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 and welcome to this naked mind podcast. I am so excited because one of the amazing things that

can happen with this naked mind in the process is that sometimes you have somebody who reads

material goes through this stuff and just takes it on in such a degree that they want to go

forward and just spread it into the world. And so I have one of those amazing people here with me

today. Welcome Debbie. Thank you for being here. Oh thank you so much for having me here. I was so

excited when I got the reply back that you wanted to do the podcast instead of me right out my

story. So it was awesome. Oh yeah so great. So Debbie like I know a little bit about you and

your successful career and where you've gone and that what you're doing now but I'd love for you

to just sort of start at the beginning. Where were you at before you know when you when you

when you wanted to to change things? Who are you? Well actually I had this relationship with alcohol.

It was just calculating the math before we got on here for 41 years. Wow. Because I started drinking

when I was 18 and I decided that it was no longer fun in my life when I was 59. So that's kind of

that's kind of my journey when I first started it. It was you know at 18 it was fun. It was a

way that we unwound. We did think that when I was 18 it was legal. So and I was kind of thinking

about my actually first experience with alcohol and it was a quite interesting experience where I was

in high school and we had just finished this test that we had to take for high school to graduate

and then this test we had to do. So we all went to this area that as kids we called it the mermaid

because you would go there because that was on a lake was the empty lot on the lake and on the sea

on the wall it's really not a called sea wall because it's a lake but anyway the wall there they had

it had an imprint in it of a mermaid and so we used to go there and hide kids the parents couldn't see

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