A Sober Reflection - Trigger Warning

​I am 286 days alcohol-free. It’s wild to be here and I am beyond grateful. 

My sobriety has brought up a lot of emotions: loads of anger at first, then a lot of introspection. I’ve contemplated relationships - past and present. I have examined my people-pleasing and self-sabotage tendencies. I have looked at how I treat myself and my body. It’s been an interesting ride, let me tell you. 

Having a sober mind is the greatest gift I have given myself. 

Today I awoke around 6:00am, as I usually do and have been looking back over my life. It’s wild how many lives I feel like I have lived and how it still bugs me when people try to tell me things I already know, simply because they walked in on this chapter of my life.

I have been and done a lot of things.

CHILDHOOD: 

I remember being a kind child. I watched over my cousin when storms came in, trying to calm her fears of the thunder and lightning. I remember petting bees in my yard and eating clover nectar. I remember the day my baby sister came home. I watched from the window as mom emerged from the car with her wrapped in a blanket. She was the most precious thing I’d ever seen. 

I looked after my siblings the best I could, even when certain adults made that impossible. 

TEENS: 

I was a rebellious teen with a soft heart shielded with a steely stare and stubbornness that made me seem very hard. I drank, I smoked Camel cigarettes, I used hallucinogens, took any pills I could steal from my parents, and smoked weed. I loved hardcore and grunge music and wore more flannel than I should have and the baggiest clothes I could find to hide my body because I had an eating disorder. I also had a long-distant boyfriend. The long-distance part was nice because it didn’t have to be so serious, but also because it kept away the boys at the school I attended. I wasn’t very interested in having boyfriends and instead preferred to read, write poetry, listen to music and be in the woods behind my house. I went to rehab my sophomore year because my mom found my journal and learned I was doing drugs. She, in return, threw out all of my punk and hardcore music thinking it was the culprit. I was also sent to a preacher who could supposedly help me. I think he felt sorry for me, really and knew I was just an angsty teen like many others. Mom did her best. I have no hard feelings. 

When I was 16, a thirty-year old man sexually assaulted me and was delusional enough to think we could be together. He kept calling my house until one day I finally told my stepdad and mom I didn’t want to talk to him. They took care of that. 

I dated a guy in high school who beat me up and would randomly knock me into the lockers like a rugby player. One day I had enough and decked him in my front yard. Mom saw it happen and figured he deserved it. I think she was right. I didn’t date him again.

At another time, I slept with a guy I hardly knew and because I felt so guilty for cheating on my boyfriend at the time, I lied to my friends and said I was taken advantage of. Not my proudest moment and this is the first time I have ever admitted this. He was a nice guy and didn’t deserve to be lied about. Luckily he never knew about it and nothing came of it except that I have been riddled with guilt for the last 33 years.

I ran away from home and lived on the river, where I had the magical experience of swimming with a couple of otters. Nature always had a way of being there for me when I needed support. 

Through all of this, I had visits with my Grandma who taught me to read Tarot with playing cards, the Ouija board, and tea leaf reading. I loved our visits. She seemed to get me. 

When I was about seventeen, one of my friends got shot in front of me while trying to buy crack cocaine. I had no idea what we were doing when I climbed into the car. I didn’t do crack or cocaine. They said we were going to the city and it sounded fun, so I went. He got shot in the front seat. I sat right behind him. We sped off and eventually pulled the car over. My friend got out and laid down on the sidewalk. I appeared very calm while my boyfriend at the time seemed very unsure of what to do. Someone called the police. I have no idea who. There were no cell phones back then. My friend laid on the sidewalk and told me he was thirsty. I immediately worried that he was having internal bleeding. All I had was a Pepsi, so I gave him sips of that. Later, when the paramedics came, I walked to the nearest wall and leaned against it. My legs shook violently under me until my knees gave out and I slid down the wall. Still later, I found myself at the police station with manilla envelops on my hands as they tested me for gun powder. There was none. The only gun I had ever shot was a .22 in my friend’s backyard and it was at cans and nickels, not people.

My friend didn’t die that day. The bullet stopped 1/4” from his heart. He did die later, however, another gun shot.

Same year, another friend shot himself in the head. Another, drunk and walking on the train tracks, was killed by a train. 

A year later, my best friend was killed in a car accident. 

To say my teen years sucked is an understatement. Most of what I went through, I brought on myself. As a matter of fact, one of the few good things to come out of my teen years was meditation. For some reason, one winter day I decided to meditate in the snow with bare feet and no coat. I wanted to see if I could sit there and be with the cold without it bothering me. I think I lasted fifteen minutes. It stuck with me and I remember taking time to meditate throughout the years. 

I got pregnant with my first son and had him when I was 19 years old. He saved my life. His brother came along the next year, while their dad was in jail. His birth further saved me from myself. As a matter of fact, it was the first few years of their lives that I stayed completely sober. I did still smoke, though I could no longer afford Camel cigarettes and opted for generics. 

When my younger son was 6 months old, I left their dad. I moved us in with my mom and got a job at a factory where I soldered terminals on back glass for a large car company. 

TWENTIES:

In my early twenties, I nearly died from internal hemorrhaging for reasons I’ll not share here. I remember saying, “I’m cold,” before violently shaking on the table. Last thing I heard was a doctor saying “I need blood STAT!” I remember waking to his kind, gentle smile and concerned expression. 

Fast forward to when I met an old friend from high school and we started a relationship. We lived in an old cabin out in the country. A cabin with no running water and only makeshift electricity that we probably stole from someone else. We heated the cabin with only a fireplace, which meant it as freezing every morning. I can still remember that bitter cold and seeing my breath in the air each morning. That said, in summer it was a wonderful place to be. We lived with Nature, in a grove of Walnut trees that taught me much about gardening. I got into runes, numerology, and Witchcraft. I even had my own outdoor altar, where I’d go out in my velvet cloak to be with the moon. Back then I also dabbled with calligraphy, making stationary for people I loved, I read lots of books and made quilts by hand. We swam and bathed in the creek and lived like a little happy hippy family. 

I’ll never forget the day I watched thousands of fireflies rise up in the field like fairy lights! Another Natural gift from God. 

It was during this time that I also got into yoga, essential oils, and natural living. I started to write more and began dreaming of writing a book. 

Still, my life was unstable and chaotic. I couldn’t hold down a “real” job and felt stifled in the only decent jobs in the area: factory work. I was flighty and had my head in the clouds. I had a lot of dreams and not a lot of focus. 

At some point, I met with a caseworker (I was on welfare at the time) and she lined me up with a job and told me I should go to the community college. Always eager to learn, I did what she said. For part of that time, I worked at the child’s support office, but then I re-assigned as an assistant to my Biology instructor at the college. I enjoyed it very much. Things were finally looking up. 

It was in my 28th year that I discovered red wine and everything really went downhill, except that I did get a scholarship to attend the University of Kentucky. My boyfriend and I broke up. The “Cabin Days” as I fondly call them, were over. 

THIRTIES: 

I graduated from UK with a teaching degree, got married to the guy I had mentioned who I had a long-distant relationship with (and who I cheated on with the guy I lied about). Great beginning, right? I got a job at a nearby middle school teaching Language Arts. Everything was great, except that I was quickly becoming an alcoholic. 

We started with sharing a bottle of wine every night and ultimately ended up having his and her bottles each night. If we went out to eat, we also had whatever we chose to drink there, and we always chose to drink. I was somehow managing a bottle of wine each day while also teaching, acting as department chair, cluster leader, and working on six committees at the school. We had a nice home and a happy life, in general. 

Like I did as a teen, I went to the woods or other Natural areas to get away and I’ll never forget yet another magical moment in Nature when I was in Berea hiking. I took a rest on a big boulder overlooking a wide vista. I was weeping quietly when twenty or so Monarch butterflies took flight all around me. Like the fireflies, no one else was around. It was just the butterflies and me. 

When I look back, I know that ex-husband was a great person and I loved him very much, but the wine killed our relationship - that and the fact that I never felt good enough for him. It was nothing he said, it was something I always felt. I always felt like I was trying to be someone I wasn’t…to be better than I felt like i was inside. with my horrible past, I always thought he deserved better. I clearly had a lot I needed to work on. 

We divorced in 2011. Last time I saw him, he was a very thin and tired version of the guy I married. From what I hear, he is now happily married and has a child. I am truly very happy for him. He deserves to be happy. 

I met my now husband in 2011…yes, while I was still married. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I guess the Universe had other plans. We married a year later; three months before our daughter was born. By then, my sons had moved to their dad’s to avoid going to the larger and less safe city schools where we lived and I was a mess without them. 

At 36-years old and with my daughter’s coming birth, I stopped teaching and decided to be a stay at home mom. I was strait laced. I even made all of her baby food. I was vegan for a long stint of time and then vegetarian. I got into herbs, supplements, and fitness, much to the chagrin of people I knew, who often made tongue-in-cheek comments about it. I made soap and essential oil blends, lotion bars, and bread. I practiced yoga on a regular basis instead of maybe a few times a month. I ran all the time, pushing my daughter in a jogging stroller. We even did a 5K and I won first in my age group - while pushing her in the stroller! I felt great. I was happily married. My sons, even though they were at their dad’s, were doing well and they visited me. For a while my oldest son came to live with us. Life was good. 

I was still drinking though and eventually red wine came back into my life in a major way. My husband and I didn’t get to the point of drinking like my first husband and I did, but we drank every day. 

If I could pick one thing that negatively affected my life, it would be red wine. The Red Devil. Truly, a toxin for me as I was slowly learning.

FORTIES: 

In my forties, something clicked with me. Perhaps it was peri-menopause, I don’t know, but the wine didn’t make me feel good anymore. My sleep sucked. The two glasses of wine that used to help me sleep had me waking every single night at 3am. I felt like death warmed up and looked like it too. Worse, it made me be short with my daughter and that hurt. 

I made it 6 months the first time I attempted sobriety. I was feeling so good but while on vacation, I was drinking NA beer in front of my friend and it’s like my “lame sobriety” was smacking me in the face…no, my alcoholism slapped me in the face and lied and told me I was lame for being sober. I was back to drinking before we got home. Back to daily wine drinking that same week. 

The next time I tried to get sober, it was harder. I lasted maybe a week….again, maybe a month…again, 90 days….the next time - one day. Let’s suffice it to say that it was not easy. 

During my forties, both of my sons became dads and I was (still am) a proud Gramma. 

We moved to a small town, where I finished getting certified as a yoga teacher. As I had described it to another local business owner, I wanted to open a yoga and botanical shop, with the idea being that I’d teach yoga and sell plants, herbs, and teas - all the things I loved. it didn’t last long. 

Another failure under my belt. 

After that, I began learning to tattoo, while I continued practicing yoga and teaching online. Tattooing stressed me out so bad that I drank more, ate shit food like everyone else in the shop, and gained like 20 pounds. I looked and felt horrible. I was in the thick of peri-menopause as well with insomnia, hot flashes and more. Finally, I gave up tattooing, thinking I sucked and wasn’t cut out for it. 

By the next year, I was a certified yoga teacher and started working toward my 500-hour training. Yoga had hold of me and it was a very good thing - a life raft, really, in the choppy water of mid-life. I focused on that and homeschooling my daughter. I kept the house, read lots of books, got back into crafting and was practicing yoga all the time, sometimes more than once a day. By now, I was teaching at a little retail shop in town and had a few regular students.

Except that tattooing wouldn’t go away and part of me hated living in the same small town I swore I’d never go back to. It was a thorn of bitterness inside me that I felt was festering. Being there brought up a lot of my past - things I had buried and hoped would just go away, but they didn’t. 

I’ll never forget the day I was driving my car. The night before, as most nights, I had had my 2.5 glasses of wine and I felt like shit. I had an intrusive thought enter my brain, “You could drive your car into a tree and no one would know it wasn’t an accident.” This terrified me, because my life wasn’t bad. I had a nice house a loving husband, three awesome kids and grandchildren. I was teaching yoga and life was good. If I couldn’t be happy with all this, how was I ever going to be happy? 

I kept thinking that the wine I was consuming wasn’t enough to make me an alcoholic and it shouldn’t be enough to make me feel so bad….but it was and it did. I realized too that I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to live. I didn’t want to live like I was. I was also afraid to get sober because I didn’t know if it would change me so much that I would want a divorce. 

But I knew I was going to kill myself eventually if I didn’t stop and I definitely didn’t want to do that to my husband or my children. 

TURNING FIFTY:

I quickly realized that being here in this town was part of my Karma. I needed to face things in order to truly live my life and to get sober. 

My last drink was April 10, 2025. 

It wasn’t easy. In 2025, I was a year post-menopause and my precious dog died of cancer. The next month, my cat passed. In October my dad passed. 

My anger and rage boiled over and out at a lot of people. I probably hurt some feelings and didn’t just burn bridges, but tore them down piece by piece before setting it all ablaze. 

But I look back on all of it at nearly 50 years old and see that it was all necessary. Ugly, awful, embarrassing….but necessary. 

I have made apologies. Some were accepted. Some were not. I’m okay with both. 

I have learned that I don’t need or want to be liked by everyone. That type of living had me emptying bottles every day. 

Now, as a sober, post-menopausal woman, I prefer to stand in my truth and my power. 

I don’t have it all figured out. I have been the worst of the worst and not-so-bad. Through it all, I tried my best. 

Through it all, I struggled and faced my own greatest fears, blocks, and hurdles. I fell down and got back up. I had to get to know myself and the world around me. I don’t trust people easily and I generally think people have ulterior motives, but I am trying. 

Without wine, my mind is clearer, my anxiety is much less, I no longer feel depressed and those intrusive, suicidal thoughts haven’t reared their ugly head since my last drink. I practice yoga every single day and have been getting to classes with other teachers to continue to deepen my practice and learn from others. As a teacher, I think it’s vital to remain a student - always. I don’t just practice asana daily. I read yoga books, listen to podcasts, practice the 8 Limbs of Yoga, and follow Ayurveda practices to bring in more of the science of Yoga. I teach yoga two days a week. 

In addition to that, I am tattooing again and loving it. I no longer have an internal crisis after every tattoo. 

I have a new grandchild. My sons have lovely girlfriends and are happy. 

My daughter is one of the most creative and unique people I know and I am still homeschooling her. 

My husband and I have a successful tattoo shop in spite of it being in a small town.

I have a wonderful circle of close friends and family and I am overjoyed by this. 

I have been a shit person at various points of my life, but I am here. Just shy of 50-years old, I finally feel at home in this body that God gave me. I am grateful to be sober. I am happily married. I am grateful to still be making herbal blends, oil blends, practicing yoga, crafting, gardening….all the things I have always enjoyed since I was a teenager and young adult, but dismissed as unimportant. What I realized was I wasn’t judging the things I was doing. I was judging myself. I never believed I was important or worthy, or okay-enough to exist. 

Well, I do now. 

Now, I send love back to that teen girl who was terrified and lonely. 

I send love back to the young mom who was clueless and scared. 

I send love back to the young married woman who never felt like enough. 

I send love back the forty-something teacher who was drinking away her concerns and crying in her walk-in closet every night. 

She did her best with what she had. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t anything I’d recommend to anyone, but it happened. 

My hope and prayer is that I can use what I have learned to carry it forward to others…as empathy, as examples, as a way to put myself in someone else’s shoes to understand and support their journey to Self. No matter how messy your journey is, there is always hope. No matter how many times you feel like you have failed, if you have breath in your lungs, there is always hope. 

There is always hope. Don’t give up.

Namaste & Blessings, 

Resa