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 Laura. Welcome, Laura.

Thank you for inviting me.

That's great. So why don't you take me back to kind of the early days, maybe your first drinker?

Well, I'll see that you know, I was one of those kids that has my first pictures with my first sips of beer because it was so cute,

dressed in my later hosin in Wisconsin at the October fest parade. So I definitely had my first sips when I was like a baby.

And I was raised in a culture where people drank a lot because it was Wisconsin and it was just part of the fun of being from Wisconsin.

It was that you got to drink a lot of beer and you're like baby like baby like for sure. I mean, it was one of those things too.

If I was helping my dad with yard work and he needed a beer after he mode the lawn, I could have the first sip if I went and got the beer.

Just it wasn't it wasn't taboo at all. It was just something fun that everybody was a part of life like drinking cool.

I was a part of being a kid. Absolutely. Yeah, everybody drank beer and I didn't have a lot of people in my life who are

like alcohol that I could say, but it was just that their tolerance was very high and they drank a lot.

So when I got to middle school, I experimented with alcohol and would drink like shops in the basement at a sleepover and sneak that and get really wasted because that was way different and better in some way than beer.

It wasn't like the typical beer because beer was all around and that would have been easy to have, but the sneaky thing to do would be to sneak the harder stuff that the older kids would get for us.

And I would say that laid the foundation for a very dysfunctional relationship with alcohol because it was binge every time from the very beginning.

There was never any hanging out at a party having a cocktail, anything like that. It was just like hide it, chog it, get wasted, act stupid and forget everything that happened like every time.

So doing that on weekends throughout high school definitely developed some type of nasty habit of just thinking like this is fun or where you kind of is it hard to remember.

I just remember that it was expected. That's just what people did. That's just what teenagers were supposed to do to hang out with people that were older, cooler.

Or accepted, it just made sense to do that. I didn't really question it. I don't remember wondering if feeling like crap was good for me. It just happened. It just it just was the way it was.

And I don't I don't remember caring much that I felt terrible, terrible and would go to practices and have to get picked up the next morning from sleepovers just totally shot.

Parents didn't ask any questions. I don't think they really knew if they did. I don't know if they cared. I think they might have thought that was just part of any kid is trying stuff. I wasn't getting in trouble with the police. I was not getting in trouble with school administrators. I was still playing my sport.

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