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 Kelly. Hi, Kelly. How are you? Hi.

Thanks for being here. So why don't you sort of tell us a little bit about yourself and take us back to kind of where drinking all started for you.

Okay, so drinking started affecting me before I actually began drinking. So my mom, my mom struggled with alcohol for a long time.

So when I was a little kid all growing up, there was a lot of a lot of issues, a lot of a lot of abuse, visible emotional abuse from from my mom. So that really affected me. And yeah.

And so I started experimenting when I was a teenager, 15, 16, you know, like speaking, lose from friends, you know, basement, their parents, collections, stuff like that. And I always, even when I first started drinking, I would always drink too much on a really cheap date.

I don't need, I don't need a lot. And I had, there was a lot of a lot of home over times.

So when I, when I went to college, you know, it's kind of the normal college routine of drinking on the weekends and maybe a little bit on the weekdays.

But some of my jobs in my 20s, I did a lot of travel and I did a lot of field work and seasonal work in and out of the country. So it was just like a lot of partying.

And it's just, it's just the culture like you, like you talk about so often, like it's just ingrained in our culture, like, oh, you know, what do you want to do?

And so I always had this like idea of basically like cognitive dissonance because I dealt with my mom because I'm so aware that I can't be like that. You know, that's not okay.

And so basically the whole time I was like kind of struggling with that.

And yeah, I would go for periods of time. I was never a daily drinker. I never got to the point where it was like I was drinking, you know, like X amount of units a night or anything like.

So I was like, well, you know, I don't drink in the morning and I don't drink every day. Sometimes the days that I didn't drink it was because I was kind of hungover and I was like, whoa, I mean, they are, you know.

And I didn't miss work, you know, like I'm very functional, very functional alcoholic, if you will, if I was to call myself that. But, so yeah, you know, in another school and different things that we're going to health care now.

So I made it through school just fine, you know, didn't drink much. And I got into, I was in a relationship.

And that totally crashed and burned in the alcohol is a factor of that.

And I didn't realize looking back, I mean, there's so many red flags, you know, there's so many red flags. There were so many times when like I could have two or three times, I could have gotten a DIY.

I had been pulled over and I'm lucky. I'm really lucky.

A couple of times where, you know, I probably could have died. I don't know.

So, you know, but I better clean myself, you know, clean my act up and like I shouldn't drink for a while or I ended up in the hospital once.

...