This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. Today I have Eric with me and she's going to tell her story.

Eric, welcome. So glad to have you here. Thanks. I'm excited about being here.

That's awesome. So why don't you walk me all the way sort of back to the beginning for you, like maybe your first drink or the early days and kind of where it all started?

Sure. So I, you know, I am a member of the this naked mind community and I see a lot of different people's stories and I'd say mine is different than some. I did not drink in high school. I'm pretty straight laced.

My parents, they drank, you know, I mean, I'm looking back on it and I can remember parties where I'm sure there was alcohol there, but it wasn't that apparent. It wasn't that up front and center. I didn't really think I've got a drink to be cool.

Well, I mean, yes, there was an association of drinking to be cool, but I knew I wasn't part of that anyway. So I really didn't drink until I went to college. I went to University of Illinois and pretty much from the get go.

You're invited to parties and there's alcohol there and it's good tasting alcohol. It's not beer. I even saw we something weird, you know, fruity. So definitely in college, I became quite the binge drinker.

I didn't drink every night. I was, you know, still pretty studious. I would drink on the weekends occasionally. There'd be like a Tuesday night or Thursday night, but mostly just drinking on the weekends, but excessively.

Puking usually. I mean, I had a reputation for throwing up. I would drink to excess and I would throw up. And I'd say after I graduated from college, that continued quite a bit. I went, I worked in a puria, a caterpillar and puria.

I feel like it's kind of a drinking town. So again, the binge drinking was able to continue. I didn't drink. I didn't buy alcohol and have it at home. So at that point, I still was kind of a weekend drinker occasionally. If I went out to dinner with a friend or something, we might have a drink or two out on a Tuesday or Thursday. But again, mostly been drinking on the weekend again and still throwing up and acting crazy and really think alcohol. Just let me let loose because I have been a pretty uptight person.

Still kind of a tight person. And but again, it was sort of contained to weekends more or less up until.

So then I fast forward many years living in Chicago and met my husband. I met him when I was still in puria, but he was a beer drinker. And you know, this is also the kind of point in time when it became very cool to like craft beers and go to craft breweries.

So that became kind of a thing. I started drinking craft beer and we would go to micro breweries and when we live in Chicago, there was always someplace we could go. So it just gradually started becoming more and more of a daily sort of a thing and maybe not every day. But it definitely was not contained to the weekend anymore.

And it continued that way until.

Okay, so it continued that way.

And we.

I mean, I felt like I lived in a suburb where there are a lot of state home mothers. I am not a state home mother.

Coming back to living out in the suburbs and being in a community where there are a lot of state home mothers and really became easy to see drinking as a way of handling all of your or avoiding your responsibilities, I think.

And it just sort of a slippery slope where I started drinking much more frequently. It was very, very rare. If I had, you know, wine that I would have a glass or even two, usually it would be three, sometimes a bottle.

So that sort of became much more of a pattern for the past couple of years. And then the, and we would have part of it and also became sort of a way in which I would determine who I would be friendly with.

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