20 Years

At the age of 17, I took my first drink. I was in the backseat of my boyfriend’s car, sitting next to one of my girlfriends. Her boyfriend, riding shotgun, passed back a bottle of rum and coke, and after she took a sip, I decided to put aside all of the apprehension I had about getting in trouble and took a long pull.

As the alcohol hit my system, I felt a powerful sensation of a switch getting flipped. It was like a click over into a brand-new feeling I would chase for the next 8 years. All the tension, insecurities, and fears I hadn’t fully realized I was carrying dropped away. My shoulders came out of my ear lobes and my skin suddenly felt like it was the right size for the first time I could remember in a long time. As I drank more, I felt more and more alive – or as a friend once put it, “wittier, prettier and tittier.”

On the outside, most people would have never known that I was walking around with massive insecurities and fears. I was a senior in high school with excellent grades, had a great group of friends, active in a host of activities, had the lead in the school musical, and worked part time at a grocery store. I laughed a lot, made jokes often and seemed like I was having a great time wrapping up high school.

On the inside, I was constantly afraid and insecure. I felt alone even when I was a group of people. I was convinced that people didn’t really like me – that they would vote me out of any group that they could. I thought I would never get into a real relationship – that if they knew the real me, that they would run screaming. I felt physically awkward, always too big or too tall. I felt compelled to achieve more, do more, be more – just to be enough to be “allowed” to be around.

Once alcohol hit my system, all of that went away, and I felt like the version of myself that I wanted to be. I was confident, comfortable, and capable. That first night, I completely overdid it, and ended up blacking out. My friend and our boyfriends were too scared to take me home to my own house, so I ended up sleeping over at my friend’s house to sober up.

The next morning, I was definitely hungover, but all I could think about was how I had felt when I started drinking.

I chased that feeling for the next 8 years, without even realizing that was what I was doing. It quickly became a vicious cycle of drinking to feel relief but doing things while I was drunk that caused me shame or embarrassment – and then, drinking again to alleviate the feelings I was having.

I went off to college, and after my first roommate confronted me about my drinking, I found a new roommate that was more forgiving. One of my earliest coping skills was to find friends that drank like I did and hang out in places where drinking was the norm. I started working in radio during my freshman year of college, and that was a great excuse to party. That career offered me access to bars/clubs/concert venues that made it easy to drink the way I wanted to. I didn’t drink every night, but it was very often and always more than everyone else.

After a few years of decreased attendance at classes and poor performance, Penn State didn’t fight me when I decided to leave. I couldn’t keep up with the responsibilities of school and work while drinking the way I was. I tried to join the military at this point because I was hoping that it would provide me the structure that would make my life feel more manageable. Unfortunately, there was a warrant out for me due to the vast amount of unpaid parking tickets I had accrued from leaving my car all over town, and I wasn’t able to join. Instead, I made the rash decision at the beginning of a semester to pack it up and go back home for a little while to try to get my life together. My dad told me that I could have six months to live at home and then, I had to figure something else out – and that while I lived in their house, I had to abide by their rules.

By this point in my drinking, I was restless, irritable, and discontent most of the time, but especially when something got in the way of me drinking the way I wanted to. The only relief that I got was when I drank again but living in my parent’s house didn’t make that possible as often as I would have liked. After just a few months, I moved out again.

I went back to college a few months after that because someone made fun of me for not having finished my college degree. Intent to prove him wrong, I buckled down and white knuckled my way through the week when I had classes and work and let loose on the weekends. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I always had an internal countdown going to when I could finally have my first drink for the weekend.

After graduation, I got a job at a radio station in Colorado Springs, and I was convinced that I was about to get my life in order, that I had grown out of the phase where I drank like I did. That attempt at a geographic cure didn’t work – it wasn’t where I was living that was the problem. Just like I had in previous locations, I found people that drank like I did and hung out with them so I didn’t feel conspicuous.

During this time, blackouts became the norm for me. I would wake up in the passenger seat of my own car, or worse, back in my apartment, with my car parked sloppily in the parking lot below. I am very grateful that I never got a DUI, and even more so, that I never hurt anyone by drunk driving.

After my mom passed away, my drinking escalated even more. In fact, on the morning she passed away, it was my turn to be at the hospital with her, and I wasn’t there because I was so hungover. It’s still one of the biggest regrets of my life. The grief and guilt I felt was unbearable, and I didn’t know how else to cope than to drink to escape. I hadn’t been nearly the daughter that she deserved, and now, I would never be able to make that right.

Once again, I attempted a geographic cure, and took a radio job in Connecticut. I thought that a change of scenery would help me start over, and that being in the same time zone as my family would be helpful now that my mom was gone. I don’t know how I thought I was going to be helpful to anyone – but I obviously wasn’t thinking very clearly. I just knew I was desperate for things to get better.

On the plane ride from Colorado to Connecticut, I even prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in anymore to ask Him to take the chaos out of my life. In return, I was willing to give up drinking hard alcohol and told God that I would stick to beer from that point forward. The insanity of that attempted bargain was lost on me. By that time in my drinking career, my alcoholism had progressed to the point where I couldn’t get drunk off of just drinking beer anymore – which meant I didn’t get the relief I was always desperately seeking.

Even though I tried to make it look good on the outside, things weren’t better. I was up to my old behavior, and if you can believe it, it got worse. I had trouble getting to work on time, and my shift didn’t start until 10am. I was constantly in conflict with family and the few remaining friends I had left. I was quickly amassing more and more debt, with no plan on how to get out. My life was the definition of unmanageable, but it never occurred to me that it had any connection to my drinking. I was under the delusion that I was still having "fun" despite the mounting evidence.

Then, in 2001, I met a woman who changed my life forever. She is a spitfire with incredible stories, a wicked sense of humor, a boisterous laugh and sparkling eyes. She worked for a record label, and it was part of her job to get my radio station to consider playing the music of the artists she represented. She would visit the station or take me out to lunch while we talked about music and bands we loved. She had incredible stories of times on the road with various bands, and we would laugh about how she had acted while under the influence.

Because she shared her stories, I shared stories of my own of my antics while under the influence, and we would laugh at those too – in the way that people do when they realize that “normal” people wouldn’t find any of this very funny.

Then, before she would move on to our next topic, she would always say, “…but I don’t have to live like that anymore.”

After a few months, I finally asked what she meant by saying she didn’t have to live that anymore, and she paused and smiled. Then, she dropped the bomb: “I am sober. I don’t drink anymore.” You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was shocked to hear that this woman in front of me that was larger than life didn’t drink anymore – and didn’t even feel the need to. At that point in my life, I couldn’t imagine a life without alcohol.

It was her words that got my attention, but the seed had been planted a year earlier when I was on a girls’ trip celebrating my cousin’s birthday. She had two friends that were sober, and during our trip, they periodically left to go to a recovery meeting together. It made an impression that they were on that trip with us and were having just as much fun as the rest of us, just without alcohol.

I wish I could say that I turned things around that day – but it was about another year before I officially hit bottom, which happened at my best friend’s housewarming party. She was my ride or die friend – the one I called to share everything with, the one that I could call whenever I need help getting out of a jam, the one that remembered the things about my own life that I didn’t. After embarrassing myself and hurting her with my awful behavior, she finally put her foot down with me and told me she didn’t want me to be part of her life anymore.

As I drove away from her house, I didn’t know what to do or how to fix the harm I had done. I called the only person I knew that didn’t drink and I asked her for help. I could tell she was smiling on the other end of the phone, and she said, “Honey, I have been waiting for this phone call.” She lived in New York at the time, but she helped me find a list of mutual support group meetings for the town where I lived and told me I should go to one as soon as I could.

That was June 30, 2002. I haven’t had a drink since that day.

I went to the meeting the next night and met some very lovely women. I couldn’t tell you what their faces looked like because I never looked up past their feet. I was horribly hungover, and full of fear, shame and anxiety. One of them recognized that I was new, so she gave me a booklet that had a list of meetings for the area and wrote her number on the back cover. With a few minutes left until the meeting started, I read the booklet. In the back, there was a quiz from Johns Hopkins to help you decide if you were an alcoholic, and I got an 18 out of 20 on the quiz. (Take it for yourself here: https://ncphp.org/johns-hopkins-questionnaire/) Then, the meeting started and went around the room to share. Eventually, it got to be my turn. I said the words “Hi, I’m Jeannine, and I am an alcoholic…” for the first time, and then, burst into tears.

After the meeting, I went to a coworker’s house and told her what had happened at my best friend’s party and at the meeting. At one point, I said, “…and I don’t even know if I am alcoholic.” She gently stopped me and said, “yes, you are.” When I looked at up her surprised, she said, “Let me put it this way, I have never had to ask myself that question. If you are wondering if you are an alcoholic, you probably are.”

I called my best friend after leaving my coworkers house to tell her I had gone to a meeting, and she told me she was happy I was going but not to call her again. I couldn’t believe it – she was sticking to the boundary she had created. I thought I would tell her I had attended a meeting and that would be gesture enough to go back to the way things were. I am very grateful that she stood her ground.

I kept going to meetings after that, in the hopes that when my friend called after she inevitably came to her senses, that I could say that I was still going. (I was in such denial that I thought it was her that needed to come to her senses, not the other way around.)

Thankfully, that didn’t happen for a long time. I kept going and started to hear the message of recovery in a way that I could connect. The people that were in the meetings I attended shared about their experiences while drinking, what they did to get sober, and how much better their lives are today being in recovery. After going for a couple of months, it finally clicked for me that, much like the Johns Hopkins quiz said, I am an alcoholic. The people in the meetings I attended shared things that I had never been brave enough to say out loud before and talked about how they recovered from that state of mind. They talked about how to work the program in a way that they had to tools to handle whatever life threw at them. They talked about being in state of peace – when they used to feel restless, irritable and discontent, just like me. It stood to reason that if they claimed to be alcoholics, I must really be one too if I felt the same way and experienced the same things.

Eventually, I got a sponsor, a woman who had experience being in recovery, who was willing to help me on an individual basis. She patiently walked me through the program, step by step. I also started to amass a group of friends that helped me to feel a connection like I had never known with a group of people before. This fellowship of fellow alcoholics has become an absolute bright spot of my life – many of the best moments of my life have been shared with them.

The program also brought me back to having a relationship with a higher power that I call God. After my incredible mother passed away, I was so angry at God that I threw out the concept of having a relationship with him out of the window. I reasoned that if God would allow her to die, when she was such a faithful and devoted Christian, that there was no reason to even want to have Him in my life. I was also quite sure that a girl like me was “too broken” or “too bad” for God to even want me around. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I now know a love, acceptance, guidance and forgiveness that I never thought would be possible.

Through the program, I have been able to ferret out the root causes of my drinking, make amends to the people and institutions I have harmed (including the best friend that inspired me to get sober) and found a way to navigate life on life’s terms with the help of God and my fellow alcoholics. I used to think that the best way to handle uncomfortable situations was to move (either across the room or across the country), but now, I know I can weather any uncomfortable situation. Even better, by doing so, I know I can be an example for other people that are in recovery of how to do that, sober.

I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in sobriety over the past twenty years (in no particular order): becoming a mom, getting out of debt, falling in love, getting married, getting new jobs, getting divorced, moving across town and across the country, losing my dad, making new friends, running a marathon, changing careers, traveling to 20+ countries and 35 states, losing a job, buying and selling homes, going back to grad school, trying new hobbies and a million other smaller life events that used to scare me to death.

Through following the example of the people that have gone before me, I have been able to navigate those challenges and blessings while staying sober – and I don’t take one bit of that for granted. I am still plugged into the program that got me sober – I have a sponsor, I sponsor other women, and I attend meetings regularly. I never want to forget that I didn’t earn the incredible life I have today – I got it by the grace of God and through working the program as it was laid out to me, and as we say a lot in the rooms I hang out in, “one day at a time.”

It's more than a little bit scary to share that I am in recovery so publicly, but I am pushing through that because I wanted to share a message of hope. I always have a little moment of panic when I share with someone new that I am sober because I worry that people will have preconceived notions of what that means. I worry that they will think they have to act differently around me, that I am not going to be any fun, or that I won’t be a reliable coworker or friend. Hopefully, if you know me, you know that nothing could be further from the truth.

I am sharing this today, on my 20th anniversary, out of immense gratitude for the life I have today. A girl like me shouldn’t have ended up like this – but I am so very grateful that I did. I am also sharing so other people know that recovery is possible. I hope that by sharing I can plant a seed for someone that needs to know that I used to live exactly like they are…but that “I don’t have to live like that anymore.”