If Journey Out of the Bottle can help even one human who's suffering like I was, that is my goal!

That they can truly know and embrace that life will be better without alcohol.

I suffered for so long. It was always an underlying, nagging feeling in my gut, knowing that alcohol was the problem. When I tried to blame my hormones, when I tried to blame a relationship, when I tried to blame, “Oh, maybe I have adult ADHD,” the suffering that I was ensuing and ignoring — that alcohol was the cause of it — went on for years, and it was daily. Sometimes most of the day. This knowing and desperately trying to tamp that down and make it something else was debilitating. It was such a waste of my precious energy.

Journey Out of the Bottle can be a beacon for other women to realize that there is another way outside of A.A. — hanging on by your white knuckles, living a punitive baseline, miserable existence without alcohol, no friends, no social life, boring. I truly, truly thought my life would be miserable without alcohol. That is what is pervasively communicated to us in the most subtle, destructive ways — that alcohol is there to be the social lubricant, that it's there to be the connection, glamorous. I truly believed that.

And don't get me wrong. I did have some amazing connections and some amazing, fun times. However, I believed that I could not have those fun times without alcohol, and I think that's the big difference — that we believe it's either/or, that there's no in-between. That if I don't drink, my life is going to be a miserable existence. That I'm going to have to go to A.A. to not drink, that I'm going to have to now call myself an alcoholic because I don't drink. And my friends aren't gonna like me. I'm gonna be boring. I'm gonna be ostracized. I'm gonna have to do these 12 steps and create more reflections on all the things that I did wrong, all the people that I hurt.

And don't get me wrong — there's some aspects, but for me, it was really being able to now access the things that were deep inside of me that I was hiding from — not realizing my full potential, not living my best life, not following my dreams, doing things that I did not want to be doing because societal conditioning told me that I had to be doing those things.

So I've come to realize that my drinking really was to almost dumb myself down, to ease the pain of not living my best life. And alcohol was feeding into that. It was slowing me down. It was weighing me down. It was depressing me. It was making me dumber. I was putting a substance into my body that I knew spiritually — somewhere — like, “Oh, it's causing me to not sleep well. I'm sure this is impacting my liver.” I'm waking up at 4 o'clock, 4:10 every morning with this racy brain and horrific anxiety. And I just thought, “That's normal. Oh, everyone my age is not sleeping. We're all waking up with anxiety. The state of our world is in complete disarray, and so of course I'm stressed.”

And I did not realize what fuckery alcohol was causing to my entire body, mind, and spirit. So of course I wasn't realizing my potential. Of course I was not feeling energetic. Of course I was procrastinating. And my self-worth and my self-trust had fucking tanked. Had tanked. Because every day that I didn't listen to my inner voice, didn't listen to my inner knowing, and would drink instead of realizing that, hey, there's something better for me — I just didn't know. I did not know.

And I don't think that many people know. I think that we all are taught that if you don't drink, there's something wrong with you. You can't handle it. Look, everybody else is drinking. This clearly isn't the problem. The problem is you. If you aren't feeling good, if you aren't feeling your most energetic, loving, motivated self, then there's something wrong with you.

And i

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