I own it, a distant, not proud that was me, and when I face it a little dignity, not looking for excuse me, I just want to be free from power, weakness head on me.

Free, free, free, free, free.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the bubble hour where real people tell real stories of addiction and recovery.

I'm your host, Gene McCarthy. I write the blog on Pickled. I have been telling my story there since my first day of sobriety in 2011.

I tell my story there and I invite you to share your stories here. And today's

guest comes to us in letter form. Ella has been a listener of the bubble hour for a while now

and she found it so helpful that she wanted to share her story as well. Now she wasn't comfortable

coming on air and many of you feel that way.

I know you can understand that, but Ella took hours writing her story out for me and asked me to

read it for you on the air, and that's what I'm going to do today. So it's a little bit of a

different show, but she did such a great job explaining her story. I think you'll really

enjoy hearing it.

Something interesting about this episode is that Ella was pretty much a normie for all her life, as you'll hear.

It wasn't until she was older and it was actually retirement that triggered problematic drinking for her.

Now, if you're a younger

listener and retirement is far in your future you might think oh I can't

relate to this but of course you know by now that we can always relate to one

another and and to me it's really a story of how change triggered something that laid in weight.

And I think it's also a cautionary tale because I think there's a lot of listeners who haven't

quit drinking yet.

I know I just heard from someone not that long ago who said they kept drinking because

of the stresses of having

...