In this episode:
I reflect on my personal experience with addiction and how storytelling helped me after years of keeping my drinking a secret as a teacher. I share my viral op-ed article, which was published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, and got me on Red Table Talk. I touch on the fear and shame surrounding addiction, reminding you that if you ever feel alone, you’re not. I also discuss some resources to learn more about addiction beyond the disease model, which is frequently presented in treatment facilities.
Resources:
Black Friday Discounts on Programs at Bottomless to Sober
Recommended Reads:
The Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis
Transcript:
00:02 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey everyone, happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate. I’m recording this on Thanksgiving morning and I’m planning on making this go live the same day, essentially for the fact that I know today can be really hard for a lot of us. I have a history, a complicated history, with Thanksgiving myself, and I just wanted to make sure that I could help as much as possible whether I’m leading meetings, putting out a podcast episode, just creating different touch points for people to feel connected to other folks and so the cool thing, too, is that my sober anniversary will be on Tuesday, the 28th. It will be three years since I last drank, and it’s also going to be the anniversary of me publishing my op-ed article that went in the Louisville Courier Journal. That went viral. That will also be the third anniversary of that in the next two weeks as well, and so actually, I want to share that op-ed with you guys, because if you haven’t read it, it is a first. It was courageous as hell because I was maybe three days sober at the time that I wrote it. I got sober on November 28th and this went live in the newspaper on December 3rd. So to give you that quick turnaround of how quickly I knew in my heart that I needed to get my story out. And I’m not saying that you need to get your story out in the same format, but I do want to speak to the power of healing that storytelling does provide us right. It’s just that power of connection, the strength and breaking stigmas and breaking the shame that really can keep us locked in silence and trapped, especially for me as an educator. So I want to go ahead and read that and also give you that heads up.
01:33
A lot of you know that I teach a writing program several times a year. It’s the six week writing for healing program. Because of good old Black Friday, I’m like you know what, let me go ahead and do a discount on that. So I’m offering that at 50% off If you sign up through Monday, the 27th. You can do that on my website, bottomless to sobercom. Then the other program that I’m offering at 50% off is my New Year’s Eve workshop, the self forgiveness workshop that I’m holding. That one is only $7.50. And we’re going to do 90 minutes of some pretty deep work on ourselves, talking about different tools and strategies, so that we can start the new year loving on ourselves a little bit more, because, especially if you struggle with addiction or have a history of it, that self love is not the easiest thing to come about. So putting that out there, take advantage. Those are both live. Those discounts are live through the end of Monday, november 27. So just that heads up, and with that, let me go ahead and share my story with you all. And again, this is the type of writing that we would be doing in that six week program, whether it’s that you’re actually writing it to share it or you just want to get your story down on paper so that it’s not like on your chest holding you down right. So with that, my story is called my Darkest Secret.
02:47
A Kentucky teacher of the year share story of addiction and recovery, published on December 3 of 2020 in the Louisville Career Journal. How would you like it if I outed you right now to everyone on Twitter? Maybe I should go ahead and do that. At the time, a friend threatened in the middle of an argument to out me to the public. They threatened me with telling the world what my darkest, most painful secret was.
03:16
My name is Jessica and I’m a recovering alcoholic. For years, I’ve struggled to balance my life with my addiction. To cope with guilt. I worked diligently to be the best teacher, the best employee, the best at everything. Because it helped me sleep at night. I spent years at happy hours counting others drinks so I could pretend to drink like a normal person, while aching to go home to isolate and imbibe. I hid my disease from everyone possible.
03:47
The very idea of someone telling my story without my consent was terrifying. Fear was crippling. How would others think of me? Would I lose my job? Would my students and their families turn their backs on me? My family and friends? What about my mother? She’s always been so proud of me. My sister and I are her American dream children. I’m a first generation American. I grew up in one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighborhoods, excelled academically and later became a nationally recognized, award winning educator as a 2019 Kentucky State Teacher of the Year. What would my mom say to me if I was outed? I’m not the first in my family to struggle with addiction, though I am the first to be in recovery. My mother’s disdain for those relatives’ choices was always evident. Some have died, some live in unfortunate living circumstances. Would she use the same language she’s used to describe them to talk about me? Would she look at me in disgust In December of 2019, I was struggling so much under the pressure of a new position and teacher of the year responsibilities that I had to relapse.
04:59
At that time I came out only to my family because I spent the holidays in a rehab facility. My family was blindsided but thankfully, through everything since, they have always stepped forward and believed in my ability to recover. I remember returning from winter break sitting in a faculty circle. When asked how our breaks were, I immediately fell apart. I had spent my holiday hospitalized and couldn’t tell a soul in the room where I was or how I was truly feeling. I was so ashamed of who I was. I was so disgusted with myself. I thought I could not tell a single beloved colleague about the significant part of my life I have to struggle with daily. I felt so alone. I had not accepted that I was sick.
05:44
I continued with my sobriety journey, feeling isolated, knowing my family was far away. I hated that. When I needed my mother’s hug or my sister’s hand on my shoulder, all I could get was a phone call. I was able to lean on my then-boyfriend, as he was also in recovery and understood the daily work it took to get sober and stay sober. Then COVID-19 came and I’m going to pause for a second and just give you because I didn’t do it at the beginning of this episode content morning. I do talk about tragic death. So if that is not something that you want to listen to on Thanksgiving or whenever you are accessing this episode, I highly recommend that you skip this episode. Otherwise you may continue to listen. Then COVID-19 came.
06:37
As the virus reached Kentucky, I assumed we were going to have an extended spring break. I anticipated an excellent opportunity to catch up on work. I hoped to build further on my relationship, get some well-needed rest and have an excuse to order food from local restaurants. Quickly, the truth was becoming apparent. This quarantine was not going to end anytime soon. I began missing my old life. The quarantine shattered my routine that was so vital to recovery. This new normal that was encroaching became terrifying as the many restrictions further physically removed him and me from our support systems. We entered grocery stores, fearing infection, just to get necessities, scrambling to get essential items such as toilet paper.
07:26
Life became increasingly depressing for the two of us and he relapsed. He struggled, he cried tears of shame and guilt, tears that I had experienced so often. One morning he said he would run out to the gas station and he would come right back. He never did. I went looking for him at his apartment and knocked no answer. I called his phone. I could hear it ring, but he didn’t answer. I banged on his door. I yelled, but no response. I grabbed a fire extinguisher to beat his door down. A neighbor called the police on me and when they arrived and got the apartment door open, I heard there is a dead male.
08:16
Everything was a blur until the coroner let me in. I saw him lifeless and there went my sobriety. At that moment I thought my dreams of a future vanished, dreams of marriage in a family just gone. I was utterly devastated and horrified. I couldn’t have my family rush over to help me because of COVID-19’s travel restrictions at the time, and since then I had gone back and forth fighting the battle of my addiction to alcohol. At the time of writing this, it was early December of 2020. So since the spring of 2020 to then, I had experienced seven hospitalizations, with stays from three up to 35 days.
09:00
My summer of 2020 was a complete blurred wreck that almost killed me, and I would have accepted that fate at that time. However, each time I fell, I was able to get back up with other support and as the fog cleared, I tried my best to move forward. Yes, the grief was too much and I would fall again. Thankfully, covid-19 allowed for remote work, so I decided to risk travel to leave Louisville and stay with my family. I sought their help because I could no longer try to do this recovery work daily on my own.
09:35
Ever since I’ve started to feel better, I have had more solid days than rocky ones. Each time schools were possibly gearing up to return to in-person classes, I noticed that panic filled me. The idea of being forced to return to Louisville for work permanently triggered my trauma. I tried once to go back and it was a failed experiment. I knew that I narrowly escaped death over the summer. Going back to Louisville would have set me up to die by prioritizing my career, so I finally decided finally to truly embrace my recovery. I decided to let go of this beautiful thing called teaching that has consumed every part of my being, and resigned.
10:19
My last day is December 4th. Do I love Louisville Absolutely? Is it a place full of trauma for me? Yes. Did I ever think my 13 year career teaching would end like this? No, however, from darkness comes light.
10:38
Each day, as I go through this process of choosing life, of choosing to stay sober just for another day, I know I made the best decision ever. My dream is to attain long-term sobriety and I believe one day I will. But just for today, I choose to live in recovery until I fall asleep. I will fight my alcoholism daily. I no longer live in fear of anyone trying to out me. There were times this year I felt ready to die, but here I stand to tell my story of choosing to live. I will live a good life. I will have a family, find peace and still be of service to others, just not in the way I had planned. My mother has a saying in Spanish uno pone, dios dispone, meaning we have one plan, but God can have other paths to our goals, which I accept as my journey. Today, I stand proud of who I am and embrace all parts of me. My recovery will no longer be my secret. Instead, it is my story to share, to tell others that we all deserve a fighting chance at a good life, no matter how many times giving up feels like the only way out. I hope and pray.
11:53
If anyone gets anything out of my story. It’s the following. Number one death is never a solution to any problem we have, no matter how overwhelming it may feel. Number two always lean on others for help. We don’t have to suffer in life alone. Number three recovery is possible. If you fall eight times, get up nine, fight for your life. You are worth it. And number four, which I have changed my stance on since reading tons of neuroscience literature, but I’m gonna go ahead and read it.
12:31
Number four addiction regardless of the substance is a disease period. No one judges a person with diabetes. Don’t let anyone devalue you for your condition. 標. And that’s my story. So first I want to thank you for listening to it, right, and I’ve got to say that when I read that story back years after it’s been written, first, I’m grateful for progress, right, just in that last bullet where I say addiction regardless of the substance is a disease period, with such firm belief. At that time I was repeating what I had been taught in treatment facilities, and in the treatment facilities that’s pretty much the only model that they function off of, which is the disease model. And to be fair treatment facilities, they have to get paid by insurance companies, and health insurance companies aren’t paying for things if they aren’t medically necessary, right? So, yeah, addiction is absolutely going to be categorized as a disease. In order for my health insurance to pay for my stays when I was in treatment facilities and in my case, was I sick? Absolutely, I had alcoholic liver disease, right, my liver was shot. So, yes, I was sick, I was very, very sick.
13:51
But I do have recommendations for a couple of resources that have helped me sort of reframe how I look at addiction, and I don’t necessarily look at it as just a disease, right, for me, I look at it as an incredibly powerful habit that is learned through repeated actions having to do with the substances, right, and so I’ll put a couple of books that I do recommend in the episode note so that you can kind of check it out and make a decision for yourself. Right, and that’s the beauty of this whole journey, right, the journey starts when you stop drinking, and so when I wrote this, it had been a few days since I had stopped drinking, right, and to see kind of where my beliefs are in terms of what addiction is three years later, that’s really powerful. But the other part that, to me, is really powerful is just this assertion that I made early on, right, that, like I understood and I had come to accept that the path that I thought I was going to be on was definitely not the path that was meant for me. And as hard as that can be to accept sometimes and if you may be sitting there as you’re preparing some food or you’re getting ready to maybe just sit around and have the day to yourself, right, that acceptance is so, so powerful because it’s just the path of least resistance and the path of least pain. And so, no, I’m no longer a classroom teacher, right, like now.
15:14
In the daytime I work out of college, sort of like in an entry level position in a residence life job, right. And then at night I like spending my time coaching people, I spend my time running meetings and I do all this other really powerful, meaningful work. It took a lot of humbling, you know. My recovery definitely humbled me quite a bit because, yeah, I went from state teacher of the year to working at a tutoring company to now being like entry level at a college, and you know what it’s fine and you know why it’s fine Because I’m sober and I’m free to do whatever the hell I wanted to when I was drinking. Sure, I was at the top of my career in the position that I was in and I was miserable and I was unhappy and I was constantly drunk and sick and making myself sicker every day. So, you know, when I read this piece, it’s just very powerful to see the transformation that came since then.
16:07
And I really do believe that writing this piece was the springboard for me to really, or the catalyst for me to really just seize the different opportunities to grow myself and really help other people as well. And so, with that being said, if you have been thinking like man, I would like to write my story, right, you don’t have to write to publish. I wrote to publish in the newspaper, but you don’t have to right. Sometimes just getting it off of your chest, getting it out of your head, can be incredibly healing as well, and I have had lots of folks. You know this is going to be the fifth time that I run this class and in the first four rounds, like I have had plenty of folks who take what they write. Then they take it back to their therapist, right, like it’s an awesome opportunity to bring content back to the professional that you’re working with to really help you do a deep dive here, and so, again, I would totally take advantage. It’s a 50% discount, so it’s $62.50.
17:03
If you sign up through Monday, the dates are on my website at bottomlesstosobercom and you can see the different dates. If you can’t make any dates, the sessions are recorded and will be sent back to you. So just that heads up as well. And then again, like I said, we also are doing that 90 day self-forgiveness workshop on New Year’s Eve, right. So kind of give you some tangible strategies to practice when you want to beat yourself over that and you’re frustrated with yourself and you don’t want to practice self-compassion. You’ll have some solid ideas for what to do with that kind of energy when it comes up.
17:38
So with that, I am wishing you a happy holiday, if you choose to celebrate. Yes, this world is on fire and sometimes it can feel very hard to celebrate anything when you know you turn on the news or you turn on your phone and things are falling apart. I also want to recognize that things have always been falling apart. It’s just that the amount of access that we have to news and to media today is overwhelming, right, and so if a part of you is like why should I bother trying, you know, because the world’s gone to shit. My invitation to you is to think about what. Will you be contributing to this world if you’re drunk Right, if you look at what is within your spheres of control.
18:25
You can’t control what’s happening in the world you individually, but you can’t control not making things worse and you drunk you under the influence of other substances. That is, you not helping in any circumstance. And somebody needs you sober. It might not be somebody across the globe who needs you sober, but it may be a loved one, it may be a colleague, it may be a friend, it may be that person that loves to hear your shares on Zoom. They need you sober. So, even if you’re not able to do it for yourself for today, think about somebody who has thanked you for something recently and do it for them until you’re able to do it back for yourself. So, with that, have a lovely rest of your day, take care of yourselves, and I will talk to you on the next one.
m Thanks so much. Have a great one.
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