You're listening to this naked mind with Annie Grace.

I'm going to this naked mind

naked mind podcast I'm here with Allison. Hi Allison how are you? I'm doing

well how are you? I'm really good. So good to see you. So why don't you sort of take us to the beginning in your relationship with alcohol? Where did it all start for you? Okay, well, I'll start by saying I was the middle of five girls growing up in a very athletic home in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.

And so there was this mentality of that my parents was always like,

work hard, do good, be good.

And the training that we all did,

we all started in swimming.

And then by age nine, I was begging to get out of it and switch to gymnastics.

So eventually I think I wore my mom down long enough to allow her to allow me to switch. So I think that where alcohol came in was through all this training I was doing.

I got this sense of like what is this all for. I'm a blip on the radar in time and space and I'm doing all this training and working really hard and what's the purpose what is all of this for and so it sort of intersected with like a spiritual

sort of collided with also experimenting with drinking and of

collided with also experimenting with drinking and I met my high school sweetheart then and so

drinking and so drinking and socializing kind of became a way of it was kind of an outlet to have a little

bit of fun in my life and then and at that same time I had this sort of renewed sense of purpose because I was

questioning is is God even real is he real in life, like what does my life mean? And so I feel like all those answers came,

but I was still doing life and I was still 17 and 18 years old and but with this kind of renewed sense of purpose I I ended up earning a four year scholarship to a division one school where I spent four years doing

gymnastics and kind of same thing.

You're training 25, 30 hours a week and I mean you're making good friends and

teammates and all of that training sort of got punctuated when we'd have this these months and months of training and no drinking

and you're in this you know alcohol saturated you know college alcohol saturated, you know, college environment and at the end of the season, you know, we would just it was just like this blowout where we would celebrate and you know, get you know, drink too much and you know, you know, drink too much and you know and all you know all those all

those things and so that's kind of how I I used alcohol for socializing but also as stress relief because it just felt like the pressure was

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