the poem is titled, I have been a thousand different women. And if you’re listening to this and you are a man, or you identify something different, just think about you’ve been a thousand different yous. Okay. Um, but the poem is titled, I have been a thousand different women. Make peace with all the women you once were. Lay flowers at their feet. Offer them incense and honey and forgiveness. Honor them and give them your silence. Listen, bless them and let them be. For they are the bones of the temple you sit in now. For they are the rivers of wisdom leading you toward the sea. I’ll read that one more time. I have been a thousand different women by Emery Hall. Make peace with all the women you once were. Lay flowers at their feet. offer them incense and honey and forgiveness. Honor them and give them your silence. Listen, bless them and let them be. For they are the bones of the temple you sit in now. For they are the rivers of wisdom leading you toward the sea. Now, such a beautiful poem and What I really, really love is the imagery of the past versions of ourselves being rivers of wisdom, right? Because the past versions of ourselves, we can definitely let those versions of ourselves fuel shame, fuel guilt. And by doing that, we can let those versions of ourselves stunt our growth. Or we can look at all the past versions of ourselves, recognize that we were doing the best that we could with what we had. and also extract a ton of knowledge, a ton of wisdom from the past versions of ourselves so that we make decisions moving forward that are in alignment with where we wanna go. So I will give you a personal example of mine. So I’ll use dating. I feel like dating is always kind of like a really easy way to explain things, at least for me. So I think in the previous episode, I talked about a relationship I’ll just give you the context in case you didn’t listen to the episode. So right after I got divorced, like back in 2017, I got into a relationship with someone who I was super excited about. Everything seemed great, except that I noticed that this person was always very resistant to anything having to do with social media. So even if we had hit a milestone and I were to tag him in the milestone, he would be resisting towards it and he would either remove himself from the tag or then he would just say, no, I’m just a private person. You know, I’m private. I don’t like to put my business out there. Back then, an old version of Jessica, she knew that there was something wrong with that. The old version of me had a very strong inclination that there was a serious reason why this man did not want to be tagged by me in anything. Right? And of course, time revealed itself that there was a whole other woman. And that’s why he did not want to be tagged in anything, right? Because he had two different worlds that he was living in himself that he couldn’t be tagged from one because it would then be revealed in the other and his whole world would blow apart. Spoiler alert, his life did get blown apart because eventually everything did get revealed. But back to that moment when I knew there was something really wrong with the secrecy of it all. But here’s where old Jessica operated from. Old Jessica was operating from a wounded broken heart from going through a divorce. Old Jessica was just happy that someone, anyone would give her attention and validate her who was attractive, educated, you know, and felt like she could get along with. Therefore, old Jessica was willing to put up with anything, including not listening to her own judgment because she was so scared of being alone. Right, I want you to sit with that. Now, let’s fast forward to current me, right? So I did take, thankfully I did learn from that experience and I did learn that if someone is operating in secret, it means that they’ve got something to hide. And so fast forward to me today, and in the last two years when I started to like date again after losing my boyfriend, That was one of the things that I really paid attention to, right? Like, do you operate in secret? Are you being secretive? Because if you are, that means that there’s something that you’re hiding, and I’m not OK with that, and I’m not sticking around for that. So there was somebody who I had met back in early, I think it was early 2022, and he was incredibly secretive. Again, and I mean, it was so early on, I didn’t need to, like, tag him in anything, so to speak. But there, it was like he never could look at his phone where the screen was visible and he always had to remove himself from the space to go take a phone call, right? Everything that he did had to be done in a way that it wasn’t visible to me. And that was a huge red flag for me. Now, I had that same feeling, that same old feeling of, well, I don’t wanna be alone, I really like him, he’s really cool, we get along well. He checked off all the boxes for me, but I had that same… sick feeling that something was wrong that I had years ago that I didn’t listen to years ago. So what did I do this time around? I listened to that feeling and I removed myself from that situation. I, to this day, I don’t know. Did he have a secret? Maybe, maybe not. But the point is, is that I didn’t stick around to find out because when I confronted him about his secrecy, he gave me a vague wishy washy answer. And that was all that I needed. I didn’t need to sit around and go through a whole entire relationship to then become heartbroken for me to find out that there’s probably something going on that wasn’t in alignment with what I needed, right? And why is that? Because I leaned on my prior experience, that prior river of knowledge to lead me to the sea. So as soon as I removed myself from that situation, in time, I found my current partner. And I don’t know where things are gonna go with me and my current partner. Like sure, it’d be great to have a great long lasting outcome. I don’t know that yet. But the point is, is that with my current partner, I pay attention to the things that he does. And so say, for example, with the online thing, there’s clearly no secrecy in that current situation that I’m in. If there’s something special that happens and I choose to post and I choose to tag him, that man is not hiding a single post. He’s very open and very transparent. He’s not running to his phone to hide it when it’s ringing, right? So that I can’t see who’s calling. Those are all the things that have led me to the sea. So I’m like at that point with regard to say dating other things. No, I’m not at the sea yet. I’m on my, I’m on my way down the river to get there. But I highlight those examples, you all, because that is a manner of how I leaned on my prior self to lean on that experience. so that my future decisions don’t backfire on me, right? But the way that could have looked differently, right, was when that, with that guy from early 2022, if he had been secretive, if I had felt that there was something wrong there and I would have still chosen to go along with it, right? That would be me choosing to not learn from the river of wisdom that I have. And so I love that poem because There is so much value in our past experiences, no matter how dark they were, no matter how awful they were, no matter how shame we are for them. There’s so much value in where we come from that we really can outline a great future for ourselves if we just tap in and pay attention to everything that we went through. But when we’ve gone through something, and we choose to ignore it when we see it coming back up again, I promise you that your life is going to put you in experiences where that situation is going to repeat itself over and over and over again until you choose to break from that pattern and do something different. And so in terms of what’s a tangible takeaway from this conversation that we’re having, a.k.a. this one-sided conversation that I’m having with the microphone and hopefully you’re listening to, I would say it is this. When you are today facing a situation that is making you uncomfortable, it’s making you take pause. I want you to stop. I want you to pull out that journal or however else you like to process and write. And I want you to think about a time in your past where something similar was happening. Right? Obviously, circumstances are not always going to be identical, but when does this go back to in time to? What do you remember? And I want you to think about what you learned from that prior situation. What is similar? What are the parallels? Write them down. What do these situations have in common? Then I want you to pay attention to what did you do in the past and what was the outcome and did you like that outcome? If you did not like that outcome, what could you have done differently in the past and notice I’m not asking you about the other person. I’m not asking about the other circumstances. This whole conversation is focused on you because you’re the only one that’s in control at any given moment, right? So from your previous situation, what was the circumstance? What did you do? What outcome did you get? Did you like the outcome? If you did not like that outcome, then go back, what could you have done differently and what may have that outcome look like? And then I want you to look at your current situation and look at what your options are. What are your options? What are you empowered to do right now? What is option A and what may be the outcome there? How does that outcome sound to you? Is it like something that you can, that you can get with? Do you like it, dislike it? It’s okay to dislike, to dislike outcomes if they’re the right thing for you. Right? Like every choice that we make is not going to be pleasant and it’s not going to be easy. but it’s going to be right sometimes. So I want you to look at your current situation and outline what you can do, what are the possible outcomes for doing those different actions, and then use that information to guide you, because I promise you that you carry all the wisdom that you need within you to make best choices for yourself. And if you’re struggling, then this is a great opportunity for you to find where you can reach out. who you can connect to help you tap into yourself. Right? So really that’s all that I wanted to kind of share in this episode. I want you to be kind to yourself and rather than feel shame and guilt for what you used to do, what type of person you used to be like, use that previous person to provide you all the information that you need. for how to move forward because you are a source, you are the best source of information for how to live your life. So with that, I’m gonna go ahead and close out. I hope that everyone has an awesome day, share the podcast and I will talk to you soon.

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In this episode:

Link to Spotify

You don’t have to be a sober person in recovery to have a history of making poor choices. In this episode, I discuss coping with the highs and lows of dealing with other humans being flawed individuals and how you can extract information from your experiences to keep you mindful and not jaded. People only show us what they choose to reveal, so how can we be kind to ourselves when we miss red flags?

Resources:

Jessica’s Instagram

Bottomless to Sober – Workshops, Writing Classes, and Coaching

Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas:
Hey everyone, welcome to today’s episode. So I wanted to talk about the topic of self-compassion. And the reason why is because I realized it’s something that I need to practice more for myself. There’s a recent circumstance in which I found out some really unfortunate news about somebody who I highly respected and admired. And I feel like a part of me immediately made it about myself and judged myself really harshly. and was like, well, you should have known better. You know? And so with that being said, I’m honestly probably going to break this up into two episodes just so that each episode is more clear in its topic. So first I want to talk about practicing self-compassion when other people let you down, essentially, right? Like you have this vision or an idea of what a person is, and then their true colors and you’re like, holy shit, I did not anticipate that. And it’s funny because this is totally it’s totally unrelated, but not so, you know, recently I’ve been also kind of following the media about Lizzo. And obviously I wasn’t there and I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen. But again, it just it just kind of stings like to have someone that I admire and then see these new versions of. these people come out. And I think, A, one of the big takeaways is it’s just that reminder that we as humans are very imperfect. And if anything, I as a person in recovery need to always remember, right, where I was at one point when I was making deceitful choices, right, selfish choices, choices that didn’t benefit anyone except for that urge to drink. And… reminding myself that I’m not the only person who struggles with poor choices, right? And that you can have other people, like just because somebody isn’t struggling with addiction, it doesn’t suddenly make them like a perfect angel or a human being. Because I think that I have this notion of, well, people in addiction or in recovery, they can have these struggles and they can have these dark, sordid histories, but no one else on the earth’s population can. And then I suddenly like hold other people to these weird higher standards. And really what I think current events are showing me is that I totally need to check myself and that anyone, anyone and everyone is subject to having a vast complexity in their lived experience, not just sober people. So anyway, with that being said, I’m going to read a little passage that I’m going to post on my Instagram at some point. And I wrote. When people show you who they are, believe them. However, people don’t always show their real selves. We don’t know what we can’t see. So remember to be kind to yourself for not knowing certain truths. You’re doing your best. I’m gonna read that one more time. When people show you who they are, believe them. However, people don’t always show their real selves. We don’t know what we can’t see. So remember to be kind to yourself for not knowing certain truths. You’re doing your best. So I, I had to write that down because it is very important for us to first remember that right. There are times when people will show you their true colors very clearly and it falls on us to decide what we are or are not going to do, right. So I’ll give an example, say, with friendship. Let’s say that you are early in recovery and you told a friend that you are quitting drinking, you’ve decided that you don’t want it to be a part of their life, of your life, and this friend is like, oh, well, can’t you just have one after you’ve already said that you’re done with alcohol? Now, that’s giving you information that you can choose to believe or not to believe. The information that I’m getting from a scenario like that is that friend does not care about your wellbeing. Point blank period, right? What I’m getting from that is that friend is more concerned with maintaining a relationship with alcohol than they are with you maintaining your health. Right? So at that point, when a situation like that presents itself, you have the information that you can decide what to do with it. You can either choose to continue that friendship, see what happens, or you can choose to remove yourself from that person, understanding that they’re just not in alignment with where you are in terms of your relationship with alcohol. Another scenario of people showing you their true colors. I’ll give an old example from someone I dated in the past. So after I had gotten divorced, I was in a relationship with somebody who never would let me tag him on social media. where if I were to tag him, he would always remove the tags and remove the tags. And his argument was, oh, you know, I like to be a private person. And there was something about that really bothered me because he stated that, but then, you know, I had gone to meet his family, I had been in his community, et cetera. I had gotten very, very involved. And in my mind, I was like, well, then why can’t… You know, I’m not blowing up the social media posts even back then in terms of my personal stuff, but I was like, why can’t I post like happy anniversary and tag you? And something about that seemed very incredibly suspicious. And I knew back then that I should have been like, well, if you are hiding me, there’s a problem and I will not be hidden. So I am done. Right? That’s what I quote unquote should have done. that’s what I would do today. And now that I know better, I would do better. But of course, I didn’t know back then. Lo and behold, what the time reveal time revealed that he was actually in a whole other relationship. And so that was the specific reason as to why he couldn’t be tagged on social media, because he was holding a huge secret from me and from like everybody else, right? Like he was basically seeing two people at once. So He showed me who he was. He showed me very clearly that I needed to be kept a secret, but I chose not to believe it. And so then I got burned, right? The beautiful part of it is I know better now and I do better now. So one of my very clear things in relationships is that if I get a sense that you’re hiding me, I’m just not going to entertain you because I will not be hidden. So I wanted to give those two examples of to just hit on that point, right? That people can show you who they are and it’s up to you to believe them or not believe them and then just deal with the consequences. Life is always gonna teach you a lesson. It’s just a matter of how you choose your path. But the next thing I wanna focus on is the idea of people not always showing their real selves. Because that’s the thing. Sometimes people will give you the very clear signals. Sometimes you will see the red flag. And again, it’s on you to either act on it or ignore it and then deal with the consequences later. But people don’t always show everything, right? And some people are very good at being deceitful and compartmentalizing the parts of themselves that they don’t want other people to know. A perfect example of this, and I’m not saying that social media is deceitful, but a perfect example of this is someone’s social media feed, right? Like Right now, my hair is in the bonnet, like I am up early and I’m just recording, but I’m not posting myself and what I look like when I get right out of bed on my Instagram. The reason why, because I don’t really want people to see what I look like when I get out of bed. I don’t care to share that. I mean, I look pretty much the same, but I choose to curate my Instagram feed so that you see what I want you to see, right? And the point there is that everyone does that with their social media. Whatever people put out on their social media, is a curated story that they want others to see of themselves. So they’re not going to show, like I’m not going to show when I’m cleaning up my dog’s poop, because again, I don’t think that that’s relevant. I don’t think that you need to see that. If you want to see that, let me know. But I think that that’s not a valuable thing to share. But if we take the concept of the curated version of ourselves from social media and apply it to regular life, it’s very similar. People… show what they want you to know. And so in the cases of folks who are very vulnerable and open and transparent, that’s great because you get a better sense of the whole picture. But even then you still don’t see everything and you still don’t know everything. So when you are close to someone or where you have been close to someone and then you find something out major about them that came completely out of left field, it can be really hard. to process that information. And you might want to be harsh on yourself, right? Whether it was say deception, like in a relationship, right? But it doesn’t have to just apply to that. It can be literally anything that comes out about this person that you didn’t know that might be a disappointing truth about them. And now suddenly you of course make it about yourself and you might be feeling really bad about yourself. Like, how did I not see this? How did I not know this? And the reason I’m bringing that up is because you didn’t know, right? Some of us might say, well, what about my intuition? How did my intuition not pick up on the fact that this person was a liar or a deceiver or a cheater, or a gas lighter? Why didn’t I pick up on that? And I wanna invite you to think about the fact that even our intuition is our body having a response. to the stimulus that it receives, right? So as humans, go back to just basics, we see things, we hear things, we experience our environments, or we experience someone else who is in our environment, and our body scans that person and creates a decision of whether they’re safe or not. If someone is purposefully hiding something or compartmentalizing and keeping something away from you, There’s no way for your intuition to scan and pick up that this person is some sort of a risk, right? Again, there are times when those flags are visible and we choose to ignore them. But I’m talking about the invisible flags that we didn’t even have the option to choose to ignore. Right? We can’t see, we don’t know what we can’t see. And we can’t sense something that has been completely cut off and blocked away. And so I really just want us to practice that self-compassion when we don’t know the entire truth, when we don’t get to see the entire picture, because sometimes that does happen. And the other really important thing is to not take it personally when some sort of dark truth comes out. Right. Because at the end of the day, you know, to quote Dominguez-Ruiz from the four agreements, everything that other people say. has nothing to do with you. Everything that other people do has nothing to do with you. Even, and you know, he does say this in his book, someone could straight up come up to you and shoot you in the head, and it still has nothing to do with you. And the argument there that he states is that when people make decisions, it always has something to do with something internal that they’ve got going on. So when there’s someone in your life that you may have respected, or a celebrity who you really admired, And it turns out that there was something secretive and dark about them that has come to light. It is so important for us to remember that we did the best that we could with the information that we had. Right? And when more is revealed, it goes back to us now being empowered to make a choice. What do we do with this information? Right? Do we… ignore it. Do we act on it? Right. But again, practicing that self kindness is so important, especially in the world of being in recovery, because you’re going to find that there’s no such thing as at least in my opinion, there’s no such thing as like the good person or the bad person. We’re all humans and we’re all incredibly flawed. And sober people aren’t the only people who have a history of making shitty choices, right? It’s a human experience. In the human experience, there’s a lot of terrible choices that are made, and it’s up to us to decide what we’re okay with and what sits right with us and what doesn’t sit right with us and act accordingly. So with that being said, what are some actionable items you can do kind of given this information? Like if you recently had somebody in your life who totally let you down, what can you do? So number one, write about it, right? Get all the feelings out, write them a letter. Don’t send them the letter. Go through the art of writing them the letter where you say everything that’s on your mind, but don’t send them that letter. This is an activity for you to practice healing and for you to let those emotions that are weighing on your heart and mind off of your chest. This is not for you to go interact with them. If you choose to interact with them, That is something that you can do after you consult with like a mentor, a coach, a therapist, some sort of professional. Like I said, I’m not going to sit here and tell you on a podcast to go talk to someone because I have no idea what the context is. And if this was like an abuser or something, I’m definitely not going to sit here and be like, yeah, go talk to them. But I will tell you to go ahead and write everything down on a piece of paper. Okay. Then the next thing that I want you to do is I want you to recognize the… good that you did see of what was shown to you, what was good and what was helpful and beneficial. Because again, not all situations are just this or that. We live life on a spectrum. And I want you to acknowledge the positive sides of the spectrum here. Then I want you to go back and look at if there was any sign of a flag that you missed. Was there any hint of red in there that you just turned a blind eye to because the good was so good? And what I want you to do with those hints of red, maybe pink, I want you to just lock them away in your mind as a source of information, as a reference catalog, like an encyclopedia, for the future. And this information does not mean that it’s law for everyone that you come across in your future. But what it does mean is that if you see this hint of pink or red, again, with a person that you interact with in the future, that you step back and take a close look at the situation that you’re in, whether it’s a friendship or romantic relationship, a work partnership, et cetera, and you use that to help you decide if you’re going to move forward with this person and how, right? What safeguards can you put in place? What I don’t want you to do. is to take this one example of a person and apply it to all blanks. You know, like if you are a heterosexual woman and a guy cheated on you, I don’t want you to be like, oh yeah, all men are cheaters. No, that’s not going to be helpful. And that kind of thinking is going to be very alienating and leave you isolated in like an ivory tower because you’re trying to protect yourself. And really you’re… just not going to experience any joy or any pain because you’re sitting there and isolating yourself. So that’s not healing either. Isolation is not healing. So just putting that out there. So anyway, I hope that this was helpful. I hope that if you are dealing with a slightly wounded heart because you’ve been let down by another human being, being a human, that you remind yourself that it is okay. And again, reflect on it, write out your feelings, identify what was good. And then also lock away the red, lock away the pink, but don’t make the pink or the red law. And hopefully that’ll just kind of help you in terms of practicing some of that self-compassion to yourself for not having seen everything, right? People show what they choose to show, even you show only what you choose to show others. So when somebody finds something out about you and they’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know that. Again, it’s okay. It is all right. So thanks so much for your time today. I’m going to do a second part to this with regards to self-compassion, specifically with regard to ourselves, but I just wanted to do this one first. So thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, share it, and I will talk to you soon.

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In this episode:

Link to Spotify.

In this episode, I sit down with Brian, a school administrator with a remarkable journey to share. Brian opens up about his past as one of the few Black male elementary school teachers he knew. On top of that, he shares how he battled alcohol addiction and navigated the challenging road to sobriety. Listen to learn about educators’ struggles as they balance teaching responsibilities with personal demons and what tools you can take for your journey.

Resources:

Follow Brian: @teacherhootnhowl on TikTok, Threads, B-R-I-A-N Linktree

Explore Brian’s Support Groups: Sober Together Facebook Group and Sober Together Marco Polo

Bottomless to Sober – Workshops, Writing Classes, and Coaching

Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas
Hey everyone. Welcome on today’s episode. I’ve got Brian, who is a fellow educator who I’ve connected with here in the beautiful world of the internet. And really, I just wanted to invite him on the show today because I think it’s really important with back to school season being right around the corner for folks to hear about the perspective of an educator with regards to his story in recovery, and hopefully you are able to walk away with some tangible strategies to either help you or the educator in your life in terms of.

making some strides in your own journey. So with no further ado, Brian, tell us about you.

Brian
Well, I’m Brian and yes, I am an educator. I have been an educator for, I don’t know the years now, 24, I think. And part of the education journey that I’ve had has been partly, mostly as an alcoholic that I could honestly say.

I’m originally from Michigan. That’s where I spent the first 30 years of my life, growing up in a very Southern Baptist Christian home where alcohol was…

just no, a big no-no. Alcohol was bad. And I’m 46, I grew up through the 80s and 90s. So a lot of the advertising and things like that were out there for us and what we were learning in school had to do with not doing drugs. That was a big deal. But alcohol really never seemed to be

deal they didn’t Nancy Reagan the former first lady didn’t really talk a lot about don’t drink don’t drink or anything like that so it was such an acceptable thing in society but I really got through middle school through high school without ever doing anything I believe it was because I

was raised that way and that wasn’t something that I was gonna do but by the end of my senior year of high school in 1995 I was just turned 18 and in February of that year and it was the end of the year it was a memorial day weekend and I went quote-unquote camping with my friends.

And because that’s what you do. It was senior skip weekend. So we skipped school, went camping at the rifle river. I have no idea where that is. I just know I was in the car. Drinking beer and enjoying it. And I was like, oh, this is cool. This is what this is what camping is. So I think that first night. Because my bloody recollection is not all that good, but.

I’m pretty sure I went through a case of beer, smoked weed, did everything that 18 year olds did or teenagers did at the time. I did it all in one night and I was like, yeah, popped up the next morning and did it again. And that started a life of drinking. So I was a commuter in college, so I still lived at home and lived…

the college life even as a commuter. So I would still go out and party. I would still start my weekends on Wednesday and go to Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then start over calmly on Monday with a new week and focus on my school and all that kind of stuff. It wasn’t…

crazy alcoholic drinking and when I looked back on it, it was, you know, what a lot of people were doing at the time. It was just partying as a college kid. Then around 22, I ended up abruptly ending all that party stuff and got married and was a father immediately. So

I had to make some different choices about how I dealt with alcohol because that was still there. And honestly, I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking to you if I hadn’t gotten married and become a dad. When I did party, it was blackout drink party.

piss yourself at some point, puke wildly. I had fun, but there were a lot of times that I’m pretty sure I was not the life of any party because I was always focused on the drink. Always focused on the drink instead of focused on the fun. So I took that into marriage, and I think I was more of a…

heavy drinker, but I tried to restrain myself to weekends because I had little kids. I have three daughters and I needed to be present as dad and as husband for my wife to be able to do that and be an elementary school teacher. So in my town of about 35,000, I think everybody knew who I was. I was a kid.

black kid who grew up in a white town where I ended up teaching in the district and town that I grew up in. So people knew who I was and if I did stupid stuff with alcohol, people knew that. My wife, when we got together as just dating and stuff like that, she was not a drinker. And I…

Introduced that to her at some point. I guess in order to date me you were gonna have to drink With me or you didn’t have to but that was that’s part of the decision that she had made so It became a thing for us, but I can remember many times As a young dad and young teacher and young husband still doing stupid drunk stuff

not all the time, but enough as to where I should have known that there were some issues there. But I was able to survive and be successful. And as a teacher, my kids were in the 90% reading, and they were very high in math, and they were good kids. Nobody messed with Mr. Johnson’s class. I guess I can say my name. I don’t care.

Brian
Nobody messed with my class. They were well behaved. They were good kids. They knew what the expectations were and what they were supposed to do. And I think at that time back in the early 2000s I didn’t spend a lot of time drinking during the week where I would show up to work hungover and smelling like alcohol or anything like that.

I was good about that. I was always really good about separating work and alcohol. Even though sometimes I do remember I occasionally, you know that wake up time when you’re like, oh shit, I’m still a little fucking drunk. Can I cuss on here? I just did. Oh, sorry.

Jessica Dueñas
No, you’re fine. Totally fine.

Brian
Yeah, but I would wake up a little drunk or hungover or whatever you want to call it. And I’d still be able to go to work because it was a small town. So I could just hop in the car, drive a half mile to work and push through the day. And when you get good at teaching, you can figure out those days that you don’t really want to do anything.

And I’m not promoting this at all, but we figure it out. If it’s a day that as a teacher, I just need to be alone, even though I’ve got between 20 and 36, 38 kids, whatever you, it’s all changed over the time. But I was very good at not being drunk at work and never would have thought to drink at work.

or drink before work or you know head right to the liquor store after work that was not part of anything. I would have laughed if anyone had asked me that what my routine was. My routine was to get up really early, do lesson planning, do grade grading papers and

be the first one out the door because I wanted to be there with my kids and my wife. My kids didn’t even know I was a teacher. They never saw me grade papers, they never saw me lesson planning, and they were little, but they really had no idea. Not until they got older. Around the…
sixth year, fifth or sixth year of my career was when the economy started to really be messy and that was the first experience that I had with being laid off and not knowing what I was going to be able to do, not knowing what the future was.

with my job even though eventually I would always get my job back but sometimes it was less like last second I remember they were like hey you’re gonna be teaching this kindergarten in the morning and eighth grade math in the afternoon and I’m like okay at different schools yes yeah I can do that of course

Jessica Dueñas
That’s insane.

Brian
super teacher, I guess, but I was gonna do anything for my family. But the cycle started of not knowing where I was going to be. And I think the last year that I was there, I ended up at a different school and it felt like a… I don’t want to say an imposter, but if you know schools, schools really… I think if you have a good school culture, you can…

sometimes become very family-ish and sometimes that can turn a little clickish. So I would show up and felt like an outsider. And through all that, I think my wife and I had decided that we were going to leave and my wife and I ended up deciding that we were gonna go to somewhere. We didn’t know where and we landed on Arizona. She had lived in Phoenix in 99 and said it was beautiful. So we ended up.

coming here, I’d say probably about 15 years ago around today. I got a call to be a Dean of Students. And I think by that time we were, I know I was drinking more. We had sold our house and were living in her parents basement until I.

was able to get a job in Arizona and then we finally did move, but I know I was drinking more then. I don’t know if it was because of the stress. I don’t know if it was because of the progression of the disease. It’s a lot that I look back on and wonder, you know, where the red flags were, should have been. Can’t go back and change time.

So I know that alcohol was way more of an issue. And I’m telling this story from what I recall and how I’m recalling it. I could be way off base. My wife could have another version of this and I’m sure she does, which there’s nothing wrong with that. She was there for that and any kind of trauma that I caused. And…

Brian
as I tell this and try to go back so many years, it is an interesting trip because I see things from my perspective. Having little kids, I don’t really think about, having little kids then, I didn’t really think about, you know, what any of this was doing for them, to them, or how it was affecting them. I should have thought of that stuff because I was an educator and…

I knew the effects of substance abuse and trauma and all that stuff from being a teacher. And I did not apply it at my own home. And that was a fail. That was a fail on my part that if I could go back and change time, I wish I could. But like I said, I can’t. But I get to do that now. So…

Coming to Arizona with no money and nothing. I had a job and I was excited, but we had really pushed all the cards on the table to be able to sell the house and move and do all of that successfully, which we did. But there was a lot more drinking in my house, probably on my part.

I don’t know if it was because the job was more stressful. It just always felt like we were behind on a lot of different things financially. And moving to Arizona with three kids is hard. And then the thing that we tried to avoid in Michigan started happening in Arizona.

where the economy was, it’s like Arizona always has to be able to catch up from the bottom. So two years into working here, they’d already cut my job in half and I was basically instructional coaching and Dean of Students at the same time. And then by the third year, the my position was gone. They had eliminated that. So I was in

What I really didn’t know was this long series of not knowing what the hell I was doing in education. I didn’t know what the next job was. I didn’t know what the next school was. And as a teacher or as an administrator, that’s not a good feeling to have. And within that, I used alcohol as just a way to basically shut down.

I think I was still successful during that time doing what I needed to do, but that was what I used to just basically say, fuck it. I’m doing what I can. I’m doing the best that I can. And it doesn’t seem like enough. And I was, my gosh, after I was a dean of students, I was a…

specials teacher where kids came to me and I Just basically did what I did him from my office in the classroom talked about so what we would call social emotional learning now I was a social emotional learning teacher before that even Was a thing and I got to do that kindergarten through eighth grade, which was a nice No, it wasn’t a nice experience. I’m looking at it now. Like I’m glad I did that

But I was at one school for two weeks, and then I would go to another school for two weeks, then I’d go back to that school for two weeks, and I didn’t have any kind of home again. I was just that dude that taught that specials class, and I knew that that’s what I was, because they had called it like a gap position. We just need a special, we need a body, we need somebody who can do this, and I was like, yeah, I’ll do it, just to, you know, I didn’t know any better.

but it didn’t help me out in dealing with alcohol. It really allowed that to increase. Yeah.

Jessica Dueñas
Right. So when did you like, when was like that turning point for you where you had to stop drinking? Like, what was it that brought you to that turning point? You know, for some people, they use the term bottom, other people don’t resonate with that term. But I’m hearing like your career was getting increasingly, increasingly more stressful. The budget was affecting your role.

Brian
Yep.

Jessica Dueñas
also kind of like not really being honored and respected as a professional, which happens to so many teachers. And so yeah, I’m curious, like, where was it that you started to realize that the alcohol had to go?

Brian
Um, well, after all a few years in flux, I ended up getting an assistant principal job in a different school district, which was great. That was 2012. And I was in that school district for seven years where I was an assistant principal and I was a principal. Uh, I was drinking during that time. I, my principal would tell me that sometimes when I was an AP.

And I think I knew I had a problem. I was still drinking when I was a principal. And then we had the change in leadership. So as an educator, you know this, you get a new superintendent that comes in, new superintendent, cleaned house, of all the administrators put her people in. And I was one of the people that,

Brian
was part of that deal. And I had to go back to the classroom. And that was really not the rock bottom, but it was bottom enough as to where I should have known, yo, you got to stop. During that time, I had my first seizure in 2019. I didn’t know why I didn’t and I ended up in the hospital for a few days. And

Jessica Dueñas
Wow.

Brian
I didn’t, it was not attributed to alcohol. So I was just like, all right, let’s just keep going. So I continued on with life, but then the pandemic hit and I was teaching at home, like many teachers across the country, across the world. And my alcohol definitely very much,

exponentially increased as to where I would be on a Zoom and I would have bottles next to me and be able to put kids in breakout rooms and then be able to break out my own bun and there was there was no supervision there was no administrators coming to the classroom or anything like that so I became a drinker at work at home.

Jessica Dueñas
Hehehe

Brian
And during that time I had COVID, I lost my taste and smell, but with that I also ended up in the hospital. I had a car accident where I believe I had a seizure. My blood pressure was really low. My, and then by the time that they had done all the scans and checks, they’re like, dude.

your kidneys aren’t functioning, your liver’s fucked up. You got a lot of stuff going on. I burned my esophagus because I couldn’t taste and smell. I was drinking 100 proof, you know, the 99 brand. I was drinking 99 bananas, like it was water and I was chasing it with water. Like either my chaser, I wasn’t mixing drinks anymore. I was just like.

Jessica Dueñas
Oh god.

Brian
I’m gonna get fucked up and still do whatever this is. And during that pandemic time, I was hospitalized a few times. I would pass out in parks. I would go, quote unquote, walking. And when I went walking, there’s lakes here where we can walk. I would hit the Safeway first and get some little of the airplane bottle type.

drinks, put them in my pocket, walk around my three miles and be halfway through that little pack knowing that I had stuff at home. I started driving out in the desert just because there was that was the only way out of your house because it was mask up or don’t go anywhere, you know. So I would drive out, I would drink, throw bottles out the window.

there were never any cops around, so I wasn’t really worried about it. And throughout all this time, doctors would be like, dude, your liver enzymes are bad, your, these numbers are bad. Every time I would have to go to the doctor, it was like, I knew something negative was gonna be there and it was about alcohol. I stretched through that and I was like, I’m gonna be a principal again.

I’m going to do this again and I got that last year. And. At Labor Day of 2022.

Brian
I was told in the morning, this is the best, I was working at a target school, the guy that ran it said, this is the best start we’ve had in our 10 year history. Thank you. And that afternoon, I was given a letter of termination because they said they didn’t have enough students. They had cut my Dean of Students position the week before. And I was like, yeah, I can manage this on my own, which I could. And then I lost that job and that was pretty much.

the way and I just didn’t care anymore. I felt like a failure for the third or fourth time in my career. Everything was defined by my education career, by being whatever that position, whatever that title was. That was an important thing growing up, was going to college and becoming that thing and being that thing for the rest of your life.

And I clearly wasn’t doing that from what the world was telling me. And I just started drinking all the time at that point last year. Uh, crisis team had come in. I’d been to the hospital several times. I really wasn’t doing anything good as a dad or husband. I was terrible to my wife. I was really angry with her.

and displayed that regularly. I didn’t care about education anymore, which, you know, that was my heart. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

Brian
Eventually through a series of events, I ended up checking myself in to a behavioral hospital and or psych hospital, whatever you call it. And

That was October of last year. So almost 10 months ago, just over nine months ago now, I finally had said, you know what? This isn’t gonna work anymore. This marriage isn’t gonna work. Being dad isn’t going to work. Being teacher guy or educator or whoever the, whoever I thought I was supposed to be, none of that was going to work if I was going to…

keep drinking alcohol. And on top of that, physically, medically, I had a seizure in January of 2022 in my glass with my students. And thankfully I had a, my teacher’s assistant was a paramedic and my wife worked there too. So she was around the corner.

but I was able to not help. But again, that should have been a red flag of stop, stop. And I had tried to stop during that year in 2022 because I knew going into that next job, having alcohol be a part of it was not going to help me be successful as the principal that I wanted to be. And when I lost it, I lost pretty much hope. But then…

something clicked that said, hey man, the next seizure you have, it could be your heart. It could be, you know, I didn’t know. And I made a point of saying I’m not going to be the guy that dies with a bottle next to me or in my classroom because I was drunk. And I was in the psych hospital for a week. And really…

I think through the use of medication and therapy and, uh, seeing other people in similar circumstances and meeting people who I still talk to today and we still have connection, uh, that ended up being really important. And I was listening to your podcast today.

and one of the ones that you did before about you know being in a hospital and it was the best thing I could have done and I honestly don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner except for when I think back and I can think currently is the stigma that goes around with being an alcoholic that exists here in this country

and probably around the world. I haven’t been around the world, but I know it does because I have friends that I talk to around the world now and they said the same thing, but I finally succumbed to that. And since October 15th of 2022, I have not picked up again and I have not had any cravings. I have not thought about it. And every time I think or see alcohol, I…

do a little dance in my head or sometimes physically and say, fuck you, I win. And that’s how I am here today. As a nine month sober person, my life has entirely changed and I’m a better everything for it. And I wish I’d done it much sooner.

But I’m glad I’m still here and get to be able to talk about it, share my story with other people. When I was a principal, education stories were huge to me. That would be part of every PD that we would have was education stories. And I would have teachers share their stories about how they got to where they are today.

Brian
I’ve been a speaker at a conference on stories and education. So coming up on you, you have a similar thought process when it comes to storytelling and storytelling and education with alcohol. That’s like sort of a cool bonus. I don’t know.

Jessica Dueñas
Right.

Brian
But it allows you to be able to use the things that you have used as an educator and be able to, honestly, I put them into place in my own life and they have been part of the toolbox. I was gonna talk about toolbox, but…

Jessica Dueñas
Go for it because I mean that, I mean, I was going to ask, well, now that you are so sober, now that you are sober, how are you staying sober as an educator? So yeah, like what does that toolbox look like for you? Schools right around the corner.

Brian
Yeah, so once I got out of the hospital last year, I started going to, I tried AA meetings, because it was a different world. I’d gone to AA once or twice, a few times before in town, and it was in person, and I live in a small community. So it wasn’t really anonymous. Everybody, you’d see people and you’re like, oh shit, I know who that person is. Oh shit, that lady teaches at my kid’s school. Oh shit, like, oh.

It didn’t feel good. It felt weird. It felt vulnerable and exposed and what’s the talk of the town going to be? This teacher guy is drunk and I didn’t like AA when I first went. And then I went zooming on AA and for a period of time that was very helpful for me to be able to hear.

other people’s struggles and stories within their addiction. And to know that I wasn’t the only one who was on the struggle bus when it came to this. I remember going in 1998, I was 21 years old, one of my buddies, he had to go to AA court mandated because he got a DUI. And I went to the meeting with him. I’m like, I don’t have anything else to do. I’m living at Michigan State for the summer, living my best life.

waking up drinking, going to bed drinking, eating Subway, like 21 year olds do. I went to this AA meeting in person, because that’s all there was then. And this, I just remember it vividly, this man talking about how he couldn’t function. He’s like, I had to wake up. And he said that he drank a case of beer a day. And I was like, you can’t drink a case of beer a day. What the fuck? These people are crazy. And…

He said I couldn’t I would wake up and I would drink and I would drink throughout the day and I would drink at night And I’m like God that’s an alcoholic. That is not me. I am NOT that person and Eventually that became me Spoiler alert! It happens! So I Listened to these people I had really determined that I was not going to be drinking anymore because I didn’t like I said I didn’t want to die

Jessica Dueñas
Right. Spoiler alert, it is possible to drink that in a day.

Brian
and I knew that I only had so many chances left. That’s really how I felt. I felt like if I was a cat, I was on life 12 and shouldn’t have been there. So, putting my toolbox together, when I got released from the hospital, I got set up with a therapist. I got set up with an intensive outpatient program, which was…

uh what I’ve really been doing during this time of uh I don’t want to say not working because I’ve worked off and on here and there but I had to and everybody doesn’t get to do this I had to call time out on my life in order to keep my life I could have kept grinding I there’s I could have after I lost my job in october or september of last year I could have

easily gotten another job because they need teachers and I’m a little unicorn-y in teaching because I’m a black male elementary educator and there aren’t a lot of us. There aren’t a lot of black educators but there aren’t a lot of black elementary male educators on top of that. So I could have jumped back into it but I had support from my family and I had support from my wife to do whatever I needed to do to…

help myself be better. And I did the intensive outpatient all online and that included physical therapy. My body was broken down from the seizures that I had had. So I couldn’t even lift my arms hardly. And my wife would make fun of me when I was trying to bag groceries because I couldn’t bag groceries.

I was so slow and I couldn’t put dishes away and all of this stuff and there was an app that had come out before I went to the hospital and it was called Sober Together and you basically had to there was a guy that moderated questions a question of the day and you got on video and answered the question of the day.

That was great. We had a little community. Uh, you got to learn a little bit more about people. Um, it was a way to keep accountable by checking in every day. And through that learning along with my IOP, I had put together a lot of tools for the toolbox to be able to.

do something different than alcohol. To be able to color and draw and sing and find joy in doing laundry and the little things in life and still being able to go to some meetings and stuff like that. Well, early this year in 2023, the Sober Together app, they couldn’t maintain it.

and they shut it down. And that was a interesting time. But this group of alcoholics, we were very slick and we shifted our questions of the day over to Marco Polo. And we started assigning people weeks to have questions of the day. And with Marco Polo, there’s no time limit.

And that’s how I ended up where I am now with this group of people and being able to talk and getting on TikTok. TikTok, man, that’s been one of the best things I could have ever had. No lie.

I was a TikTok watcher like a lot of people are back in early TikTok. And then when I got out of the hospital, I’m like, I’m going to tell my story on TikTok. I’m going to go through recovery, check it in on TikTok every day. And I think my first one was maybe day 20 or I’m walking with my daughter. We’re on a walk. And

It got a lot of likes. A lot of people liked it. I was like, oh, okay, maybe people will. I was just a watcher and laughed at people dancing and I learned how to grill really good. And all the stuff that happened in the pandemic, I got really good at some things because I learned them on TikTok. And I thought, why couldn’t someone learn from me on this platform and see that you can be an almost dead.

puffy-faced, fat Elvis, alcoholic, at the bottom of whatever the bottom is, to be someone who today is 280 days sober and living the best life that I could possibly live as a school leader. With my family being happy and…

the changes that are actually occurring in my world because of the actions that I’ve taken. I would never have imagined that, but that’s where I am today and I’m damn proud of it. I work hard at it. For anybody who thinks they can just not work at it, they’re kidding themselves. It takes work, it takes determination, it takes plan, it takes support and I have…

all of those things at my fingertips right now. And I am so thankful to be here and get to share this story because there’s a second half to it. I look at it as the one of the questions recently was what would you call a chapter, this chapter of your life? And I went straight to Dr. Dre and I was like and Snoop and I was like this is going to be called the next

And that’s where it is. That’s where I am right now. I am living the next episode of Brian, and I’m no longer identifying myself as an educator. I’m just me. Everything about me as an educator defined who I was, what school district I was in, what position I was in, how many years I’d been somewhere. It was always important to be that guy.

Jessica Dueñas
I love that.

Brian
And now I could care less. I’m glad I have a school job and as a school leader, but I would be happy working at the safe way where I used to buy all my alcohol or working at the liquor store where I would pull up and the guy would be like, hot damn, hot damn, cause he knew my drink or the liquor store on the main street down the road where I can walk in, the guy sees me.

and pulls out my bottle of 99 bananas and I pull out my $9.67 and give it to him. I went in there and bought for my wife a few weeks ago, a few months ago, and he goes, the guy that owns the place, he’s like, damn, you look good. And I go, I’m not drinking anymore. And he literally walked back, put the little bottle down that he knew I would get. Then he goes,

Jessica Dueñas (49:15.051)
Thank you.

Brian (49:26.998)
what would you like? And I got whatever it was that my wife wanted. And I walked out of there just like I had won the lottery. Like I have done this and I’m going to keep doing this. And it took therapy, it took meds, I take naltrexone every day for cravings. I take gabapentin, which I think helps with that. I take

Zoloft, which helps me with my, which helps my brain. I’m taking things now that actually help me. And I listened to, you had mentioned on your podcast, your most recent one about if you break your arm, you put a cast on and you don’t have to wear the cast for the rest of your life and you don’t have a broken arm for the rest of your life. And

Brian (50:26.126)
And I looked at these things like, okay, I needed AA for a little bit. I don’t need that anymore. I don’t foresee always needing to be on medication for cravings or for anxiety or for any of that stuff forever. I don’t really see that. I see these things as temporary so that eventually I will be free of all of that. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.

Jessica Dueñas
Mm-hmm.

Brian
And that’s part of the story too is like you said, if you need something that’s going to help you just be your best self, what’s wrong with that?

Jessica Dueñas
Exactly.

Brian
I don’t think anything’s wrong with that. And that is what I’m telling people in my recovery is the point is not drinking. The point is being sober. And if I have my own way of doing that, then that’s totally 100%, not just fine, but awesome.

And I can share that with other people who get stuck in the AA trap or the big book trap or I don’t want to sponsor trap of what that is. And I love to read. I’ve read so much about the brain and the body and how alcohol really does mess that up. They would always show us that black lung back in the day when it was about smoking, but they never showed you.

the effects of the alcohol on your brain and your body. And I wish they would have, but now I get to be that person to be able to share those things with people like you who know that there are many paths to recovery, not just one. And that whatever your path is, if you’re successful at that, it’s…

it’s good. If it’s good for you, it’s good and it’s a path and a journey. And I was listening to somebody the other day talking about the journey. And if you’re driving from Michigan to Arizona and you get a flat tire, that’s just a little bump. That doesn’t mean you go back to Michigan and start the trip over. It means you fix your tire and you keep going to Arizona.

And if I were to relapse, which I don’t foresee, but I’m not, I always say confident, not cocky, Brian. If I were to relapse or for people that do relapse, you don’t have to go back to square one. You get back in your car after changing the tire and you keep moving forward. And that’s my mindset right now. And for anybody that talks to me, that’s where I’m at. And I’m…

best Brian I’ve ever been in my life. Well, maybe outside of that cute kid that I used to be, but that’s a different podcast.

Jessica Dueñas
Right. Well, Brian, I mean, just thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us today. Again, I mean, just for anyone who’s listening, I feel like a couple of the key takeaways here is, yeah, like exploring that toolbox. You know, again, nothing that was said here is medical advice. However, both Brian and I have benefited from collaborating with medical professionals, including…

going to treatment when you need to go to treatment, having a psychiatrist prescribe you medications that, you know, hey, you don’t have to take forever if you don’t need to, but really be open to whatever pathway is going to get you there. It doesn’t matter how you get there. The point is, and like Brian said, the point is getting to be a sober person, getting to be an alcohol-free person so that your life doesn’t have to revolve around this damn substance because…

we do already have enough to worry about, and we don’t need to have alcohol be that added thing that complicates things. So, I mean, Brian, again, thank you, thank you, thank you. And we are close on time. So I’m gonna go ahead and wrap us up. Did you want to say any last word? How can people find you if they want to find you? Or do you want to not be found?

Brian
I can be found on TikTok at teacher hootenhowl. It’s a weird name, but it’s a name that, this is gonna sound really silly. The hootenhowl was a bar that my buddy, teacher buddy and I would go to after, on Fridays, to finish our week, cause we hated our jobs and hated our lives. And we were just talking one day during the pandemic.

Brian
like we should come up with a podcast called Teacher Hoot and Howl. And I sat down and wrote out a whole little plan for it. We never did it, but I just took the name and, uh, have kept it. And it’s been really cool. I know one thing that you asked me to talk about was, um, still being sober when your partner is drinking.

And all I will say to that is if you stay focused on yourself and the things that you need to do for you, people can do whatever they want to do. It’s their choice. And my job is not to go in there and try to solve their problems. Even if it’s the problems of people that you care about and love. My problem is.

Brian
my alcohol problem and…

being preachy and all that shit is not going to help anybody stop. I know that for a fact. So I just try to like in teaching, be a model of what an alcohol free life can be. And currently on July 22nd, 2023, I think I’m doing a damn good job.

Jessica Dueñas
Yes, that’s awesome. And plug for my latest podcast episode, episode 10, I actually interviewed my sister on her experience as a loved one dealing with me and my addiction. So for anybody who is out there and is kind of listening to this and you’re like, Oh, I have a podcast. episode for that. Like go listen to it. It’s really helpful for folks who are dealing with a loved one struggling. Maybe you’re not, but someone you care about is. So I’d definitely recommend that. All right, Brian. Well, thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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In this episode:

Link to Spotify

I share about navigating through a day of feeling triggered after a disagreement in a personal relationship, and share specific strategies for getting through the tough days without a drink.

Resources:

Poem From Agridulce – Dhayana Alejandrina

Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops

Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas:
Hey, so today’s episode is brought to you by having a hard day and deciding that again, there’s so much power and connection, even if it’s me talking into a microphone by myself, knowing that at least one other human being is going to hear this. Like just that is comforting enough for me. So thank you for listening, but it has been a hard day. And if it’s been a hard day for you, I’m letting you know that I will not drink with you. Um, we

we need that reminder. And I wanted to record this podcast because I think it’s so important to just be really, really real and highlight the fact that this journey of being an alcohol-free person, of being sober, of being in recovery, it’s not sunshine and rainbows. I haven’t had a drink since November 28th of 2020 and at the time of this recording, it’s been two and a half years, over two and a half years. And today, my body…

has been experiencing the sensations due to emotions that in the past would have made me drink. I’ll say for the purposes of this episode, I’ll say that I’ve been triggered except that I don’t want to drink and I know that I won’t drink. So it’s not like I’m having cravings for a drink, but I never wanna forget what those sensations were that would set me off to drink in the past. And so I’m going to use the language of I’ve been triggered because I think that’s probably the best way for me to convey content that is…

helpful. I don’t know. I might be wrong. You might be like, I don’t know, just, you know, disconnect, click next show. Um, but for the purposes of all intensive purposes, let’s say that I’ve been triggered. I think that’s the best way to like go through this, except, um, like I said, I don’t want to drink, but the experience that my body is going through is the exact same experience that would have been a triggering experience in the past. So anyway, why the hell is Jessica triggered? Right?

For context, I’m in a relationship and it’s great and it’s healthy. And all healthy relationships go through bumps in the road. Right. And basically my significant other and I, he and I are experiencing some incongruence in terms of how we’re perceiving a specific situation. And, you know, I have been having one perception and he had been having a different perception. And we realized that yesterday. And so we’re taking a little space, like for a day to just kind of like think and reflect.

and then come back together and, you know, talk about what we’re each wanting and needing and how we can support the other person, et cetera. But the old me, like my brain is perceiving it as a major threat, right? Why? Because in my history of being in romantic relationships, a disagreement was way more than just a disagreement. A disagreement often led to like huge heated arguments with yelling.

Um, especially when I was much younger, you know, things would get physical really fast. Um, you know, I mean, I’ve had like the police involved in conflicts that I’ve dealt with romantic partners in the past, right? And so for me to now have a disagreement with someone, my body hears the word disagreement and is like, you know, sounding off all the alarms. And so me being by myself in my apartment for me.

that also is a previous condition under which I would drink. So of course it’s like all the stars are aligned for my body to really think that I’m threatened. And so my brain, I would say like the primitive part of my brain is feeling threatened. And when our primitive parts of our brains feel threatened, what usually does it lean toward if there’s a history of alcohol abuse? Typically it would be alcohol, right? What we would need to survive is, you know, food, human connection,

Food, human connection, what else do we need to survive? Oh yeah, water. You know, things like that. Those are the things that we actually need. But when our dopamine has been, like our relationship with dopamine has been distorted by the use of alcohol or other addictive substances, we don’t think that we need those actual things. We think that we need like alcohol or, you know, insert whatever addictive substance you used to dabble with. So with that being said,

My body has felt like today what it’s felt like, again, this happened yesterday. And so it’s still just been kind of like on a higher level of escalation. So like at work, while I felt this anxiety, which manifested in my stomach, feeling like a roller coaster was kind of like on the, you know, going down the hill on a roller coaster, I had to be really mindful of how I was interacting with other people because I wanted to make sure that I didn’t like lash out at, let’s say colleagues and et cetera. So you know, I kept to myself a little bit more. And um,

And you know, that was one thing. I was really mindful of how I was treating other people. So in terms of like how I got through the day, I was mindful of that. As soon as I got out of work, one of the important things that I did was get into movement. So I went to the gym, I lifted some weights and that felt good, but it really wasn’t enough. And so I got home and I put on salsa music and I did some, I started taking classes again. And so I did some dancing by myself to kind of practice and move. And that felt really good. But…

For me, somatic strategies aren’t enough. Like breath work is good, which I did do, taking deep breaths to again, help break up that physical manifestation of the anxiety in my stomach. If you take a deep breath and you stretch out that diaphragm and it presses on your stomach, you can feel some relief of the physical sensations that come along with anxious thoughts, for sure. But again,

I also had to kind of sit and talk to myself and like do some self coaching. So what that looked like for me in case this is something that might be helpful for you is, again, going back to that perceived threat, I had to first assure myself that I’m safe, right? Like my body is thinking like, uh-oh, there’s a disagreement with a romantic partner. She’s in danger. Like alert, alert. So I had to tell myself.

First, this is temporary, Jess, like you’re okay, Jess. And then two, I’m safe. Like those are old dangers. I’m not in those old relationships anymore where a disagreement could lead to huge outbursts. It’s like, this is safe. We’re having calm conversations. So that’s the first thing that I remind myself, that I’m safe. And then the second thing that I remind myself of is that my relationship is okay. Like I’m perceiving these threats, but again,

It is absolutely normal for two adults who consent to be together to have disagreements, right? And we’re handling it in a calm, mature manner, but I still feel escalated because there’s just that history that I have. If you read The Body Keeps the Score, our bodies remember things much more quickly than like our conscious minds do, which is crazy. So anyway, once I remind myself that

I’m safe and my relationship is going to be just fine, that this is normal. That really does help bring me down. But then the third thing that I did, so I had the movement, the somatic piece with movement and breathing, the self-talk, the coaching, self-coaching. But then the third thing that I did that really helped was also seek connection and community. And so I happened to have to facilitate meeting tonight, which was perfect because in the community, I shared that I was having a hard day.

And what that allowed me to do was connect with other people who were also having a tough day or even if other people weren’t having a tough day, they’d all been there and they knew that you get through it. So there’s just that encouragement piece of being with like-minded folks in that space to really feel accepted and safe and nurtured and cared for. Because sometimes self-nurturing can be hard. So when we can’t do it for ourselves…

we go into the community, we lean into the community, and the community can do for us what we can’t do for ourselves just yet. And again, and I’m pointing this out because even at two and a half years sober, I’m still leaning on community spaces, right? And so I wanna highlight that certain things may not just suddenly disappear just because a lot of time passes. And I mean, two and a half years is not even a lot of time in the grand scheme of a human life, you know what I mean? But anyway, then the fourth thing.

that I really leaned into was also moving into self-encouragement. Once I leaned into the to the community, we started having a conversation. I felt more inspired to lean into that self-encouragement piece, both for myself and then also helping others encourage themselves. And so I’ll share this poem that I read to the group. It’s super short and it’s by poet Diana Alejandrina. I’ll put the link to her book in the show notes in case you’re curious about her book.

You can find it on Amazon. And listen to this poem. It’s from page 93 in her book, super short and beautiful. The poem is titled Vulnerable.

I’ve always been beautiful. I just waited too long to tell it to my reflection. I’ll read it again. I have always been beautiful. I just waited too long to tell it to my reflection.

So I love that poem and I shared it with the group and then encouraged them to fill in the blank. So instead of I’ve always been beautiful, just kind of have them all fill in whatever else they wanted to. But I really love that poem because one thing I realized also that being unsettled in one area for me quickly leads to spiraling in other areas. So like I noticed that again, we had that incongruence with me and my partner.

And so then today I was also then having like random body image issues, like out of nowhere, like just not feeling comfortable in my skin. Um, you know, looking like jumping into comparing myself really quickly. And so reading that poem and then again, being in community reminded me that like, a I’m exactly where I need to be. I am a beautiful whole human being.

right, most importantly from the inside. Like, seriously, like what I have to offer in terms of my heart and for you listening, right? Like tap into your heart, like what beauty does your soul have to offer this world, right? Like the gifts that you have to offer other people because you take care of yourself and nurture yourself and you work on your personal development, like wow, like that shit is beautiful, right?

And if you haven’t told yourself that you’re a beautiful person, like, please stop, like press pause on this, go to the mirror and tell yourself that. Or even if it doesn’t feel natural, like I’m willing to believe that I’m a beautiful person. Right? Like sometimes positive affirmations can be a little, eh. Like if, you know, I don’t want you to be talking to yourself in the mirror and saying something that feels phony because being phony, that’s not, that’s not it. That’s not the way to go. I try my best to be really authentic and you know.

you when I’m having a bad day because I think that that’s important. So don’t call yourself beautiful if you don’t feel it, but at least say something good to yourself. What have you always been that like, you know, you are and just say that, right? Like, so anyway, um, suffice it to say by the time I was done being in community and talking about this, I felt more self-encouraged and

reminding myself that I am enough. I am a beautiful person. I have cared for myself so much. Perfect example, random side note. To add to my interesting day, my dog decided to, he ain’t decided to, he got sick. He threw up two times and had diarrhea two times, all in the span of me having this meeting. And I heard weird noises going on, but obviously I’m busy facilitating, so I can’t just leave a Zoom meeting hanging.

But I sign off the Zoom meeting and I go out there and I open the door and whoa, it was like biological warfare. Like all my senses, like my nose felt attacked. And you know, poor doggy, he’s okay, he’s fine. Just letting you know, Cruz is good. But anyway, like of course I go to clean up everything. And here’s evidence, right? Like again, if I wanna dive into my paranoid fears of like, oh, my relationship is in danger, what did I do? I called my boyfriend and I said, hey, Cruz threw up.

can you come over? I need some help. Or like, I needed, he had, he had my dog cleaning solution. I left it over there. So he came over, he got out of bed, he came over, he brought me the cleaning stuff so I could clean up the poop and the vomit, you know, with the enzyme cleaner. And he gave me a big hug and a kiss and then he left because, you know, we had agreed to like have time to ourselves tonight. And again, that was evidence for me of that my relationship was totally fine.

Right? Like we’re grown people. We can have disagreement, have some space, but then show up for each other. But then being the fact that like, I thoroughly cleaned up this dog’s poop and vomit, and I wasn’t upset at him. I was calm. I was like, okay, like poor puppy, let me clean all this nastiness up, you know? And that I cleaned it well, also spoke to the growth that I’ve experienced because there was a time when I had him initially.

that I had gone into like an eight month bender because my boyfriend, my then boyfriend had passed away. Right? And so being able to like thoroughly clean up after a dog, after several messes that I left behind, just reminded me like there was a time that I wouldn’t have had the physical capacity to do that because I would have been passed out. I would have been too drunk. I wouldn’t have, I would have been so uncoordinated that I would have like sneered everything even more. So.

there’s been a lot of growth. There has been a lot of growth. And so to kind of close out a couple, just again, concrete things that you can do if you’re having a hard day. Number one, practice some sort of a somatic strategy to bring you into the present, right? Again, if you are feeling triggered, chances are your body is perceiving some sort of a threat, even if you’re safe.

And so first, like bring yourself into the present moment. Remind yourself that you are here in the now, right? That craving that you’re having, don’t get upset with yourself over having the craving. Get curious about it. What need do you have that is coming up for you that is being interpreted as a need for an alcohol, right? So is it that you’re needing a human interaction or you’re needing rest or you’re needing food, water? What do you need?

Ask yourself that, what do I need, right? So anyway, the somatic strategy, ask yourself what you need, get curious with yourself, remind yourself that you’re safe. Again, remind yourself that you’re safe. Get in community. If you are not a part of a community, I strongly recommend that you find yourself one. If you’d like 12-step programs, do a 12-step program meeting. There’s also online resources, Smart Recovery is free.

The Reframe app offers a seven day trial. Theluckiestclub.com also offers a seven day trial. Those are two communities that I work with. I’m a coach and I still firmly encourage my one-on-one clients to go get in community because your mentors, your coaches, they come and go, but your community is there forever if you choose for it to be forever. So I always strongly encourage people like get in community. You…

You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. You don’t want to lean on just one person. So find community. I still lean on community. And then, yeah, like the last thing I’ll say is find some way to encourage yourself, right? I mean, like I said, I invite you to take that poem that I read and fill in the blank with something that applies to you. I have always been blank. I just waited too long to tell it to my reflection. What are you? What phenomenal thing are you?

and tell yourself that, right? And nurture that and encourage that because you’re not drinking, because you don’t need to drink today just because you had a crappy day. You don’t need to do it. I’m not doing it. You don’t need to do it. We cannot do this together.

I think that’s all I have for you folks. Sending everybody lots of love, sending myself some love too. If you are wanting some supports, you can find writing classes at bottomlisttosobre.com. You can schedule a free consultation for one-to-one coaching. If you’re a teacher, I am running a free support group for educators on August 3rd. So just a couple of things that are popping up. And yeah, subscribe to my email list and that way you’ll also have a heads up whenever anything cool is happening that I am running. But my next free writing workshop will be in September.

And then my current six week writing program just started, so I’m not taking in anybody for that, but I have one more six week writing program coming up, Writing for Healing in September to close out the year. So thanks for listening, sending you lots of love. And if you are enjoying the podcast, please write a review, please share it. Thanks so much.

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Content Warning: language, death, drug use

In this episode:

Link to Spotify

Initially, I was going to tell my general story, but as I recorded, I realized this episode is more about my life before I got sober. I share how things started for me in childhood as a daughter of immigrants with all the pressure to fulfill the “American dream,” and how I eventually managed to win Teacher of the Year while drinking a fifth of alcohol a day, up through the loss of my partner and finally coming to a place of stopping drinking and how I stopped.

Resources:

NPR – Sharp, ‘Off The Charts’ Rise In Alcoholic Liver Disease Among Young Women

Red Table Talk – Are You Drinking Too Much? A Wake Up Call for Women

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Transcript:

Jessica Dueñas:
Hey everyone, in today’s episode, I’m gonna tell my story, kind of like my general story. And it’s funny because I had started recording this earlier and then I was abruptly interrupted and in the spirit of me just doing this podcast as a like, just spit out whatever needs to be said and not editing, I was like, you know what, f it, I’m just gonna start fresh. And I will also trust that whatever I say is what is meant to be put out there into the interwebs.

You know, I’ve told my story so many times at this point that it’s always interesting when I say it and to see what feels right and that that’s what comes out. So again, I just trust that whatever I share is what needs to be heard. So I’ll go ahead and I will share and of course, you know, the standard content warning for just about lots of things stands for this episode. So there will be talks about.

alcohol abuse and sexual abuse and things like that. So just kind of putting that difficult stuff out there. I’ll do my best to remember to pause and give you that heads up before I say something explicit, but just giving you that heads up. So anyway, enough rambling. Now I’ll go ahead and start. So I was born in Brooklyn, New York, born and raised, and I was born to a Cuban, an Afro-Cuban father and a Costa Rican mother.

I each come to the US in the late 60s, very early 70s. And I was born, I was kid number eight and I’m the youngest. My parents each had their fair share of relationships. So I was actually only raised with one sister even though she’s the seventh and I’m the eighth. And so my sister Sophia is 11 years older than me and then there’s me. And I was born February 4th, 1985. So I’m an elder millennial, woo woo.

I’m just putting that out there too. I don’t hide my age, I don’t care too, so just putting that out there. Anyway, so with my parents being immigrants, they definitely valued education, the American education system very, very much so, to where it didn’t, almost everything else didn’t matter as long as I did well in school. And the other thing actually that they did value a lot in terms of American values,

I think really is just the adoption of beauty standards, which are, I mean, and I would say honestly, those are more European beauty standards, right? I am taller. I have brown skin because my father was an Afro Cuban. My hair is curly. And then I also have always been a heavier person. And so since I was little, my academics were always celebrated because I’ve always been really good at school. But my appearance has never fit.

that standard and so there’s always been non-stop attempts to change how I look. Like stay out of the sun, go get a relaxer at the Dominican salon, go lose some weight, you know, ponte en dieta. Like always, always like something about how I looked had to be changed and something was always wrong with how I looked, right? And the thing is, when you’re a little kid and that’s what you hear, you start to really believe that shit, right? Like if you’re constantly told that you’re fat, that you’re this, that you’re all…

you know, this, that, and the other, you start to really believe it and you start to see yourself as less than everyone else around you. So from a very early age, I had incredibly low self-esteem because it just wasn’t built up. And I will take this moment to pause and say, my parents did the best that they could with what they had. And honestly, I’m so grateful to say that I am so not pissed at them or at my mom, really, who probably perpetrated this way more than my dad.

because I’ve done a lot of work to understand that folks tend to repeat what they were taught and they tend to repeat what they grew up in and it takes a lot of work to pause and examine what the hell you grew up in and make a change and so I’m grateful that I get to do that but my parents as immigrants as struggling folks they didn’t have the opportunities that I do to stop and do serious self-reflection and like work with professionals and get help so

they grew up in those environments where they rip people down to pieces based off of parents. And so I definitely got ripped down quite a bit. And so the other thing that I developed early on was a really complicated relationship with food and just tons of shame around it, right? Because like if I wanted, if something tasted good and I wanted a second serving of it, I immediately got yelled at, right? And so for me, I immediately started to associate wanting more food or like…

food as something to get in trouble over. So really early on I started to learn how to hide food that I was trying to eat, sneak food in my drawers, sneak a couple dollars out of my mom’s purse aka steal money from her to go buy food and then eat it, hide it in my backpack, get to school, throw it out of my book bag so that nobody knew that I was eating all this extra food because I grew to like it but I felt like it was this forbidden thing and so I was always hiding it.

flash forward 15, 20 years, right? Like that’s exactly what I was doing with alcohol. The second that alcohol for me became something that was bad in my mind, and it made me a bad person to consume it, I started to hide it from everybody else. So anyway, backtrack to childhood. Like I said, I was academically gifted. And so by the time I got into eighth grade, I had picked up like a scholarship to go to this very elite private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Spence School.

Where again, I knocked it out the water academically. I was really on point but as I got older and became a teen the heavier I got right and so Even though I’m so grateful for school and honestly, I’m so grateful for my teachers, right? like my teachers inspired me to be an educator because When I felt like shit about myself Those men and women whose classrooms I went into

made me feel whole. And I was like, you know what? Like one day I’m gonna do that for someone else and I’m gonna do that for someone else’s kids and I’m gonna make other people’s kids feel really good because my teachers made me feel good when I felt like shit. And I’m so grateful that I got to do that as a classroom teacher for 13 years. But that’s the side point. Anyway, back to the story. So anyway, my self-esteem is really rough in high school.

But academically, I just soared. So by the end of high school, then I had a full scholarship to go to Barnard College, which is a part of Columbia University. So I mean, I had made the Ivy League, y’all. I literally was living and breathing my parents’ American dream, while at the same time feeling incredibly insecure because they still were always commenting on my appearance and how I needed to lose weight and I needed to do all of this. So anyway, carrying all that low self-esteem into college and onto the college campus.

was a perfect recipe to fall in love with alcohol because as a freshman, I was invited to someone’s 18th birthday party at NYU’s campus. There are these guys from the Bronx who had brought some liquor bottles down there. And I stayed out of trouble. Honestly, I did. I minded my business for the most part. I mean, I would get into shit sometimes, but overall I stayed out of trouble. And so when I was on at this party, they were drinking shots. They were taking shots.

And I remember I think one of them was like Goldschlager. I don’t know, whatever it was nasty with gold flakes. And I’m pretty sure that’s what it was called. So anyway, one of them was like, oh, you drink ma? And I was like, before I could even respond, my former friend was like, no, she doesn’t drink. And I felt like, you don’t know that. Like, uh-uh, like I’m gonna talk for myself. And I was like, let me get one. So I took a shot.

And I remember everybody was staring at me and I felt the nastiness and the heat go down my throat and then light everything up like it was on fire. And I wanted to react, but people were watching me and I was like, I’m not gonna react. And so, you know, as they said, I took it like a champ. So they offered me more and I was like, yeah, let’s do this. Because once I started to feel the effects of it, right, and I felt my inhibitions go down and I felt more relaxed, suddenly it was like I was freed.

from feeling physically undesirable, which is something that I always felt every moment of every day. I always felt physically undesirable because it had been programmed in me since I was a little kid that I was not attractive, right? That I was not beautiful because I was fat. That I was not beautiful because my skin was too dark. That I was not beautiful because my hair was too curly. All of that had been programmed in me real hard at that point. So the alcohol made that go away.

and it allowed me to socialize and relax a little bit around these people and relax a little bit around cute guys, right? And I was like, oh, this is good. So time passes in college and I’m doing good in school in general. My class, I’m doing good in my classes or doing well in my classes. And my drinking stays pretty much limited to weekends and binging and stuff like that. But then I get into a relationship with somebody, another guy from the Bronx, nothing personal.

towards the Bronx by the way. That’s just, I don’t know. I always ended up with guys from the Bronx back in the day. And that was a really, really problematic relationship. My family, again, we just didn’t talk about anything. So when I got into a relationship and all the red flags were starting to go up and shine bright in the sun, I didn’t have anyone to talk to, to be like, hey, he did this, he said this.

is this okay? Am I safe? And so basically like by the time we got to Thanksgiving of you know our that first Thanksgiving that we were together, we ate at his family’s house and then we came back to my dorm and then the morning when I get up and I get on my computer he had been on Facebook. Yes, Facebook is that old. And he was logged into his account and when I opened my computer I can see the messages were there and I at that time I was so

I knew nothing about healthy relationships or anything. So of course, if you leave your messages out, I’m gonna check your messages. And that’s exactly what I did. I checked his messages and in there, there was an exchange between him and his previous girlfriend. And clearly he had been cheating. That was incredibly devastating to me because again, this was like my first real legit boyfriend and we just spent the holiday together and oh no, now you’ve cheated. So now like I’m heartbroken. And I had zero standards for myself at that time.

So when I found out that he was cheating and I threw him out, I let him back in a couple of days later, right? And it was just like, no matter what would happen with him, and it would increase up to the point of like physical violence at times, I kept letting him back in because I was just so scared of being alone because I thought that I would always be alone because I had been told since I was little that nobody’s gonna want me, right? But here somebody wanted me.

So it’s okay if they do all this horrible shit to me because at least they want me. That was the old thinking that I used to have when I was younger. And suffice it to say that relationship finally ended, but by the time that relationship ended, my drinking had escalated to the point that I had gotten so depressed that I wasn’t going to class. And so here you had this real bright ass girl from Brooklyn in an Ivy league institution who flunked the semester and lost a scholarship. So…

I took that as a sign that maybe I wasn’t meant to go to college, maybe I needed to drop out, and that’s exactly what I did. I went and I unenrolled from the school. As soon as I get back to Brooklyn and get back home to my mom’s house, because I was living in the dorms like I mentioned, my mom was like, I did not come to this country for you to drop out of school. So she basically was like, you’re going to have to get the hell out if you don’t go back to school. So I was like, fine. I’m going to get a day job.

and I became a secretary at a law office in Staten Island. And at night, I started taking classes at Hunter College at the City University of New York. So I did that and I actually, I got to the end, I got to graduate and I applied to be a New York City teaching fellow because let’s not forget, I still remembered the only adults that ever made me feel good and accepted were my teachers. And I was like, I still wanna do that. I still wanna help make some kids feel good. I still wanna do something good in this world.

So I became a teacher right after college. And I started, I was a special ed teacher in Bushwick in Brooklyn, really close to where my parents had their store. And I taught at my first school for about four years. And I met my ex-husband there. I also started working at the school with a bunch of other fresh out of college teachers. So everybody was fresh out of college. We were all super young. And the funny thing with alcohol, right? Like we all basically just carried our drinking habits from college into our teaching profession.

But now we gave it a new name and it was Happy Hour. So we would go to Happy Hour and one day my relationship with alcohol changed. And I’m not gonna say that this is the day that I became someone with alcohol use disorder. I still can never tell you when it was official because I don’t think there’s such a thing, right? But I had about three drinks in an hour and one of my coworkers was like, dang Jess, like, isn’t that a lot? And I was like,

That is a lot. Inside, that was like my thinking. But then my thinking spiraled to immediately jump back to when I was a kid and I was getting yelled at for eating too much food. And so that wave of shame like, practically knocked me over. And I was like, oh snap, I’ve got to hide my drinking. It wasn’t like, oh snap, let me evaluate my relationship with alcohol. Like, oh snap, maybe I am drinking too much. Nope, it was oh snap.

I don’t want people to see me drink how I want to drink. The exact same way that in the past, I didn’t want people to see me eat how I wanted to eat because I didn’t want to get yelled at and trouble judged, et cetera. So that was basically the start of me drinking more in secret. And so from that point forward, I always matched other people’s drinking. So if we were sitting at a table and we were hanging out for the night, whatever you drink, I would drink it. You had one drink, I’d have one. If you got…

plastered, I was getting plastered right there with you, right? But what would always happen is once I would leave the social gathering, there was always that little pit stop at the liquor store on my way home so that I could finally drink how I wanted to drink. Now, this heavier drinking early on got pretty much like stopped because I got into a relationship with my then husband and he was a

He didn’t have any addiction issues, so he didn’t drink how I wanted to drink, and I obviously was not trying to have problems. So that kind of kept me in check for enough time for the years of our marriage. But even in our marriage, there was one incident where I did start drinking in secret because we were living in a fixer-upper and I couldn’t stand being in that mess. And so he would go to work, and I would drink when he would go to work because I was on summer vacation from teaching, so it was like, you know, I would day drink.

But then one day I accidentally drank too much and I blacked out. Well, I passed out, but it was also a blackout because I couldn’t remember it. So FYI, passing out and blacking out are two different things, but they can both happen at the same time. And all I remember is that I woke up at the University of Louisville Hospital. By the way, we had moved to Kentucky at this point, which is where he was from. And that scared me enough to make me stop drinking for about a year. I mean, and I like joined AA at that time and I…

soar off alcohol for about a year because, you know, it scared me, it scared him. And it was so early on, it wasn’t, yeah, I was early on enough in our marriage where I cared about keeping that marriage intact. And I knew that if I drank, it would basically be me saying, I’m over this marriage. So for as long as I wanted to keep the marriage, keep the house, keep everything, I didn’t drink. But that was the thing, right? I was not drinking for an external reason.

not for an intrinsic reason. And so once I became unhappy with the marriage and I realized that I was okay with things if they fall apart. And I was okay with letting go of this house if it had to go, right? I decided to start drinking again. And so after that, it was only a matter of time before we ended up splitting apart. And I mean, some other things were going on there too, but that’s more his story. And I’ll let him tell that someday if he ever chooses to on his own. But.

Once we got divorced, I finally was like, woo, I can drink how I wanna drink, right? Like going back to that theme. And when I got into my own apartment, that’s where it really was on. And I wanna say we got divorced, I think it was 2017. And by 2018, 2019, I was drinking a fifth a day of alcohol. And by the summer of 2019, I got diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease.

At the same time that all this is happening, right? Because my drinking has escalated so much after the divorce, I also really dive into my career. Because if you all remember, since I was a kid, I always was priding myself on what I can do academically. And so as an adult, obviously I wasn’t in school anymore, but I was working. So I always loved being a good teacher, but I was really like going above and beyond, right? Like staying late, doing all the things, and then.

treating myself by drinking to excess, blacking out, passing out, waking up at like three in the morning to get up, lesson plan, deal with the hangover, self-medicate, and then go back into school. Because in the mornings what would start happening as I got sicker and sicker, I was going through really bad withdrawals, so I got a prescription for benzos to help me in the mornings so that I could go to work and function. And then once I got home and finished all my responsibilities, I scratched off my to-do list.

then I would indulge. But our bodies can only take so much, right? Like the CDC states that heavy drinking for men is 15 drinks or more per week. And for women, heavy drinking in a week is considered eight drinks or more. If I was drinking a fifth a day, that means I was consuming 17 drinks per day when the limit for the week was eight. So that is just to give you a sense of how much I was stressing my liver.

how much I was really, really hurting myself. So anyway, the other thing like I was saying is because I dove into my career and was doing such an excellent job, I did such a good job of teaching that at the peak of my alcohol addiction, while being diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease, well, I didn’t know that at that time, but I won the State Teacher of the Year Award.

Like I literally took the title home for the top teacher in the entire state of Kentucky for 2019 and I got to represent the state in the national competition for the national teacher of the year. And yes, this in the depths of alcohol use disorder. So if any of you are sitting there with your fancy career wondering, could I have a problem? Yes, you absolutely can have a problem. You don’t have to be any kind of stereotype to have a problem.

If you are consuming too much alcohol and you’re questioning your relationship with alcohol, you probably need to address it, right? Like let’s be frank. So anyway, I won the Teacher of the Year award, which brings me so much attention and really all this clout, but I’m drinking so much. And so you can imagine that on the inside, I really felt like my heart was being ripped apart. I mean, not only did I win this award, I won this award two weeks after my father passed away.

And a few days after learning that my then boyfriend after my divorce had also been cheating on me, I was like, dang, right? Like I was not catching a break. The one break that I caught was the teacher of the year award. But you know, I will say again, going back to the academics and going back to work, I do think that school saved my life. I do think that teaching was a part of saving my life because if I didn’t have school and if I didn’t have teaching in the depths of all that addiction.

I don’t think that there’s anything that I would have found worth living for. But I, every day, I did find showing up and bringing smiles to those kids’ faces was worth living for. But once the alcohol got to the point that it threatened my career, that’s when I finally was like, okay, I need to do something about it. So by September of 2019,

My liver disease was getting worse and I was now starting to develop like actual like straight up panic attacks where I could not get in my car at all or drive because I was like jumping or screaming at anything. Like I was starting to, I didn’t hallucinate quite yet but I feel like I was like a step away from starting to hallucinate. Like that’s how bad the effects of the drinking were getting to be.

So I was like, it sounds like I need to go to treatment. I mean, I looked into like how to stop drinking on my own and I knew there was no way, there was no way that I could have safely stopped drinking. You cannot put a fifth of alcohol down your body every single day and then just put that to the side. Like you can’t do that. So I did go into a treatment facility, but I went in telling everybody like, oh, I’ve got the flu and I’m gonna be out for a few days, like don’t call me. That’s what I said.

But in reality, I was detoxing and struggling a whole lot. When I got out of that detox, I did go back into AA, but I couldn’t take it seriously enough. I wasn’t willing to come out and tell people what I had been struggling with. I was going to meetings and I had a sponsor who I was sort of listening to, but my heart wasn’t fully in it.

I just wanted to be able to show up to work because A, I cared about work and B, I lived by myself and I had to make sure I could pay my bills so I couldn’t be missing work because of alcohol. But I wasn’t really ready to transform my life. So because I wasn’t ready, of course, whenever you’re not really doing the work, you’re setting yourself up to have slips and relapses, etc. So by the holidays, when the holidays came around, that’s exactly what happened. I felt really lonely and sad and I started drinking again and I ended up in a treatment facility.

all over again. And this time my family found out because it was the holidays so obviously they noticed that I was missing. And the other huge thing that happened while I was in that treatment facility was that I met Ian. And I remember when I walked into that treatment facility and I was doing my intake, I was drunk, but I do remember this. So it’s a drunk memory that I actually have. He was like in the common area. Treatment facilities have common areas, FYI, most of them do.

and the TV was going and I look up and I see this beautiful man just sitting there like watching the TV and he looked right at me and then he looked away and he like went back to looking at the TV and I remember drunkenly being like whoa he’s really cute I need to not talk to him. That was literally my first thought. My first thought was don’t talk to him. But of course why would I listen to my instincts right? Of course not.

So I did avoid him for a couple of days, but probably at about like the third or fourth day, he sat next to me in one of the activities that we were doing, and he just starts asking me questions about myself, and he’s like, where are you from? And I was like, oh, I’m from New York. And he figured that I wasn’t from Kentucky, because you can hear in my accent, I do not have a Southern accent of any kind, or Midwestern, whatever you wanna call it. And so he was like, oh, what’d you do in New York? Did you model? And listen, y’all, like,

That is such a cheesy line, but it worked, right? Because I was like, oh my gosh, ha ha. And yeah, we just hit it off after that. Like he said that and that opened the door to conversation. And by the time I left the facility then, and again, this was during winter break, so no one at school even noticed that I had gone missing, right? That’s like the crazy shit about it. But anyway, when I left the facility, I gave him my number and I was like, yeah, call me. And honestly,

I didn’t think that he would call. But a few days later, my phone rings and it’s him. And he’s like, yeah, like, do you wanna go to a meeting together? And I was like, oh my gosh, of course. And so we went to this meeting together. And at the end of AA meetings, I mean, I’m not gonna say all, but at the end of this meeting, there was a prayer and everybody got up and held hands. And you know, this is before the pandemic too, right? So…

I remember putting my hand in his and it was just like this big strong muscular hand. You know, I mean, he’s a vet. And you know, I just felt like my heart just like, whew, flutter. And I was like, wow, you know. And yeah, we got into a relationship and everything was great. Of course, we got into a relationship against everyone else’s advice, right? Like our sponsors were like, no, terrible idea. You shouldn’t do it. You both are literally brand new to recovery. And of course, we were like,

you know, we don’t care what you have to say because, you know, little did I know that I really like learning lessons the hard way and that’s basically what happened there. And so, you know, we were off in this like beautiful La land, but then the pandemic hit and when the pandemic hit and everything shut down, those church basements that we were having meetings in closed and the community centers closed.

and there was nowhere to go. People were starting to use Zoom, but I wasn’t aware of resources that existed the way that they do today. Today there’s platforms like the Luckiest Club, Tempest, Reframe, right? I work with the Luckiest Club, I work with Reframe. I had no idea those things existed back then. I mean, the Luckiest Club, I don’t even think existed until May of 2020, right? So we had nothing and we were ticking time bombs.

for relapses or slips, whatever the word is that you like to use. And he was the first one to relapse. So it was funny because I had done like, I had like a fake Twitter account, like a fake sober Twitter account. And somehow this woman from NPR, Yuki Noguchi,

I caught her eye with my tweets. So we did an interview and I was talking about my relationship and how cheery and happy I was. And it’s really eerie and I’ll put the link in the show notes to that interview because she met with me then. And then we did a follow-up a year later and this was after everything had happened. And I told her and I updated her on everything that happened and it was really heartbreaking.

But yeah, I did that first interview with her and I was like, yeah, my boyfriend is great, we’re going to go walk the dog, blah, only to find that he didn’t come back and it was because he had relapsed on his drug of choice, which was opiates, specifically heroin. And so that day I found him, he was alive and he was in his apartment and he was high and it was so scary because he looked devastated at his choice and he was so embarrassed and so ashamed.

And I tried to convince him to go to rehab, you know, like go back to treatment, like you need to go back. And he was finishing up his degree in social work at that time at, I think it’s Sullivan University in Louisville. And he was like, no, I’ve got to finish my work. And this man finished his work. He got everything done that he needed to submit for that semester. I remember him working really hard through like the high and the withdrawal. And he got it done.

And then what happened after that was he used again. And that was so difficult because I was like, if you’re gonna keep using, you’re not gonna be able to stay here with me, you know? Because I was like, I’m gonna end up drinking again. And so he was like, okay, well, let me go to the gas station and then we’ll talk about it. So he left to go to the gas station and this was on April 28th of 2020 and he just never came back, you all.

He never came back. I had called him, he wasn’t answering, and I had such a bad feeling as soon as he didn’t answer. So I drove over to his apartment and I saw that his car was in the parking lot for the building. So I get into his building and I go up to his apartment door and I start banging on the door and he’s not answering and I call the phone and I hear it ringing from inside the apartment. So I’m like, he’s in there.

but he’s not answering. So then I grabbed the fire hydrant, just as like one of the neighbors slash people who works in the building comes out, and I start slamming his door with the fire hydrant, and the guy is like yelling at me to stop, and that he’s gonna call the police on me. And I was like, go ahead, like please do. So then of course, like I hear him on the phone, and he’s like, yeah, there’s this tall black woman at the door, blah, blah. And you know, this was shortly after Breonna Taylor had passed away, and I was like, oh, great.

But honestly, I was just so focused on trying to get into that apartment that I didn’t care that he was calling the police. And I was, I welcomed it because again, we needed to get into that apartment. So the police come and you know, he of course does open the door for them. And content warning, you might want to mute this for a few minutes, but they opened the door and they say there’s a dead male.

and I immediately start screaming, screaming at that man. It’s with PTSD, I learned from reading The Body Keeps the Score, another great resource, that our memories get really, pretty much fucked up. And so it’s hard for me to remember the sequence with which everything happened. I just remember the bits and pieces. And so I remember, like if I close my eyes, I can remember.

the police officer putting my hands behind my back and pushing me against the wall. Then it’s like, it fades to black. Then I can remember calling his mother and telling her that her son was dead, like fade to black. Then I remember seeing her appear, fade to black. And then I remember the coroner telling us that we could go into the apartment and see him before they rolled him away.

And so I walk in and he’s on the stretcher and I look around the room and I can see that there’s blood splatter on the wall, probably from him trying to hit his vein with the needle. I see the belt on the floor, the syringe, and he’s just there. And he was blue. He was so blue. And I touched his hair. He had really soft hair. I touched his hair and I said, bye.

and the coroner took him away, his mom followed, and I walked out and I got into my car and I went straight to the liquor store because I didn’t have anywhere to go. I hadn’t set up systems in place for real support. I hadn’t even really told my family that I was dating someone in recovery. You know, there were so many things that I didn’t do for myself that, so I had no place to land.

when life hit the fan. I had no place to land except at the bottom of the bottle. So I went to the liquor store and I got drunk and honestly from that point on, it was eight months of me on a bender. You know, I mean, there were car wrecks, I was in about seven to eight treatment facilities, you know, I was in hospital stays from like…

three days to like five days in the near ICU, all the way up to like a five week stay at a residential facility. You know, it was like I had run through the gambit of interventions and I kept drinking. It was like, what the hell? But I still wouldn’t talk about what was going on, y’all. Like I was still in between hospitalizations. I was showing up to work and trying to teach and.

You know, I kept trying to pretend that I could just move forward, but I was so heartbroken and I couldn’t tell anybody why I was broken. Do you know how hard that is? That’s really, really hard. And by November of 2020, I was staying here with my sister in Florida in the Tampa Bay area. And I went down another spiral down the bottle and she called.

I forget how I ended up in the hospital, so I don’t know what she called or she took me. But point is, in Florida there’s something called the Baker Act, which is if you are a risk to yourself or others, that you can be hospitalized in a psychiatric hold for 72 hours. So that’s what happened. And once I was there and I finally came to, I was like, oh my god, I’m so exhausted. So exhausted. I cannot keep going like this. This is not sustainable.

It was like I was dying, but I wouldn’t die, but there was also just no way to live, right? So I was like, I’m waving this white flag. I give up. And by giving up, I mean like I give up resisting, not that I give up on trying. And so I gave up resisting my addiction and I finally was like, I will get help. I will take medicine. I will talk about it. And so the biggest…

act of liberation that I did for myself was to break the stigma that I grew up in, right? Like coming from a family that we didn’t talk about anything, I said, no, we’re talking about this. And I wrote an op-ed for the Louisville Journal, Louisville Journal, the Louisville Courier Journal. I wrote an op-ed that came out, it went live on December 3rd, where I told the world, back then I used the term alcoholic. I don’t really use that term anymore. But

Basically I was like, hey, I’m your Kentucky State Teacher of the Year and I’m an alcoholic and these are all the things I’ve been going through in secret and I’m done with it, I’m so over it. At the time that was published, I barely had a week sober because my sobriety date is November 28th, 2020 and I wrote that piece around December 1st and it was published on December 3rd. So it was a really quick turnaround, but that, it had to happen.

There was no other way that I could free myself from alcohol because it was so ingrained in everything that I was doing and the shame was so powerful that the only way I felt that I could free myself was to just completely put myself out in the open where I knew that I was safest by being most vulnerable. I knew that I was safest by making myself incredibly vulnerable. Because

No longer could anyone judge me if I put my story out there myself. So the narrative of my mom shaming me when I was little about what I wanted to eat, to the time that co-worker embarrassed me at happy hour, to the time that I was afraid of losing my marriage, like all of that was squashed when I wrote that piece and I published it.

in the career journal. And immediately after that, I resigned from classroom teaching. I started working at a tutoring company instead so that I could really just focus on my recovery. Because again, I did really love teaching and there’s no way that you can teach well in this country and practice perfect self care, at least not me. If you all are, if you’re a teacher and you’re listening to this and you’ve got to figure it out, please email me so that we can talk about it. But I don’t know how you can be a public school classroom teacher.

and truly take care of yourself and be balanced and do both things well. I don’t have that magic key. So I decided to let go of teaching so that I could take care of myself well. And yeah, and initially in my journey, I was in 12 step programs. And then eventually I realized that they didn’t resonate with me. And when I ended up being a guest on Red Table Talk at about five months sober, and I met several sober women who were not in 12 step programs, I was like, whoa. So

you can be alcohol free and not go to AA. And they were like, yeah, like, look at us. And I was like, oh, snap. And so then I started to explore more and find other communities to get involved in and find other ways to do self-development work, which essentially it’s still, a lot of it is all the same, like 12-step work and a lot of the other work that you have to do to develop yourself. A lot of it has similar undercurrents, right? It’s just a matter of just finding the space that you’re comfy in. And so I eventually, I found my space

My journey started with medications and then eventually I did a lot of self-assessment and work again with my therapist and psychiatrist to decide when it was good to let those go. And eventually let those go. And yeah, ever since it’s been, it’s been quite a journey. I feel like this episode really captures more of like my pre-recovery journey. And I should probably do another one at some point about life, like sober life.

Um, cause honestly that would be a whole other conversation, but yeah, I think that sums it up. I have been alcohol free since November 28th of 2020. I don’t regret any of it. I lost a lot as a result of alcohol, but honestly, I do feel like I stand to gain everything from the world and, um,

I’m so grateful for people like my sister who never gave up on me even when I wanted to give up on me. And for all the people who maybe had an inkling that I was suffering but they didn’t know to what extent and so they just loved on me, so grateful for them too. And yeah, I just, I thank you for listening. If you want to work with me, say, on writing your own story.

and check out my website, bottomlisttosobre.com. If you want one-to-one coaching to help you with breaking past whatever the hell’s holding you back from getting better, feel free to reach out. Schedule a free consultation. There’s a lot of different fun things that I do. Most of the things that I offer are free or super low cost and then, yeah, just like come hang, come connect. Thanks so much for listening and you have a great one.

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