Recovery

My name is Megan and I’m a recovering alcoholic.

THIS is my testimony.

Before recovery:

What my life was like…

My relationship with alcohol was a “ticking time bomb” as they say. The first drink that I can remember consuming was strawberry-flavored wine at some idiot’s house while waiting for my friend to finish her business, it was my senior year of high school and the idiot had graduated a year before my friend and I. I didn’t like how it made feel, tingly and on-the-edge. That would soon change shortly, in college. I would visit my friend at UC Fullerton on the weekends while working a full-time job and going to school in my hometown. I cozied up to the enjoyably warm, tingly feeling that I would get from downing hard lemonades while rocking out to Lil’ Jon, the crunk master himself. I had made a theatre friend at my college who liked to drink the heavy stuff, Wild Turkey, and I can remember one lazy afternoon being too drunk to function and not liking it one bit. I swore that I would never drink again. Shortly thereafter, it became an every night sort of thing with my ex in the late aughts into the twenty-tens. He liked to drink nightly so I joined in. Vodka, Rockstar power drinks, and an eighth of NorCal weed became the norm every single night. Problems in our relationship got harder to deal with. Towards the end of the nightmare, a Drunk-In-Public charge was placed upon my head after being found in my car, screaming in a Taco Bell parking lot with the key broken off in the ignition. If the car would have been on, that would have been a DUI. I felt somewhat lucky.

After leaving that douche bag, drinking became a normal thing after a hard day’s night working in a busy restaurant. A bar across the street was chosen as “The Spot”. I never knew what to order and didn’t want to come off as a lady’s lady in front of a work colleague that I was trying to impress so I ordered what became my usual:

A double shot of well whiskey & a pint of Bud Light. 

I became enamored with alcohol. I would drink alone, often, and long into the nights, just to feel something or perhaps not feel anything at all; it truly depended on the day’s events. I can recall one particular evening blowing out the speakers in my car, listening to Pink Floyd at full volume, driving over 100mph down a popular highway in the middle of town. I was fearless but also, pretty reckless.

Things didn’t work out with the guy I was trying to impress so I set my romantic sights on an old friend. Big mistake, huge. It was a complicated affair which forced me to move north where I licked my wounds and hid my drinking, which is a ginormous red flag in itself. I truly believe that I drank myself into the hospital by consuming those horrible canned hard ciders because three months after I arrived, I spent two weeks in the hospital. My diagnosis was “undetermined”. I left hopeful that I’d never have another drink or cigarette again. Problems with my Mum led me to drink and fall into the arms of another douche bag where I received official DUI numero uno. I thought that would “wake me up” but it didn’t. 

Working the graveyard shift, I discovered that it was okay to drink in the morning because that was my wind-down time.

I definitely had my issues in the past with alcohol but I believe that my real problems were exacerbated when my daughter was born. Surprisingly, I made it through my entire pregnancy without even a craving. I can remember the night I picked up a drink after it had been so long. It was my 31st birthday, I wanted to drink that night to “relieve” the stress of being a new mom and going at it without my male counterpart. I promised myself to stop the next day so I could continue to breastfeed. I kept saying “tomorrow, tomorrow”… but tomorrow never came because I never prioritized it. Then the cycle began: drinking every other night, then every night, then on my lunch breaks at a bar across the street. 2020 was a bad year for me only because after a drunken night of arguing with my Mum and just wanting to get away, I crashed my car of ten years into a dental office and received DUI numero dos. I couldn’t drive for a year and then when I did, I needed an SR-22 and my insurance sky-rocketed. I had to blow into a device just to start my car…

Loser-mode activated.

That STILL didn’t stop me from drinking.

In 2022, Wild Turkey was the first thing on my stomach, literally every morning. It was a real low point in my career as an “alcoholist”. Mum couldn’t handle my drinking anymore so I moved into my own apartment. Big mistake, huge! I don’t remember much of 2023, it’s a drunken blur for me: I remember working two jobs to support my habit (drinking and getting tattoos), being in the saddest Hoe phase of my life (at one point I was on six different dating apps), and a lot of drinking and going out to steal from major department stores. Pictures frames, cases of bottled water, fancy face wash… it was not my finest moment. I faced eviction before swiftly moving back into Mum’s, but I was still drinking, so nothing had changed.

Then the following year I switched to Black Velvet after realizing that I couldn’t handle being completely plastered all the time. I had joked with a retiree in a senior community where I worked when I asked him what he would like to drink. He mentioned Black Velvet and I had never had it. From that afternoon, I was hooked. By then, I knew where every liquor store was in town; when out-of-town, I needed to know where the nearest one was. I knew what times these liquor stores opened and when they closed. I knew how much time it would take to drive and pick up a pint. I knew how much a pint and an 12oz Red Bull would be and would essentially borrow money from future paychecks to support my habit. Pay Day advances are a huge scam and I was completely stuck in the cycle. My entire paycheck was in the whirlwind of disgust and shame so I continued to drink to try and forget.

The turning point:

What made me realize I needed change…

During my drunken phase, I calculated that in seven short years, I had had twelve jobs. In the same amount of time, I’ve moved eight times. This is not normal behavior. This is “drunken idiot trying to find comfort to continue drinking” behavior. All of my wrong doing was pretty obvious to me. I was living with a lot of guilt and shame but drinking to numb everything. I was on vacation in October with my Mum and daughter. After a rough night of arguing with Mum about whether or not I should go to a reunion that I coordinated (I didn’t want to go because I was feeling extremely self-conscious and no one was going to be there), I woke up the next morning determined not to be drunk anymore. I didn’t like constantly being inebriated and unsure of myself. I finished the rest of my whiskey, a mere shot and a half, chased it with water and told myself, “that’ll do”. I had finally had enough. After seven years of hard and heavy drinking every day, I was done. To be honest, it was my Mother that motivated me to stop. I don’t want my adult daughter to see me act like a drunken fool or resent me for making her do something that she didn’t want to do. She’s already seen enough and who knows how much she remembers. I told myself that I don’t want to be like that anymore. After the third day of sobriety, I finally started a countdown to keep track of how long it’s been since that last sip of booze while on vacation because I knew that I could finally take myself seriously.

Recovery today:

What my life is like now…

I am what’s called “California sober”. I have completely quit everything except for marijuana for anxiety purposes. Through my recovery with alcohol, I’m white-knuckling it, literally holding on for dear life. No AA, no sponsor. Just sheer willpower to give up something that was turning me into a bad person. It is not easy and some days I curl into a ball and cry myself to sleep. I’ve had plenty of days that have tested my willpower and I haven’t faltered yet. I smoke which brings down the desire to drink and get in trouble and do bad things. Thinking about it now, I’m quite possibly stronger than my Dad who requires all of those things to maintain his sobriety plus a romantic relationship. Instead of going to the liquor store after dropping my daughter off at school and waiting for them to open at 8am, I go home, have some caffeine and attack the day with gusto. It is not easy staying motivated and I still have days of complete failure and misery, but I’m not stuck in that pattern anymore, where I’m sad all of the time. I’m finally free.

What keeps me going:

What helps me stay sober today is thinking about how bad my life was when I was drinking all the time. Sure it felt good in the moment, but that moment was so fleeting. The amount of trouble that I was in (pay day advances, burning personal and professional bridges, lack of self-confidence) kept getting bigger and bigger and drinking didn’t solve a damn thing. In fact, evidence shows that it made things extremely worse. The amount of trouble that I could have been in if caught doing these nefarious deeds was also daunting.

I think of my daughter and how she doesn’t have to grow up with an alcoholic Mom anymore. I can pay more attention to the things in my life that matter, like family and my mental health. She can grow up knowing that her Mom cares about her and herself enough to change and conquer a shameful generational disease. My only hope is that she doesn’t take that first sip.

I look back on my behavior during the final years of my drunken stupor and am seriously so blessed that I didn’t get into any legal trouble from being drunk in public and committing petty theft or even grand larceny. I’m also very blessed to have not injured anyone while driving drunk because Lord knows it wasn’t just the two times that I was caught.

I’m so grateful to be sober because I can actually enjoy life and remember the commitments that I made to myself and others. I can get up in the morning and live my day rather than drink and pass out. I can be my silly self and not have to worry that someone thinks I’m drunk. I don’t have to worry about being pulled over by a police officer or making myself look like an absolute jackass on the internet. I can be myself and feel good about the choices I make because my judgment isn’t skewed.