- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Friends & Family
I work in the addiction treatment field for a toxicology company, and I work with treatment centers from Maine down to North Carolina. My sober date is July 5, 2014, and the word I would use to describe my drunk life is chaos, complete and total chaos.
I had no clue who I was. I was a shell of a person going through life, and I had felt like that all my life. I felt like that even before I was drinking. I felt empty. I didn’t really have much of a purpose. I started drinking at age 14, and my really deep drinking probably started in college. College was a free-for-all. Drinking wasn’t a dark thing yet; it was still fun. It did turn really dark when I was around 25 years old. I lived at the shore, and I would black out every single night, even though I didn’t know what blacking out was.
My mom works in the field, and she’s been in recovery for 34 years. She called me and said:
“Some of my friends are super concerned about your drinking. They say they see it on Facebook.”
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“Do you black out?”
“Is that a thing?”
I thought you had to drink every single day and lose your life to be an alcoholic. My conversation with my mom didn’t wake me up. It just made me feel weird that she mentioned it.
A month later I got a job in the addiction treatment field for this toxicology company. I went to conferences and lived a double life. I had been going to support group meetings for about two years and doing the 12-steps, but nothing changed and I was still drinking on the weekends. I thought I was controlling my drinking really well, but I was miserable and still in that shell I talked about. It was a beeline way of living: You just go straight with no goals, no excitement. It was weird and numb.
After a year of working for the toxicology company I got an opportunity to go on vacation. I had lived in Mexico, so I had the choice to either go on a retreat or go to Mexico and visit my old friends. Mexico is where I went. During this trip I hit my moment of pain, my turning point.
The trip was mayhem. I don’t remember a thing about those five days. I came home, and a month later I found out I was pregnant. I had no clue whose it was or what had happened. I had watched Jerry Springer. I never thought I’d be one of those people. I had morals, but I hadn’t lived up to them, and I thought I’d never live up to them.
I decided to have the baby. I thought, “It’s going to change my life. It’s going to keep me sober.” It brought me to the point of saying, “I have to be sober now. I am pregnant, I have to be sober.” God gave me this chance to be sober because I never would have stopped otherwise. I couldn’t. I knew a friend who did stop, and I asked her “How? It doesn’t make sense to cut it out of your life. I don’t get it.” I didn’t know alcoholism was a thing, but I did think it was weird that normal people didn’t deal with the same problems as me.
A month after I learned I was pregnant, I learned the baby had a severe birth defect. This baby had made me decide to change my life and be a mom, and then I find this out? I stopped believing in anything. I thought I no longer had a god, but I still looked up and asked, “What is going on? Why are you doing this to me? Show me what to do here because I’m done.” That was it. It was real. I was in so much pain, I couldn’t believe it, but these events had to happen for me to know that I needed to get sober. In the moment I wanted to die, I wanted to kill myself, but now I look back and see that it was magical. I was already two months sober. I had no other choice but to end the pregnancy and it was then that I went into a 12-step meeting on my hands and knees. I was done. My delusion broke, clarity came through, and I knew I was an alcoholic. My whole family is in recovery, but I was over there in my delusion. I didn’t know what it meant to be an alcoholic, but I started calling myself one. I’d had no clue what was going on, but I knew there was something not right. It’s so weird to me how you don’t even know.
I went into 12-step meetings. I did the work, and started helping other women, and it changed my life. The empty shell filled up. When you go through the steps as a student, your soul has a big hole in it. You’re going to get half-filled from that work, and then you’re going to loop around. You’re going to become the teacher and fill up the rest; you’re going to become whole. You learn and you give it away, and that is the cycle you have to do your whole life. I didn’t get it for years, I didn’t hear a word, and then I got it. Now I have a ton of sponsees. I work with women all the time. I run meetings, and I speak. It truly has filled me up. I’ve learned that if you’re trying to run the show, it isn’t going to work. When I have a tinge of anxiety, that’s my signal. I know when I start to feel something bad like that, I have to do something about it. I have to call somebody. I’m super connected. I have all these tools now.
Everyone asks, “I still have anxiety, how does that go away?” Well it doesn’t go away. Feelings are things that happen. Pain is the same as happiness, joy, boredom, and loneliness. “They’re all the same,” I tell my girls, “So we have to treat them all the same.” Why are we running from the pain and chasing the happiness? It doesn’t make sense. Why can’t we just say, “Hey pain, what’s up?” I’m learning to sit in the pain or sit with the loneliness. I have a ton of tools I use. I call somebody, and I break down the pain. I figure out what the pain is. Is it protection? Defense? In the end it always comes down to not trusting in something bigger than myself. I’m not trusting that I have a path and that it’s going to be okay. I’m always taking my will back. When someone tells me that, I think, “Oh, duh,” but I can’t ever tell myself that. I have to call somebody. I get outside of me, because me is dangerous. I reach out to other people like the other women I am working with, and I help them. That’s what I do now every single day. Every day something different happens, and I grow a little bit more. I don’t call anything a problem anymore. I never call anything a problem; I call it an opportunity. I have an opportunity to see the world differently, to learn, to change. Negatives and positives are all equal.
My relationships are now totally different. I am different. I mean I am still self-centered but not as bad. Every time I do something, I ask myself if it is selfish or not. I have to break that down every day. When you do that, you have to look at yourself, and you have to change. You have to change.
My best friend is a normal person, and she just got married. She said, “You are the best friend that anyone could ask for.” I could have cried. It’s so amazing. I call her my human angel. I treated her horribly, but she stuck by me through this whole thing. She always saw the good person I tried to be but couldn’t. When I started to be that person, she said, “Kate, you found it. You found that person you’re trying to be.” She sees me so clearly, and it’s amazing.
My mom and I are best friends. She’s in recovery so we have this connection that’s unbelievable. We grow together, we learn together. She says things like, “This might be enabling your spiritual growth.” When she doesn’t want to help me out with something, she’ll say, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Everything has changed. I’m a different person. I’ve become me. I’ve gotten whole, and I love that because I was empty for 27 years. I had more stuff and money when I wasn’t sober than I do now. I have less. I don’t even live on my own; I live with my mom. I have less than I did, and I’ve never been so filled up. It’s crazy. The material stuff doesn’t do it. I always want more and more, but I catch myself before I act reckless and destructive. I catch myself because of all the tools I have.
Now I’m 28, and life’s just beginning. I am proud that I am now totally connected to myself. I know who I am without a doubt and to the inner being of me. I never knew who I was before. I would change my hair color every day. I would wear different clothes, try different styles. I was just trying to figure out who I was. Now I’m dating, and people ask me, “What do you look for in someone? Do you have an ideal relationship?” I want to find someone who is whole. That’s all I need. I am whole because of getting sober and doing the work, and that is what I want in someone else because it’s so important. I know a lot of people who are walking around half-filled, and it’s painful. I get refilled every day because I lose a little and get it back. It’s an everyday thing.
Whenever I share my story, I end it by saying, “If you’re on the edge of this thing, or if you’re right in the middle, you can either continue to drink and drug or you can come over here and try this. Try it for one week or one day. It doesn’t matter. Just see. You can always go back to that life. There will always be a bar, a drug and the chaos. What is the risk of trying? You’re not losing anything at all.”