In this episode:
Listen in as I discuss the challenging and sometimes very uncomfortable decisions I’ve made that led me to recovery and, ultimately, saved my life. The journey to recovery has not been easy, as I share about selling my beloved house and moving into my sister’s guest room in Tampa. I also recount how I had to quit my prestigious teaching job and switch to working an entry-level sales job, a decision that, although humbling, was crucial to my recovery. Oh, and dating? My recovery definitely made that interesting.
Tune in as I continue to shed light on the other critical aspects of my recovery journey, including the use of medication and the idea that no matter when and where we start on this path, we are exactly where we need to be.
Resources:
Feeling’s Aren’t Facts: A New Year’s Eve Self-Forgiveness Workshop
Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops
Transcript:
Hey everyone. So on today’s episode, I wanted to share a list of tough decisions that I have had to make to save my life and recovery. It actually comes inspired by Deisha Kennedy. She’s a financial educator. Her Instagram handle is at the broke black roll and she recently shared a list of tough financial decisions that she had to make that essentially saved her life, and so you know, I found her list incredibly inspiring. So I figured, you know what. Let me do some reflecting and list some of the decisions that I have had to make in my recovery to basically save my own ass. So, with no further ado, here’s that list, right?
00:42
So, number one, I sold the house that I was super proud of buying all on my own in Louisville, kentucky, and I moved into the guest room of my sister’s house in Tampa. So for me, giving up that house that I bought all on my own after having gotten divorced in 2017, it was a huge sacrifice, right? And for me, I grew up in a home where, culturally, we were taught to be quote unquote strong, independent women. Right that we don’t need anybody, and you know, my parents so often emphasize that I was supposed to go to school so that I wouldn’t need anybody else’s help. And yet here I was identifying the fact that I desperately needed someone’s help and that it really wasn’t good for me to live by myself, and I sold the house that was, in a sense, like a dream little house right so that I could move with my big ass dog into my sister’s guest room. But you know what? That allowed me to move into? A home that was full of love, a home full of people who were cheering on my recovery and a home full of support. So I had to make that really, really tough call to lose a space that was online, an actual piece of property whose value would have increased drastically since the pandemic right, and I gave all that up for the sake of having a safe environment. And so I wanted to recognize that that was one of the big decisions, that it was a hard decision but it was a necessary one.
02:10
Number two I quit my job as a teacher in a school that I loved, that was a part of a community that I actually felt really involved in and loved by and accepted by, except they didn’t know I was drinking, right. But I walked away from all that and I had even been named the state teacher of the year in Kentucky the year before and I walked away from all of that in order to start fresh, right. And so when I walked away from my teaching job I don’t talk about it often but like my day job for about two years in my early recovery, I mean I still consider myself to be early on enough, but you know, at the very start my day job was I was a salesperson for a tutoring company and I was an entry level salesperson for a tutoring company, making a little bit above minimum wage as an hourly rate right, going from being like state teacher of the year to that. However, it helped save my life right, because I walked away from a very demanding job that was absolutely exhausting, that, even with all the recognition that I had, I still felt like I struggled to feel successful when my students were constantly being measured against these like standards that were being thrown on us right, and I taught students with disabilities and even though they’re just as successful as their peers, it didn’t always show on tests, right, and those tests directly spoke. Not that they’ve directly spoke, but they directly affected me in terms of my evaluation as a teacher. So for me, I needed to let go of that paperwork, let go of the increasing demands, let go of all the stress and lack of appreciation that teachers overall deal with, even with my accolades again, for the sake of seeking my sobriety, right. So I just want to recognize that like if you’re listening and you’re wondering do I need to walk away from my job? I’m obviously not going to sit here and advise you through a podcast that you need to quit your job, but it is something that you might need to look at right Next up I have, when I started dating again, that I made it a priority to discuss my recovery from addiction very early on with any man who I decided to go out and date with, even if it felt uncomfortable, even if I remember thinking, man, I might miss out on a great opportunity here.
04:31
Right, I still went forward and shared and disclosed my status as a person in recovery because I knew that there is no way that I could build a long, lasting, long term relationship and foundation for a possible family with someone who didn’t know and accept my story fully. That is so important to me. It is so important to me especially because of the work that I do being a life coach for people in recovery, facilitating support group meetings in different communities, openly writing about my story and sharing about my story. There’s no way that you could be the man in my life if you don’t see all of that and see it as an asset. You’ve got to see my recovery as a win. If you look at me and you think I’m a liability, if you look at me and you feel like you don’t trust me, if you look at me and you have your own negative perspective of what recovery looks like, if you buy into the stigma behind addiction, then you’re not the person for me. Frankly, I wanted to know that really really fast. I always brought it up as quickly as possible so that I can clear the path. If you weren’t with it, then you could go and free me up so that I can meet somebody who would see me as a value because of my recovery.
05:54
Next thing on my list is that I accepted medical assistance and I used medication for the first one and a half years of my recovery. I had to let go of that idea that I could do this all by myself and I had to accept that it was okay to work with a licensed medical doctor who can prescribe me something to assist with what I needed, and then, when I no longer felt that I needed it, I worked in conjunction with said licensed professional and let go of the medications. Now, obviously, my journey with medication is not going to be the same as your journey with medication, and just because I have stopped taking medication does not mean that other people need to stop per se. There’s nothing wrong with taking medication long term. It’s just that, for me, I decided that I no longer wanted to take the medications, and the way that I looked at it for myself, in my personal experience, was, if you break a leg and you have a cast, you have crutches. You don’t keep the cast on and you don’t use the crutches for the rest of your life. That’s the way I look at it in my experience for myself. For me, I was, once I felt strong enough in terms of having learned alternate coping tools that had nothing to do with drinking. Once I took the time to design a life that I wouldn’t want to escape from, I figured that I would be good in terms of working on gradually releasing the medication under medical supervision, and I did. Again, not to say that that’s everyone’s experience, but it is mine, and it was very humbling efforts to accept that I probably needed some crutches, that I wasn’t going to do this without the crutches, because I had already been trying for 14 months and repeatedly failing.
07:36
The next big decision that I had to make in terms of supporting my recovery was actually making time in my schedule to show up for my recovery. I clearly was able to manage the logistics of making time in my schedule to drink every single day. That meant that, likewise, I could turn things around and make time in my schedule to go to meetings, to journal, to reflect, to work with Early on. I was in a 12-step program, so I had a sponsor in the beginning. Then eventually, it became mentorship and working with the therapists and coaching. No matter what was going on, I had to dedicate the time to my recovery the same way that I did with my drinking.
08:18
The next big thing that I did was assess my spending. Listen, I used to be such a spender when I drank. I’ll give you an example. I one time when I lived in an apartment before I had built the house, so this was probably around 2016, 2017. No, I’m sorry, I’m giving you the wrong year. Let’s say 2018, approximately. In 2018,.
08:43
There was one day that I had fallen asleep from drinking and when I wake up and I come to, my apartment is full of smoke and there is a man in my apartment who was one of the managing operators of the apartment complex in which I lived in. And apparently I had gotten so drunk and fell asleep to the point that the food that I had cooking in the oven burnt. My apartment had filled with smoke, the smoke alarm had been going off and I noticed neither the smoke nor the alarm. I didn’t hear any of it, I didn’t smell any of it. Nothing woke me up until that man was keyed into my apartment and woke me up out of my sleep, right. So if he hadn’t come in and if that alarm hadn’t like tripped up the security system, could a fire have happened? Absolutely, Could I have died in this fire? Maybe, right, I don’t know, but the fact that it took someone coming into my apartment and waking me up, and that being the only way that I came out of my my like passed out state, speaks a lot. So, anyway, the following day, I had gotten a certified letter from the apartment complex stating that I had a warning and that, if that incident happened again, that I would have my lease revoked and I would have to move out, right. That I would get oh my gosh, I wanna use the word evacuated, but evacuated is not evicted. There we go, that I would get evicted.
10:05
So when that happened, rather than stopping and saying, okay, this is a sign that I need to stop drinking, I became really innovative because people with addictions are incredibly driven people, and when I was still driven to drink and I decided to transition into using Uber Eats and other food delivery services so that that way, I could safely eat when I wanted to eat without risking burning down the house right, and risking burning down the apartment complex. To me, it was an innovative solution to a problem and so but here’s the thing I was on a teacher’s salary, right, and I was my own. I lived by myself, so I took care of all my bills. I was dealing with student loans, et cetera. So my credit card took a big hit because every single night I was ordering Uber Eats, that I was, first of all, barely eating because, as I was getting sick or with alcoholic liver disease, my appetite basically disappeared. However, I still would buy food because I felt like if I forced myself to take a few bites at least. That was doing something right. Doesn’t make sense at all. But that’s drunk math, so to speak. So anyway, over time, after about a year or two years of just buying so many Uber Eats deliveries and then I started doing alcohol delivery as well all those fees, all those charges really really added up and I took a big financial hit.
11:29
So when I stopped drinking, I finally had the courage to actually, like, look at my credit card account and look at my bank account and assess the damage that I had done. That was really hard, that was really really uncomfortable. I’m telling you, right To feel like, oh my gosh, I’m at a negative right, but that was. You can only go up from there if you stop drinking, and that’s how I felt. I was like, well, I’ve got to pick up the pieces financially, create a budget and get on a plan, and so and even to this day, like I have signed up recently for a financial literacy class, and so, as I used to dedicate so much of my money to alcohol, now what I try to do is save. I’m still working on learning about investing and then on occasion, I treat myself within reason to nice things. But I really had to completely overhaul my financial situation, and alcohol made me not give a shit about how much I was spending every single day on food delivery, which was not good at all. So that was a big decision. Another big decision that I had to make was I had to stop telling myself that I was bored every time. Things were quiet when I was drinking alcohol, especially so heavily.
12:44
After my divorce, those few years between my divorce and me quitting drinking, I find myself in romantic relationships with really problematic men. Right, and there was always drama, there was always a conflict, I was always saying something that I couldn’t remember, and then there was always gaslighting happening because people were telling me that things were happening that weren’t maybe necessarily true, but there was no way that I could really hold them accountable because of the fact that I was drunk all the time. So there was just so much chaos in my life that I had gotten accustomed to. And even when I dated Ian, who passed away, obviously we were both sober during the length of our relationship, but then, immediately after he passed away, I spent eight months just in and out of hospitals.
13:30
So for me, my life, I had just gotten used to this sort of like base level line of chaos that in sobriety it went away for the most part and then it was just really uncomfortable to sit with the stillness of some evenings. And sometimes that stillness would lead me to have thoughts that start ruminating and almost like I would just start looking for problems. So I had to really just stop and tell myself that when I was bored that there was nothing wrong with the stillness. Right To not confuse boredom for peace, or rather I think that’s the other way around, so not confuse peace for boredom. Then the last thing on this list that I would say that was really important for me to come to as a decision was to accept that I wasn’t behind quote, unquote anyone else and really embrace that where I was and where I am today is exactly where I’m supposed to be. Right For me.
14:38
There is a lot of ways that if you were to say, compare my personal situation to that of other peoples, it’s very easy to be like, oh yeah, she’s behind, right, because I no longer own property, so I had no home, divorced right, so in theory, behind there in terms of like having a marriage, having a family, no children. So again, especially I mean at that point, when I got sober, I was 35, now I’m 38. But you know, like there are all these societal markers that are external things that you can say that they’re look for is that I was missing and, oh, also being in debt, right. So I had all these things going on where I would start to feel bad for myself and I would start to internalize this idea like, dang, my parents came to this country for me to just be this far behind, right, and I have had to learn to let that go because, frankly, like, yes, I gave up my home, yes, I gave up a job that I was kind of like a little like angel rock star at, so to speak. Like, yes, I was in debt, etc. But you know what y’all like, I can go, eventually I could buy a home again, if eventually I can have a career that I want, right, I can fix my financial situation. But you know what I can’t do? I can’t recover any of that shit if I’m dead because of my drinking. So, at the end of the day, right, it’s like it’s about really just having that very realistic perspective that all those external things don’t matter if I am not alive, and recognizing that I am alive today because I was willing to step away from all those external factors to work on myself.
16:16
So, with that being said, I hope that this podcast episode helped you reflect a little bit on some of the tough decisions that maybe you have had to make, or some decisions that you are sitting with that you might need to complete or move into action. What are they? Feel free to reach out to me and let me know here. Just quick announcement on December 31st I am offering my Feelings Aren’t Facts workshop. It’s a New Year’s Eve workshop on self-forgiveness. It is only $15. If you are interested in work, doing some self-development work with me, I highly recommend it. It’s going to be a beautiful 90-minute workshop where we do some serious reflecting and some writing, where we just kind of set the stage for a beautiful start to 2024. So, with that y’all, thank you so much for listening and I will catch you in the next episode.
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