Author: Jessica Duenas

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

Bottomless to Sober – Writing Classes and Coaching Support

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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