You're listening to This Naked Mind with Annie Grace.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to This Naked Mind podcast. And I'm here with Tammy. Hi, Tammy. How are you?

Hi, Annie. I'm doing great. How are you?

I'm great. Really good. Thanks for being here. I'm super excited. So why don't you take us sort of back

to the beginning in your journey? Where did it all start for you with alcohol? Okay. It's a pretty

long one. Kind of, I'm old. But if we start from the beginning, I started with alcohol. Okay, it's a pretty long one, kind of, I'm old, but if we start from the

beginning, I started drinking around 14 or 15 as a teenager in high school, just before high

school. I learned how to drink, you know, a friend of mine had her sister brought us beer,

and it was super exciting. I was on the beach, 15-year-old, talking to college guys, and wow, that was

super cool. So my first experience was really fun, even though it tasted disgusting. It just was fun.

I was kind of a shy person. My mom tells me I was a sensitive kid, a little bit of a crybaby,

a little bit emotional, dramatic, that kind of kid, kind of book nerd person. And so it immediately helped me right away with that anxiety that I didn't have a word for back then, and I only know now looking back in sobriety, that I was an anxious kid, but I, again, I didn't know the word for that butterfly's shaky feeling I got sometimes when I was with people, I was born into a family of athletes and

extroverts, and I just was a little bit different. I always felt a little bit different. So anyway, the beer did the trick. And as I moved into high school, I just, I was a binge drinker on the weekends. Like I think a lot of people start. I was a great student. You know, it was very important to me to get into good college so So I was, you know, 4.0, Honor Society, leaders on campus. And I did everything I was supposed to do. I tried really hard to be that perfect child for my parents. So, and I didn't really have, you know, my parents didn't really drink at home. So I wasn't, I didn't really have access to it. They might have had drinks at parties on the weekends, too. So it wasn't like it was an everyday thing in my house, but it wasn't weird, you know, to see them have a glass of wine on the weekends or my dad to have beers on the weekends. So I thought it was what I was, how I was supposed to be progressing. So I did that through high school and was able to skate through with, you know, okay um again looking back now i see more things that

you know i was lucky i did so many dumb things but i made it through high school as that weekend

binger and made it to college and it really just kept going from there it just only had expanded

because then we could start drinking earlier in the week and so the binging instead of friday

saturday started on wednesdays burgers and beer beer was Wednesdays at the fraternity houses. So it just expanded through college. The first year, I got in a little bit of trouble with my sorority and people saying they saw me drunk at a fraternity house. So not things, not good things were reported about me. So I did have some small problems, but it was

always manageable. And I got through it and I sort of would get myself back in order. And my classes, again, I'm still doing, you know, 4.0 and, well, not quite in college, but still very good grades in college. And, you know, and it was important to me to get good grades. And it continued that way. But when I got that call out at the sorority,

that scared me a little, so I calmed down for a while. But it always, there was always a reason to

ramp it up. And then at the time, I was in college at USC, which is in Los Angeles, and my father

was the head football coach. And it was a super high pressure situation that pressurized

each year because it's, at that time in the 80s, it wasn't like it is today quite as crazy

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