You're listening to this am here with Colleen. Hi, how are you?

I'm really wonderful. Thanks, Annie. How are you? I'm doing really good. Great. Why don't you sort of take us back to the beginning and tell me what you know what what what role alcohol played in your life since the start.

Yeah certainly so if I were to be totally transparent, I had a major event that happened that happened to me when I was about 19.

I wasn't a drinker you know I was a good girl

the Catholic girl raised in a big family and you know waited to have said you know

I did all the like right things and I had this event happen to me which I won't go into detail but it was so profoundly

shameful for me that I I buried it within my essence and I threw away the key.

And I didn't realize this until years later,

in fact, it was my sister who one day in my 30s asked me what happened to me like she knew something that happened because I had told myself I'm never going to get married I'm never going to have kids and nobody's going to want me right and so I never spoke about it to anyone but what

happened is it really like affected how I felt about myself in the subconscious level of not loving myself. And so what I started to do, unbeknownst to me, is drink to mask that feeling. I felt that drinking, I'm a binge drinker, that's the type of behavior I had. And I'm really a very quiet person. I really love my alone time and so the drinking helped me feel more social, feel more funny, you know, that type of thing outside of my space because in my space I'm very comfortable by myself.

So I started, I went to college, did the drinking at parties, too much drinking,

couldn't get to class.

Actually, I went to college to play soccer,

so I really didn't have an agenda scholastically.

And so getting to class wasn't a big priority for me. And I had to drop out. So then, you know, my parents welcomed me back home, like probably thinking, oh my God, what are we going to do with her and so I bumped into a friend of mine another soccer player friend of mine who was commercial fishing and she calls me call and she's like, call you got to come fishing with me. And I was probably 26 something like that. And I was like, well, what is this? This was in the late 80s, right?

Factory trawlers, commercial fishing was just happening.

Nobody knew what the heck it was, myself included, right? So I'm like, yeah, sign me up.

I'm all about adventure and having fun. So I'm like, yeah, sign me up. I'm all about adventure and having fun.

So I pack my little seat bag. She tells me what to pack. I get on a boat. My parents dropped me off like I felt like kind of like a

kindergartener and And we wave goodbye.

And so off I go into the commercial fishing industry

and 37 years later, it's been my career

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