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. I'm here with Carolina who is going to share her story with us today. Welcome, Carolina. How are you?

Thank you, Annie. I just want to say what an honor it is to be here. You know, your work just transformed my life and I'm so excited to share my story.

I'm so glad that you're here. Awesome. So what did you take us all the way back to the beginning for you? Where did it all start?

Yeah, sure. So I think I started regularly drinking around my senior year in high school. I definitely tried alcohol maybe before that, but that's when it really became kind of a regular constant in my life.

And I grew up really shy and pretty introverted. And so when I found alcohol, it was almost as part of my identity that I felt like I could never have expressed before.

In high school, I had a few friends, but I wasn't, you know, a grevious kind of person. And I started going out with my friends of parties and I just found that I could be this completely different person with alcohol. I could make friends easily.

It really helped to kind of build up my self-esteem. And that's kind of when it started to be like a regular in my life. And then I went to college. I went to UCLA, which was kind of a bit of a party school.

And there I really kind of poned in on this kind of party lifestyle. I was still, you know, very much into here.

And so I needed a bit of solitude and a bit of me time. And so I found myself, you know, during the day being on my own and reading and studying and then, you know, humans still need connection.

So I would use alcohol as that solution to go out at night and making friends that way and talk to people and be more sociable in that sense.

And throughout college, I kind of started gravitating towards like a crowd that really, really liked a party. And it started becoming, you know, a really constant kind of thing from every single weekend.

And then by the time I graduated, I was 22 and I just had absolutely no idea how to be an adult.

I graduated around the time of the recession and I just wasn't sure what to do for a job. I went to grad school right away because I just didn't really have any idea.

I just got out of a really tough breakup. And so I just never formed any kind of like healthy coping skills. And so along with, you know, going out a lot and stuff, I started to really bring the drinking home to and just didn't have any other kind of healthy coping skills to go through this kind of period of

transition and being kind of on my own.

Yeah.

I would actually say that I was drinking the most I ever have in my life around 22, 23 and kind of really veering towards that problem-drinking territory.

But likely a confluence of events happened around 24 that really kind of pulled me back into the next phase of my life that I'll call the moderation illusion.

And I met my husband. Now he's my husband and he was, he liked to drink too, but he just didn't drink as much as I did. So that really kind of toned it down.

Of course, I would only drink when I was with him. I wouldn't drink alone. I just wanted to, you know, portray myself as a very kind of normal person to him.

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