My Journey Out of the Bottle
I started KNOWING and downloading and culminating JOOTB about 9 days after my last drink! A surreal amount of revelations started pouring in to my being. And I had the same recurring thoughts and feelings that I had woken up from a fever dream! That I had been in a twighlight slumber for years! And that I had just escaped from being kidnapped and held hostage. I WAS FREE! I had broken Free from what had been holding me back!
Let me start by saying that I NEVER believed that I would be a non-drinker! Never!
So the fact that I’m sitting here doing this is one of the most profound experiences of my life…so far!
I will start by telling you about my past year and the roadblocks I’ve experienced - due to alcohol.
I’ve been on a self-discovery journey of “awakening” for nearly 7 years. It began slowly for me shortly after the demise of my marriage back in 2016. And then fast forward I dove in headfirst this past year - with taking a sabbatical to travel the globe. 2023 has been super infused with so many modalities of self work & spirituality. A wide spectrum of practices to ‘find myself’ like….delving into shadow work & reacquainting with my inner-child, belief work, reiki, massage, trainings and workshops, psychic and metaphysical stuff - tarot and oracle cards, journaling like never before, a sexual empowerment retreat, several psychedelic ceremonies, breathwork, human design & gene keys, being ALONE…and all the while building a new business and desperately trying to overcome my lack of self trust and self confidence!
Soooo…the gist of this life-changing decision came from =
A 4+ year on-off partnership had ended, my job went away, my bougee housing situation shattered – and then a good friend of mine gifted me with an airline buddy pass which afforded me a free ticket to fly anywhere in the world this airline went - for free!
Well…I saw this as a clear sign from the universe … the path had been cleared and I was meant to make this happen! I mean I couldn’t let this opportunity pass me by, right?
So, all that catapulted me to make some pivotal and massively risky decisions: I decided to simplify my life by getting rid of 80% of my stuff and downsizing to a 2-bedroom tiny apartment. I sold a condo I owned, paid off debt and decided to live off those proceeds to invest in myself for the year.
Sounds very Eat, Pray Love right? Yes, it definitely has been such an amazingly transformative year for me and in this episode I’m going to share about how it all led me to finding the Key I’d been seeking to help me unlock my joy and bliss … giving up alcohol.
Let’s back up and I’ll share a peek into my drinking history.
I drank alcohol on a very consistent basis for nearly over 30 years - steadily with only very limited breaks here and there during pregnancy and only if I was throwing up sick -otherwise it was pretty much a daily habit!
I was a very social person and loved to entertain, coordinate happy hours, dinner parties, any sort of gathering where we could have our vino and connect. I drank at every opportunity I could honestly, and it became a ‘challenge’ of sorts for me to find creative ways to incorporate it into ‘mundane’ or obligatory aspects of life: school events, roadies, sneaking on the airplane, work functions, wellness events – and of course it was always my sidekick at home.
Wine was my Go To… Back in the early days, I used to make a special run to the big fancy wine stores to meander through the aisles picking and choosing fun labels, reading reviews and making mindful choices on mid-tier priced bottles. I would buy a case and that would last more than 2 weeks, and I was also sharing with others (or in my marriage we would share a bottle on occasion). Fast forward to the end – Trader Joe’s boxed wine or random sugary canned wine…,all very hastily and efficiently purchased without thought.
In the fall of 2022 when I was further disconstructing life, I put myself in a timeout from drinking, however it was very dark and punitive. I was not drinking alcohol but I was drinking copious amounts of NA wine (just as expensive btw) because the habit of ‘giving up’ was overwhelming – I tried to trickery mind. And I stopped socializing and hermitted myself away in isolation. It was quite dark AND there was a lot of benefit to that time period because for the first time ever, I really delved into shadow work which opened up a new portal to self-discovery and a much deeper exploration into consciousness and connection to source.
I was clean from the alcohol toxin input for 42 days and then incorporated it back in around the holidays. It didn’t take long at all for it to kick back into full-blown daily drinking.
I was utilizing my travel perks and looking for all the ways to find myself. I had given myself the permission to take the year off and truly embrace this sabbatical and secretly hoping that I would have that Ah-Ha moment of Clarity and ultimate enlightenment for ‘what’s next’?!?
½ way through my sabbatical in July, I even paid for a private 1:1 mushroom ceremony where I very intentionally put forth my desire to manage my drinking. I felt so positive this time. I even had the ‘worst hangover’ the next day that I was convinced was such a strong sign to me beating this.
I left 2 days later for my European adventure! I made the entire trek through the airport and on an international flight without a drink – unheard of! Made it another 15 hours after that, but then later that evening after finally finding my destination in Munich Germany, I found myself in the old square surrounded by beautiful and inviting beer gardens. Beer is not my favorite so I thought that it would be just fine to partake in one of those because I wouldn’t want to keep drinking it. (Sidenote…if I don’t like it, why? Why would I drink it?).
Let’s take a birdseye view of my sabbatical year Anxiety.
All the while of trying to find myself was the underlying battle that ensued almost daily with my lack of clarity, my ever decreasing motivation, my fears and anxiety incrementally inching upward - led me to an unchecked and unencombered responsibility so I felt like a lot of my days were spent aimlessly wandering around feeling more and more unworthy and hopeless about what’s next. My confidence toward my ability to be a functioning income building adult was tanking. Nothing sounded fun. I could poke holes in almost every idea I had, and then when it came to executing on the non-creative stuff, overwhelm and paralysis kicked in hard. My imposter syndrome was at a special sharp pinnacle and I could NOT journal or manifest my way to believing in myself. Perhaps another journey with more specific intentions or finding the right guru to coach me out of it?
In the meantime, the easy thing to do and the sure thing that I could Kill it at was pouring a glass of wine and contemplating the next step – surely the answers would come with a little liquid courage and some solution to let my mind loosen up its death grip on low vibe emotions of fear, worry and uncertainty!
Several times throughout the year I chose week long retreats, where in the back of my mind I was excited about the prospect of being ‘dry’ as a break and then hopes that perhaps that break would be the one that would magically take away my desire to drink or at least take away the prioritization that I’d placed on it. Speaking of prioritization… I KNEW that had become out of control… I would skim the surface of that issue by telling myself that I would moderate and therefore get my shit together so that the new and improved me would emerge by the end of my sabbatical.
I could not however seem to get my Mojo – I self diagnosed several other possible causes to my dazed and confused demeanor…maybe it’s my hormones? Maybe it’s adult ADHD…so perhaps some adderrall? D3? My overall ability to muster up energy to be productive was fueled by some powerful procrastination tactics. I knew deep down that my well-being was really stretched. Because my joy was fleeting and nothing was really giving me a lot of pleasure.
Another huge component to my sabbatical year was managing an extremely emotionally and painful breakup – another massive addiction! I could NOT shake my desire for him and my incessnant need to ‘fix that’. I gave so much of my power away around that co-dependent low vibe relationship that I felt near the brink of brokenness on many occasion and I held a gripping fear that my best parts of life were gone and never to return. My essence had been lost and I was blaming the relationship failure. That I was broken from that and I needed to rebuild…and this sabattical was going to reprogram me!
MY ROCK BOTTOM
Now… my drinking was surely an ever-present activity in my life. And also, not equivocally out of proportion to many of my social circles’ usage. So, I was not a stand-out as a point of concern for my friends – meaning there were no interventions. I still have no idea what the ‘true story’ might have been behind my back – but no matter now.
Yet… behind the curtain my life was not feeling ‘right’! And then my son, Garrett dropped IT on me…the ever dreaded ‘talk’. He expressed his concerns for my drinking. That he was worried about me.
I agreed that I would stop drinking when he was around. That was on 9/12… I did not stop drinking fully for another month. I had weeks more of managing my thoughts and plans around drinking. The moderation and planning for it, was taking up even more precious resources of my brain and energy. The whole trying desperately to keep it at bay, limit it and plan around it…. it was just ever present all the fucking time.
The Beginning of the End ~
A lot of my friends were boasting their intentions for committing to Sober October - and I seriously had the voice in my head saying, “That’s cute and how magnanimous ~ I wish I could do that”.
I made a personal ‘deal’…that I would have a few ‘off weeks’ while on mom-duty so I would be sober on those times. Good enough, right?
The first week of October was a full-time drinking across multiple cities. I flew to Omaha to visit Rylie then out ot NY to visit a friend I’d never visited before. That visit culminated in at least 3 ‘aggressive’ conversations where I was outwardly rude and entitled and combative, coupled with inappropriate social media posts, drunk texting and just plain ugly behavior. The week climaxing with a fancy wine-tasting night back in Denver which ended in a series of blackout debaucherous moments.
That Sunday 10/8 after the wine tasting, I was in a mental torture chamber! My anxiety was SO BAD I could not leave the couch, and could not stop my thoughts of doom and gloom… visioning every worst case scenario while having this feeling of “uh oh…what have I done …what is going to come back to haunt me”? I just felt IN TROUBLE.
UGH… Is this really going to just get better on its own? How many more wasted days, dollars and hopes and dreams can I afford at this point?
The next morning, October 9th during my journaling and coffee time, I thought, I have to STOP! And still to this day, I’m not sure what came over me, but I spent the entire day watching YouTube videos of movie stars’ addiction shares and sobriety success stories. All the accounts of their rockbottoms, and ultimate life changes, happiness and turnaround post-giving up alcohol (and other drugs)…
I felt such immense feelings of relief hearing these stories of triumph. That it’s possible to have a happy and better life without it.
Up until that point, I had avoided very hard ANY sort of posts, articles, readings around sobriety. And here’s an interesting story about How hard I avoided it. A few years back, at my first “dark knight of the soul / midlife crisis” during Covid. I had a vision of starting a new life then too and one massive action I took was to sign up for a Life Coaching certification. One of the main curriculum courses was “How to Stop Overdrinking / or Quit” (or something like that)... and y’all… I SKIPPED THE WHOLE THING! I mean I perused it, and the more I looked at it, the more I avoided it hard. That was the beginning of what I now know to be labeld as Cognitive Dissonance! I could not fathom that I could possibly be a non-drinker! Just not possible! I would fail. And that ‘demon’ was ever-present throughout the entire coursework in the coaching learnings…and I constantly felt a huge lack in Confidence…and basically self sabotaged myself by not believing that I could actually be a coach. Afterall…the coaching part was pretty easy, but that was also the beginning of my Foggy Brain onset… (I had increased my drinking by multiples at around Spring of 2018 and that rolled right into Covid day drinking…and I was unemployed so I was unchecked and well… Everyone was doing it. I felt very supported in my zoom HH’s and social distanced drinking!
So yeah, once I finally opened the door to peek in at the problems of alcohol and the unexpected happy ending stories - the Universe took the opportunity to THRUST OPEN the door and kick me inside.
I’m so grateful for this ‘divine intervention’ as that day was the beginning of the End.
