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 and I'm here with Ruby. Hi, Ruby. Hi, Annie. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Oh, I'm so excited you're here. So what do you kind of take us back to sort of the beginning for you, like your first drink or where did all all start?

Um, so I guess the first, um, drink was in high school. Um, I had a drink. Let's see, there was four of us girls and I think they stole some alcohol from from their parents.

All I remember is I was really sick and I did not like it. So I actually didn't really drink alcohol. Um, I wasn't a heavy drinker in high school or college.

I was always called the lightweight and I could only have like a half a glass of something and so, um, yeah, alcohol wasn't necessarily a problem for me until I started working in the wine industry about 20 years ago.

So that's kind of where I grew up though, um, in the wine country and my stepdad is a wine maker. So wine was kind of like its own thing. It was revered and um, it was something that you had a dinner every night.

It was kind of requirement and part of just living in this area. So yeah, that's my beginning.

So then when you went to work in the wine industry, what did that look like? What was your, what was your job?

I worked in marketing and sales as well as the finance. So I reported wine and sold wine worked in web stores. So, um, had to help people to buy the wine.

Sorry. I'm nervous. I realize I'm nervous now.

That's okay. Don't worry. Totally. That's fine. So, um, yeah. So what about that kind of triggered your own drinking. Do you think?

It just became something that I started doing every day. It became so ingrained with my identity. Every part of my life.

Friends, co-workers, everything involved wine. Every part of everything, including, um, I'm a mother, a single mother, but dealing with all my other parents, friends, and, um, you know, we would have play dates that we would drink champagne.

So it started becoming, um, just every ingrained in every single part of my life. Um, so it got, it was very difficult for me to try to distance myself from that. Yeah.

And so was there any, at that time, did you have any experience of feeling like, huh, I'm not really liking how much I'm drinking or was it just everything was pretty normal, pretty kosher.

I didn't think about how much I was drinking at all, and I did not think I didn't even really know about alcoholism or even wasn't on my spectrum of what drinking is for me.

Um, I thought an alcoholic or someone that drank to excess was like a bum on the on the street or something. You know, I just, just I, I had my job, everything was fine. So I didn't think anything about it.

Um, but my, my first addiction was, was food. Um, and, um, I actually gained a lot of weight so much so that I decided my solution was to have bariatric surgery.

So that's actually when I started to abuse alcohol was after that. I didn't realize that, um, people that have bariatric surgery, weightless surgery are very susceptible to, to abusing alcohol.

Um, and that's really when, um, all the sudden my tolerance was up, my, the amount I was drinking, um, increased drastically and rapidly, very rapidly.

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