In this episode:
This episode isn’t just about recounting childhood memories of me stealing money for food; it’s an exploration of how writing can serve as a potent tool for healing. I discuss the cathartic experience of writing about one of my childhood stories and how it helps untangle the deep-rooted issues that often lead to substance abuse. By embracing the lessons of our past, much like the Sankofa tattoo on my arm symbolizes, we can pave a way for genuine recovery and a brighter future.
Resources:
Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Classes, and Workshops
Six-Week Writing for Healing Program – Reduced Registration Through March 31st!
Mother Hunger Book Study – Starts March 30th
Study: Greater self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism in severe alcohol use disorder
Transcript:
00:19 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hey, everyone, for this week’s episode, I actually wanted to share a bit of some writing that I started and abruptly decided not to finish just because I felt like not using it anymore, and I’m giving myself permission to just kind of randomly share it. However, this piece of writing was definitely cathartic for me, and so for any of you who are just looking for opportunities to do storytelling of your own, I encourage you to sign up for my six week writing for healing program. We are starting back up in June and I have discounted pricing through the end of March, through March 31st, before the prices go up to full price. So please sign up. If this is something that you have been kind of sitting on and hesitating to do, I hope you take this episode as an opportunity to be like oh, maybe I should go ahead and write. So, anyway, I’ll go ahead and now read what I have, and I hope that you resonate with it in some way, shape or form. No one is looking.
01:18
I thought as 10 year old me pulled $3 bills from the envelope mommy used to hide cash. I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and quietly dialed Waming Kitchen’s phone number. Waming Kitchen was the quote unquote ghetto Chinese spot in the neighborhood I grew up in. The chicken wings were to die for and everyone in the community crowded inside to place orders from behind bulletproof glass. I, however, was too young to be allowed to go out on my own, even across the street, so I had to sneak in my delivery orders and a loud Chinese accent. I heard a woman say you know, hello, waming, how can I help you? My voice quivered as I whispered in response hi, can I get chicken wings and french fries with hot sauce and ketchup? I then gave our address, snuck down the stairs and waited for the lady’s son to show up on his bike with my delivery. As if it were a drug deal, I slipped in the money, hoping that none of the neighbors saw this illicit transaction. Then I crept back upstairs to my room and rushed to eat so I wouldn’t get caught. Once finished, I sealed the food in a plastic bag and hid it until I could throw it out in a trash can, far from my mother’s sight. I felt like shit Stealing from my mother just to get some food. What kind of person was I?
02:39
I continued these same behaviors, though, over the years, and eventually they transferred over from food to alcohol. I remember, in 2020, battling my addiction hard after my boyfriend’s death by overdose, and sneaking out of my sister’s house to grab a secret booze delivery, then trying to hide the bottle so I wouldn’t get caught drinking in her home, after she explicitly had asked me not to do so. I was lost. But here’s the thing everything has a point of origin, right, and the timing of my addiction to alcohol goes back to Brooklyn in the 1990s.
03:15
Drinking, or any addiction for that matter, has a root cause that is outwardly shown, obviously, by the individual’s abuse of a substance. But, honestly, addiction itself is a symptom of something more profound. We can address the symptoms as much as we like. We can make all the attempts to abstain from alcohol, drugs or other problematic behaviors. Still, if we keep ignoring why we are escaping life in the first place, we’ll never be able to fight our addictions.
03:41
When we stop drinking, many of us are often left with the question what now? You need to look at your past before you move forward. I have a tattoo on my arm which is a rendition of the Sankofa symbol. Sankofa originates from Ghana and the symbol is a bird that is moving forward while holding a piece of its past in its mouth. The idea is that successful movement into the future requires taking a part of the past with us In recovery. Our past does not define our future, but coming to terms with the root cause of our drinking in the first place and taking that knowledge with us is what will let us fly forward as the Sankofa does.
04:25
This notion of looking back and digging deep is also counterintuitive for many of us as people with complicated relationships with alcohol and other drugs. We flee from memories and feelings to function by drinking or engaging with other mind-altering substances. We force the memories of our past far away from our stream of consciousness, often because they are so painful. We become masters of compartmentalization and we lock away the parts of ourselves that we find inconvenient to face. We fail to realize that if life will keep putting us in situations that will repeat themselves until we gain and apply the knowledge that we’re meant to acquire, I’m going to repeat that we fail to realize that life will keep putting us in situations that will repeat themselves until we gain and apply the knowledge we’re meant to acquire. Until we do, we will fall into things like the repetitive cycle of relapse. I know because my own relapses led me to be hospitalized eight times. I was hospitalized eight times for stays ranging from three days up to five weeks because I continuously avoided addressing the core of my symptoms.
05:34
As I previously stated, the root of my drinking is in my childhood. I will not sit here and state that I had a terrible childhood because overall, I didn’t. For the most part, everything, or a lot of things, were fine. Everything was not fine, but most things were fair enough. Most days I remember them as uneventful or routine or structured. I had hardworking immigrant parents. I was raised in a two-family home in Brooklyn alongside my sister, sophia, who’s 12 years, my senior. Growing up, I did well in school and I never got in trouble. I never lacked any essential needs. My housing was always stable. We always had food.
06:15
Some of my favorite memories include my dad, who was not a reading and writing fan, taking me to the library weekly. I would go inside and select all sorts of books that would stand out from the shelves, and I loved books like Goosebumps and Sweet Valley High. But I also grabbed some educational content because my mother liked to review everything I would read and I wasn’t allowed to only read for fun. She wanted me to read for academic purposes and I want to read for fun, so together we made it work. I was into sharks history, and so I mainly borrowed nonfiction books about marine life, biographies and wars yes, I know it’s incredibly random, and occasionally I would grab something in Spanish to maintain my literacy there. And again, my parents did the best that they could to take care of us and listen. I say this often because it is critical for me to not reattach myself to old pain that I have already worked on releasing. I have to remind myself that I am always healing from this part of my story, because the thing is that as I grew my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, it did fuel my strengths, but it also birthed the void that I would desperately try to fill throughout my life.
07:27
As I wrote earlier, I did well in school. I was a model student, both in conduct and academic performance, which definitely made my parents happy. I loved seeing how I could lift their spirits whenever I brought a good test score home. I would beg them to attend parent-teacher conferences, just so that I could see my mom’s face light up as my teachers told her all about how great I was. Their praise lit a fire in me right when my parents had something good to say after a parent conference. It would just light me up, and so doing well in school was the perfect means to that end.
08:03
My education was a non-negotiable to our family. My parents could not access adequate schooling in their respective countries, contrary to what is commonly taught about Cuban education. My father and my mom, though she was great at math, she didn’t go past the fifth grade in Costa Rica. So I was their American dream, and at an early age it meant being the best student. I loved praise for the work I did well at school because it would spill into our home life. I would hear my parents talking about how smart I was whenever they spoke to a family member or friend on the phone or in person. Everything was lovely about the recognition I got from my parents.
08:41
Until now, as an adult, I understand that that was the only thing about me that I ever got affirmations for right, and so as a kid I put the two and two together not consciously right, but just sort of subconsciously that my measure of value and worth. It was conditional and it required me to put up a performance of being a model student, which I took that with me into my womanhood, and being a model employee, right, the teacher of the year, et cetera. Like I learned at a really young age that many benefits come from good performances, and so my perfectionism was born. And what’s even wilder is and I’ll put this in the show notes that recent studies show that individuals with alcohol use disorder can display perfectionism as a trait which made perfect sense right as I became that high achieving professional. Once I was no longer a student.
09:35
And here’s the thing for all the praise I received for being an excellent student, I received an equal amount of criticism through fat shaming for my weight. I was an overweight kid, so much so that I remember when my third grade teacher had to measure each student’s height and weight in our class in third grade, when she saw how much I weighed because I was over 150 pounds this woman chuckled and she said whoa, you’re a little heavy, aren’t you? The fact that I am 39 and writing this today shows how I will never forget how uncomfortable that made me, and after that moment I swore I would never make anybody else feel that way and as an educator, I have vowed to never make a single student of mine feel how that teacher made me feel in that moment. But then here’s the thing right. Like in my family’s culture, being direct or outright mean was acceptable, no matter how painful it was for the recipient to hear this critical commentary. Also, being fat was something that nobody wanted for their daughters, so my parents, especially my mother, did their best to quote unquote help me by continuously fat shaming me. Right, but like here’s a news flash, you can’t shame people into changing their behavior.
10:51
In my mother’s eyes, I always ate demasiado, meaning too much. Right. Whenever I was hungry, she would get so outwardly angry at the fact that I wanted to eat otra vez. Right Again. In Spanish, I can’t tell you how often I heard por eso es que está como está. Right. In English, that means that’s why she is as fat as she is, which is something my mother stated whenever I served myself just about any portion of food or dared to have a snack. I hated family gatherings and still resist them in adulthood, because my weight was always the first thing that relatives commented on and my parents did nothing to defend me. My father stayed quiet and my mom actively joined in the conversations about my body. I got so confused whenever someone in my family had something to say about weight in my food, right, I couldn’t wrap my mind or my head around the fact that, like I enjoyed food, but at the same time, I was getting in trouble almost every damn time I wanted to eat, I developed shame for the first time, but I didn’t understand what it was that I was feeling. As a grown woman, I know what it is right.
11:57
Brene Brown states that shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love or belonging. Right, so, and here’s the thing with shame Shame, it’s a powerful feeling that can be tied to drinking. Right, I mean, there’s several studies that link shame and drinking. There was a study done in 2015 that actually showed that there was an increase in shame. That increased shame in fifth graders led to earlier drinking as teens. And then, if you look at college students, there was a different study that showed that students who experienced shame when they thought that they drank more than their peers would actually then go ahead and drink more as a direct result of thinking that there was something flawed with them. Right and again. I’ll put these studies in the show notes.
12:45
So the fat shaming really led me to think that I was not worthy. Because I thought that I was not beautiful. I had internalized this false belief that I was less than everyone else and I always felt that if I could just eat less and get a little bit smaller, that I would be more acceptable to my parents and my family. My mother, maybe more boys would like me at school or I could get to wear nicer clothes. But I could never manage to eat less and as time passed I ate more, but in secret. From the age of 10 until last year, as a 38 year old, I have literally spent my entire life on a diet of some sort and I vividly remember you all.
13:25
The first time someone called me beautiful, it was my sophomore year of college. I was sitting on the floor of my friend Stephanie’s Columbia University dorm room. I went to Barnard. Barnard is a part of Columbia University. Well, I dropped out. You know, spoiler alert alcohol in college not good, but anyway.
13:43
We were getting ready to order, you know, some burritos when this guy named Earl, who was this incredibly handsome friend of mine. At the time, he just abruptly turned to me and said you’re one of the most beautiful people I know. I mean you all. I was stunned. I just quietly smiled and said thanks, but inside I thought what the hell are you talking about? Growing up, my parents, especially my mother, never said such things to me, so why would I suddenly believe those words from someone else as a young adult? At that time, the only thing that made me feel good about myself was my academic performance or food. Alcohol had not yet entered the chat, and so if I couldn’t be beautiful, I would be smart, and when things felt heavy on the inside, food and eventually alcohol would be there to provide some temporary ease. And so that’s pretty much where I abruptly ended it. Again, it was. This was just a draft of something I was starting to like reflect on, and it was really cathartic to get this out, and so, again, I just wanted to share it with you.
14:51
A reminder my six week Writing for Healing program will be on Monday night starting in June. Early registration discount is offered through March 31st, so I so hope to see you in this class If you’re interested in a book. Also, I am starting the Motherhunger book study, starting on March 30th as well, so check out those opportunities. And, of course, as you know, I always have life coaching available as well. So thanks so much for listening, sending you all the love and appreciate you for your time today. Hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast, but also go to my website, bottomlessdeseobercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes to one-to-one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomlesstosober.com. See you then.
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