In this episode:
In this episode, I share how my once-social relationship with alcohol turned into a hidden struggle during my early years as a teacher. We’ll explore the intense pressures of the classroom, the risks of unhealthy coping mechanisms, and the urgent warning from the U.S. Surgeon General about alcohol. Drawing comparisons to the historical shift in tobacco awareness, I highlight the importance of informed choices and self-care in the education profession. Featuring insights from my Education Week interview, this episode is a vital conversation for educators facing stress and its hidden challenges.
Resources:
U.S. Surgeon General Issues New Advisory on Link Between Alcohol and Cancer Risk
Education Week – Why Stressed-Out Teachers Should Heed New Health Warnings About Alcohol
Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Classes, and Workshops
Atomic Habits Book Study With The Luckiest Club
Six-Week Writing to Heal Program – Starts March 3
Transcript:
00:03 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey y’all. So last week I had the opportunity to interview with Education Week to essentially discuss the Surgeon General’s new advisory on alcohol and the risks associated with alcohol, but also talk about it with regard to my teaching background and my experience as a classroom teacher, who was also addicted to alcohol. Background and my experience as a classroom teacher who was also addicted to alcohol. Now, in case you missed it, right, recently, very recently, the US Surgeon General came out with an advisory with regard to alcohol and specifically in this advisory, what was outlined was the direct link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk, specifically the fact that alcohol consumption right, drinking alcohol it is literally the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Right, the first two being tobacco and, apparently, obesity. And that alcohol increases your risks for at least seven types of cancer. And that, at this point, the recommended amount of alcohol to drink is not a drink. Right To not drink that’s actually the best outcome for anybody. Right, the best drink to have is to not have a drink with alcohol in it. Now, this is a big deal, obviously, for a person in recovery like myself, where having one is not an option. I don’t want to have one, because for me, to have one means that I can never have enough. This is huge because, if you think about, if any of you have read Holly Whitaker’s book Quit Like a Woman, I highly recommend it. But one of the big things that she talks about with regard to alcohol companies, in terms of big alcohol, is she draws the parallels between big alcohol and, in the past, big tobacco. Now, when we’re talking about big tobacco, right, if you think about I’m not sure which decade I’m throwing it out my butt right here maybe 1950s, 1960s but there was a time period, essentially right, when there were no cancer warnings for tobacco use and tobacco was heavily marketed, right, like you would have the cigarettes, for I think they were called Virginia Slims and those were targeted specifically toward women, right, and because they were delicate, long slender cigarettes, that that was supposed to be something that women just wanted to smoke. But lots of people smoked back then because there was no awareness of the risk of cancer that was tied to tobacco consumption. Then, once the surgeon general put that advisory out there and the warnings actually came out on tobacco items, tobacco products, we did see a decrease in the use of tobacco. Now, has tobacco been outlawed? Absolutely not. Do people still have the free choice to consume or smoke tobacco if they want to? Yes, they can, but people have the opportunity to be informed about the risks associated with tobacco use.
02:58
Now, fast forward to now, 2025, right at the time of this recording. Now this advisory has gone out about alcohol and the risks associated with alcohol. Now do I personally think that suddenly all the alcohol is going to have warning labels associated with it? I don’t know, probably not.
03:19
I’m not really optimistic about a lot of things going on in the world outside of my control and I don’t necessarily think that big alcohol companies and that legislation is going to pass where these labels will go out on these bottles, right and cans and such. However, what I think is a big win is that we do have an authority voice, like the surgeon general, stating what the risks are in terms of drinking alcohol, because I believe everyone should have free choice. If you want to drink, that is your business. I choose not to drink because I love my life without alcohol. If you want to drink, that is your business. However, what I do believe that the public deserves and especially educators I do believe that the public deserves to know what the risks are involved in the choices that they are making, right. So if you want to have your drinks, please by all means have them. Just be fully aware of what you’re putting in your body and what you are exposing yourself to in terms of risks for your health later on.
04:19
Because one thing that I did not have when I was first exposed to alcohol I did not have the understanding that alcohol was or increased your risk for cancer. Right when I was growing up, the only story that I had about alcohol being bad was that there were these people called alcoholics quote unquote and that they couldn’t handle their liquor. And then I eventually became one of those people that couldn’t handle liquor and I thought there was something wrong with me. My entire life I didn’t realize that the problem itself was alcohol. Holly Whitaker, again in Quit, like a Woman, does an excellent job of pointing this out and writing this out in a beautiful manner. Highly recommend her book. But in the meantime, I’m glad that we have finally moved from it being said in her book to having someone like the US Surgeon General stating this.
05:08
Anyway, all that is to say is that Education Week, which is a news source for educators, typically in the K through 12 setting. They reached out to me to have a conversation about my relationship with alcohol as a teacher. A conversation about my relationship with alcohol as a teacher. The reason why is because, with this advisory coming out there, we know that educators, especially K through 12 educators, they like to have their drinks right. One of the surprising not really surprising facts. I had an intuitive feeling that this was accurate, but educators do rank among the top 10 professions who are most likely to abuse alcohol. This is data collected from SAMHSA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. So we wanted to have this conversation and we wanted to have this conversation now, early on in the year, to talk about the stresses that educators go through.
06:05
In my interview I interviewed specifically with journalist Elizabeth Hubeck. She asked me Did I know how stressful teaching would be? And here’s the thing Going into the classroom, I had no idea how difficult public school teaching would be. And the thing was that I went into teaching directly after college, so I had had no real professional exposure to any other kind of work outside of classroom teaching. So, yes, I knew that it was stressful. Yes, my body was always on high alert because anything at any time could go wrong in my classroom, especially that first year. But I didn’t know, I had no frame of reference for what other work would look like, right, and so the daily stress of being in the classroom was absolutely overwhelming.
06:59
And this episode, in a sense, is just validating. If you are an educator or if you know an educator, pass this on to them, because I want to validate that, if you are a classroom teacher, that you are 100% not alone in terms of feeling absolute overwhelm. Right, I was hired on. I’m going back to my first year teaching in Brooklyn. I’ll tell you this quick story. Maybe it’s not so quick, but my first year teaching in Brooklyn, I was in the New York city teaching fellows program and, coming straight out of college, I was hired on to teach at this small public school with about 10 other first year teachers who were also recent college graduates.
07:39
Most of us were New York City teaching fellows too, which means that we did not have education degrees. We were pulled from whatever kind of major that we had and we were given a classroom and were told go, go teach. And we really we knew we were in the thick of the chaos, but again, we were all young professionals. So we didn’t know how chaotic our world was in comparison to other people, but essentially we would get to the end of every work day, right, and there was almost like this desperate need to lock eyes with one another and, you know, just almost silently, confirm and communicate to one another telepathically, almost that, yes, we’re going to happy hour, right, because that’s the thing with educators. It’s almost like if you have a good day in the classroom, you want to drink to celebrate it, but more likely than not, you’re probably having really rough days and you’re coping by drinking. And especially when you have a happy hour kind of setting, you have that opportunity to almost commiserate with one another.
08:40
So the thing with my classroom experience too, especially that first year, was that I had classroom brawls that were almost a daily occurrence, had, again, no training, no skills to deescalate these really highly volatile middle school kiddos who didn’t even know how to be comfortable in their own bodies, right. And so I feel like I just the sound of desks like screeching across the floor and chairs being knocked over, like that sound is permanently ingrained in my head. It’s like a soundtrack that I’ll never forget. And, speaking of people, I’ll never forget I had a student, I’ll say their name was Tyson. Their name was not Tyson, but I’m just making it up and I remember again, this was a sixth grade student back in 2008 or so, so way back, and Tyson adored Nicki Minaj, before I even knew who Nicki Minaj was. Like, this kid just like, knew who she was and like if you as a teacher had a misstep in your lesson plan and there was like a minute of idle time, just any moment where things were not happening actively in the classroom, this kid would jump out of their seat and just start twerking to whatever Nicki Minaj song was like playing in his head silently.
10:05
And the thing is that you know Tyson was a sixth grader and at that time I do know Tyson now as an adult and Tyson since has now come out but back then Tyson hadn’t openly shared that they were a part of the LGBTQIA community, right, but they’ve still have become a target for their classmates. Cruelty, right, because you know, for someone who was identifying as male or perceived as a male by their peers, rather loving Nicki Minaj, wanting to twerk and dance, nicki, that made the student a target. And the problem with my other students was, again, they’re, they’re so young too. They were just parroting the ignorance that they were learning at home, right? So they would throw slurs at Tyson and all sorts of hateful labels at the student Tyson. But Tyson also did not play around and would not let any of that slide either. So I admired how much fire Tyson carried as a sixth grader.
11:08
And you know Tyson would straight up, challenge anybody who tried to call, call them any names, right? So Tyson would be like, oh, you want to call me this? All right, well then, come say it to my face. You know they would just straight up, snap, and you know they would just like stand tall, like even as their voice is cracking, right, and before I could even intervene, y’all, this room, this classroom would erupt. And again I was a first year teacher, I was like 22 years old, and the desks were flipping, the desks, the chairs were sliding across the floor. You had a circle of students, you know, forming and yelling, fight, fight, fight, and security would bust into the classroom to break it up. And then you know suddenly like my whole classroom was destroyed right, furniture everywhere, and having to put it back together.
11:56
But the thing was, scenes like this were very common, not just in my classroom, but in the classrooms of the other first year teachers that we were in, right, we were literally drowning in this sea of chaos and that shared stress was absolutely creating a strong bond for us. But we were bonding at happy hour over glasses, over bottles, and so what for me was becoming what I thought was just simple socializing, right, it very quickly was becoming a habit and then eventually it became a crutch. And then eventually, you know, it was a trap that I was in, that I didn’t even realize that I was basically setting for myself. You know, from this happy hour pattern as a teacher is where I first started to hide my alcohol consumption. Right, so we would be, you know, at our usual happy hour spot, and there was one time that I had had a couple of drinks, probably too quickly, and so my words were literally tumbling out of my mouth. Right, my words were too fast and they were getting too slurred, you know, because I was venting about a surprise classroom observation that day, and I remember that day, my observation went so badly that, in a moment of complete frustration, I literally stopped trying to teach altogether in the middle of that observation, with the principal in the back of the room and I said to my students do you want me to get fired? Because my boss is right there in the back of the room and the way this is going it’s looking like I can’t teach y’all. And I remember I pointed straight to the principal in the back who was just like hunched over her laptop, you know, taking notes. And um, you know, back at the bar like I was just downing my drinks and talking about that and how I was just like man. I thought this principal was going to like send my behind pack in and had to go.
13:56
And I was getting up to go get another drink when one of my coworkers at that time just abruptly stopped me and was like whoa, jess, I totally was drinking too fast. But when they called me out, you know those words they didn’t just land on me, like they literally sliced through me. It was like in that moment I was taken back to being a kid and being called out for, say, eating too much, when I used to get in trouble for overeating, for example, with my mom. So I mean that humiliation was just. It was just a lot, it was a lot. My cheeks were flush with shame and all I could say to myself is what is wrong with you, right? And I used to ask myself that all the time since I was a kid what is wrong with you? So I didn’t drink anymore there at happy hour.
14:49
But on my way home this was New York city, so I was riding the subway. When I got off the train and I was walking out of the train station, I saw that there was a liquor store and you know, I had the thought like, ah, like I could keep this going at home and no one’s going to say anything to me there, right? So I went in, I got a little bottle, slipped it into a brown paper bag, put that bag inside of my work bag and you know, I walked home feeling a little bit cocky, feeling a little bit good about myself and just thinking like y’all ain’t catching me drinking more than you, right? That was, that was the logic that I had, and from that point forward I always made it a point to never be seen drinking more than whoever I was with. So if somebody I was with was drinking like six drinks, I would have six.
15:38
But if I was in the company of someone who slowly nursed one drink, I was slowly nursing one drink and you know, just like that, just like that you all, my secret of drinking started, and it started from some of the stress of being a classroom teacher. Right, I’m not saying that that was the start of my addiction to alcohol. If you’ve listened to my story before I talk about more of the deeper roots, go back to my relationship with food, and I also think that one’s complicated descent into addiction goes through many layers, and this is just one of the layers. Right, because I have a whole college time story too. But I just wanted to talk a little bit about the teacher part because, again, if you are an educator, if you are a teacher, and you are struggling right now, I promise you that you are not alone. I promise, you, promise, you, promise you. Again, teaching is one of the 10 professions, according to the statistic cited in the article that I’m a part of, where the stress drives people to drink, and so you don’t have to spend the rest of the year attached to the bottle.
16:51
Don’t hesitate to reach out for support. Again, I will start coaching people again, starting in March of this year. So if you are interested in one-to-one coaching, check that out. If you’re looking for a community online communities like the Luckiest Club are great, great, great places. If you need free support, there’s always Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s not my preferred support, but it works for a lot of people right. So whatever you need to take care of yourself at this time, go do it. You deserve to free yourself. So thanks. I’ll catch y’all in the next episode.
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