Tag: waco texas

Sobriety Advice from Gabby Bernstein

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A few years ago - when I was still living in Waco, Texas - I stumbled upon a YouTube video of Gabrielle Bernstein a.k.a. The Spirit Junkie. The more videos she posted, the more I learned about her. Seeing that she went from party girl to spiritual guru gave me hope. I hoped for the courage to talk about my secrets with confidence in a way that Gabby spoke about her addictions and other issues she was working through. I knew that one day I would be sober like Gabby, and could have a blog like Gabby. Maybe I could even inspire people with my story and help others…..just like Gabby.

Last week, I went to a speaking event in the Upper West Side led by…Gabrielle Bernstein. The scene was as fabulous as I could have imagined. I mingled with beautiful Manhattan socialites while the waiters silently offered us bite sized hors d’oeuvres. I turned down complimentary wine and champagne to order a sparkling water. While waiting for the event to begin, I sat still and felt the present moment. I sipped Pellegrino with a twist of lime from a wine glass, looked through my goodie bag of skin care from Philosophy, then glanced at the stage. Reality hit me -“You’re sober. You’re in New York City. You’re sitting in the front row, waiting for a Gabby Bernstein talk. You’re here to represent NY Yoga + Life Magazine”. Feeling empowered by the present moment gave me the courage to walk onto the empty stage and I visualize myself giving talks to a sold-out room full of New Yorkers with an appetite for personal growth.

Gabby went on to give an inspiring talk about hope and Manic Manifesting that had the crowd both laughing and crying with her candor. At the end of the event, I asked her a question:

“When you first became sober, what did you do in moments of weakness?”

Her advice to me, which also applies to any addiction, is “play it out”. She told me that when she wanted a drink, she pictured herself having that drink and what it would lead to - even the hangover, shame, and guilt associated with it. She’s been sober for 10 years and still struggles at times. When seeing friends drink champagne on New Year’s Eve, she remembered how fun it was and wished she could join - but she goes back to replaying the scene in her head and is quickly reminded how it would turn out for her.

This is willpower. This is strength. This is knowing that I’m better than a shot of whiskey. This is loving my body and rewarding it with a morning meditation. This is no longer waking up to pop the aspirin that lived on my nightstand, knowing I would need it to relieve a hangover. This is self-love and I know I deserve it.

I shared this advice with a friend of mine who is in recovery from an eating disorder. She told me that the “play it out” approach has helped her during moments of temptation. Now when she feels the urge to binge or purge, she visualizes the entire process. In her mind, she pictures the binging, followed by the purging. She even pictures the self-loathing that she knows will come later. This practice keeps her body and mind healthy while in the present moment.

Sobering up is teaching me more than I could have imagined. Talking about my personal struggle helps me empathize with the struggle someone else may be facing. My nightstand no longer has aspirin. It is now filled with journals, tea from the night before, and Gabby Bernstein’s book, Spirit Junkie.

 

Sober in The Big Apple

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In the Fall of 2014, I was living in The Woodlands, Texas and I gave up drinking for three months.  It was relatively simple; I just chose other activities instead of going out.  I soon got bored of sobriety and eventually went back to dating Jack Daniels.

Fast forward to Winter 2015, I’m living in New York City and I’ve committed to giving up booze for a full year.  The first three weeks were great because sobriety was fun and new.   Now, reality has set in and it’s pretty rough.  I’ve been sober for seven weeks and I’m struggling.  I’m struggling pretty damn bad, actually.  Abstaining from alcohol is easy.  I have no problem saying no to a drink or avoiding social gatherings centered around alcohol.  The hard part is a newfound awareness of my true self.  I feel like a teenager going through puberty.  I’m emotional. I’m stressed out.  I’m anxious.  For 15 years, my subconscious sent me to drink and do drugs to suppress these feelings.  Now these emotions are coming to fruition and it’s as if I’m feeling all of them for the first time. Sobriety wasn’t this hard when I did it last Fall in Texas.

It led me to wonder why it’s so much harder to be sober in New York City than it was back home in Texas.  I thought about it for a few days and I came up with these reasons:

Family Support

The first time around, I was living with my aunt in The Woodlands.  I had little stress and lot of family.  My dad and I were reconnecting.  I was finally getting close to my step mother and my Nana.  I knew that my mom and my Gammy in Waco were only a three hour drive away.  Looking back, I now see that love, support, and stability surrounded me in abundance.

While I’ve made some incredible, life changing friendships here, most of the people in my day to day life have only known me for six months.  They met me as a girl with pink hair who moved to New York City to write for Rolling Stone magazine.  In a few months, I’ve changed my hair color and my goals and have come clean about having a drinking problem.  I’m blessed to have landed at lululemon Men’s where I feel like I’ve adopted a group of brothers who look out for me.  And if it wasn’t for my roomie / ride or die / best friend / sister from another mister / saving grace,  Alisson - I have no idea where I would be right now.

City Life vs. Suburban Life

In the suburbs, I drove everywhere.  I would even drive store to store in the same shopping center.  When driving from point A to point B there was little distraction.  It’s hard to see inside of a bar when you’re focused on traffic.

Here, nearly everything I do is on foot.  I’m walking four miles a day and that’s not including my steps at work.  At the end of the day when I’m walking to my train, I pass bar after bar.  Inside, people are laughing and having fun while singing along to songs that I love. They clink their glasses and celebrate whatever brought them out that night.

This.  F***ing.  Sucks.  I just turn up my TED Talk podcast and keep walking.

Social Experiment vs. Personal Growth

My first attempt at sobriety last Fall had no direction.  It was mainly just something to do and proved to be an interesting social experiment.  I even cheated one time.  A friend bought a round of sake bombs for the table and I took one.  I don’t even like sake, or the feeling of guilt that I carried immediately after shooting it.

Now, with some focus and direction, sobriety makes sense for me.  I’m not even tempted to cheat this time.  I’m at a point in my life where I’m cleaning out what i don’t need.  Clarity has shown me that alcohol does nothing for me, except for clouding my sunshine.  This isn’t a social experiment.  This is personal growth.

Losing Control

In addition to being in recovery from drugs and alcohol, I’m also a recovering control freak.  In preparation for moving here, I was trying to plan out my New York City life from my home in Texas. I tried to line up a job transfer at a lululemon in the city.  It didn’t work in line with my plan, so I got frustrated and amicably left my store in The Woodlands.  I also joined rent.com and put $1,000 down on an apartment that turned out to not even exist.

Life in New York City is hard to put into words, but I’ll try.  In 7 months of living here, I’ve learned that I can’t always trust Google Maps, an unbelievable amount of people can fit on a train, and that celebrities are just people, too.  I have also learned that I have zero control over anything.  The only thing I can control is my behavior.

 

 

I love New York even more now because it’s taught me patience - in a way that I could have never learned anywhere else.  It took me moving to the craziest city in the world to realize that I was missing and craving peace.  Without this realization, I may have never taken on this challenge of SobrieTea.

 

My Life as a Waco Bartender

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When I was 17 years old, I was expelled from high school for nearly overdosing in class and having Xanax in my bag. I was sent to an alternative education program where I cleaned up my act and received my GED. Shortly after, I got a job as a hostess at Slo-Poke’s BBQ Sports Bar near Baylor. I thought getting a job would be beneficial for me to start over and meet new people. I made a commitment to myself and to my mom that I would stay clean. No more weed and no more pills. I had no idea how formative that job would be; it was the beginning of an unhealthy love affair with a dark scene in Waco, Texas.

As I transitioned from hostess to waitress, I learned the cliques. The Good Kids were the Baylor students who works a few shifts a week and were only in Waco for school. They would go out occasionally, but nothing was more important than their school work. Then there were the Bad Kids. This clique’s mission statement was “Let’s Party!”. A lot of them were Waco natives who worked almost everyday and partied damn near every night. They also made fun of the Good Kids for leaving the bar early.

Needless to say, I quickly identified as a Bad Kid. We would take shots, drink beer, listen to music, and gossip about our managers. “Let’s get hammered” or “let’s black out tonight” were common phrases we threw around. We were SO COOL. I found that confidence and flirtation came easily with a drink in my hand. Before 18, I was partying in clubs, smoking cigarettes, and hooking up with guys. People wanted to be around me. I had tons of drinking buddies friends. I was finally achieving the popularity I was craving in high school.

A few months later, two co-workers needed a roommate. In my clouded mind, moving in with them “just made sense”. Finally being free from the reigns of living at home with mom, I had unlimited opportunities to make poor decisions. I was leaving work with $100 every night and I spent it as fast as I earned it. I ignored all responsibilities because life was a series of parties.

Before I knew it, my calendar was filled with excuses to get drunk: concerts, birthdays, traveling, bad days, good days, you name it - I was there and I was ready to party. At the time, I honestly didn’t think that I was doing anything wrong. I began to reintegrate smoking pot regularly, but I rationalized it since I still wasn’t taking pills. Denial taught me how to surrounded myself with people who lived the same lifestyle so I could justify my behavior.

I eventually became a bartender, spending a decade working in the Waco bar scene. I hopped from Slo-Poke’s BBQ Sports Bar to Cricket’s Grill & Drafthouse to Treff’s Bar & Grill to Diamondback’s Steakhouse to George’s Restaurant & Bar. I left each bar thinking the next one would have a better scene. The scenes didn’t changed and neither did I.

In this line of work, I worked with people from all walks of life. College kids who fell in love with a local Wacoan and stayed. People who got “real” jobs, but went back to bartending on the weekends because they realized that bartending is half the work for twice the money. Entrepreneurs who capitalized on this work environment to learn more about business. And those who turned bartending into a lifestyle and a career. All of those people were me, until I hung up my bar tool at age 28.

While I left the bartending lifestyle behind, I established a consistent presence on the other side of the bar. I loved the scene; the smoke, the music, the people, the smell - it all felt like home to me. After moving to New York, I began to find comfort in other environments. I noticed that book readings, coffee dates, and yoga classes were on my calendar in the spaces where I used to plan my excuses to drink.

Looking back, my experience with alcohol was never healthy. I grew up knowing that my grandfather drank himself to death and my father (now 10 years sober) looked to alcohol to self-medicate his depression. For some people, that family history would steer them away from booze for good. For me, I had the classic case of “it could never happen to me”.

It did happen to me.

 

 

candyland

Where it all Began

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Alcohol and I crossed paths when I was 15. We fell in love for a short period of time, but I soon left him for another love - drugs. My first night in the other realm was with my high school crush, James. At school we would talk about rock n roll and I would listen to him talk about his parties. James was the guy to know because he smoked pot with his parents and they let him have friends over to do the same. Since I was a child, I was fascinated with the 1960’s scene - Warhol, The Doors, Hendrix, Lou Reed. When James told me about his parties, I pictured a fabulous Warholian get away . One night, I finally attended.

When I got there, James gave me a tour of the house - including his room. Like his T-Shirt collection, the walls of his bedroom were covered with images of Jim Morrison, KISS, and Deep Purple. It was a step into the time machine that I’d been searching for. I anxiously waited for him to kiss me, but that never happened. He then led me into the kitchen - where the party was.

I vividly remember sitting around his kitchen table with a large group of friends; Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” was playing. The voices of those singing along amplified the room. Everyone seemed so happy, so light. In contrast to the heaviness I was carrying inside, I was attracted to the lightness of these people. Someone offered me a hit off of a joint and I decided to try it. To this day, I’ve yet to experience a feeling more freeing than my first puff off of that joint. As soon as my high found me, I couldn’t stop laughing. I was no longer thinking about the fight my mom and I just got into or the fact that I hadn’t seen my father in years. All that mattered was that moment, that song, and those people.

Shortly after that, someone handed me a Smirnoff Triple Black (feel free to judge me). I had just smoked weed for the first time, why not try my first sip of alcohol while I’m at it? That sip turned into several which turned into quite a few. I don’t remember much else from that night, but I can picture that scene at the table like it happened yesterday.

I left that party with an insatiable appetite for being high, weed being my drug of choice. When that was no longer enough, I found Xanax and hydrocodone. Cocaine and ecstasy soon found their way into my system, as well. Nothing was more important to me than feeling comfortably numb.

When I was 17, I passed out in science class. I had been smoking pot throughout the day, and had taken five full bars of Xanax. I was revived and carried into the nurse’s office. Blurry images of my mom sitting and sobbing still haunt me to this day. They searched my bag and found a bottle of pills. I ended up getting expelled and had to get my GED through a separate academy.

I’ll dive much deeper into these stories throughout my blog posts. The point of me telling you this now is so you know where it all began. Now you’ll have a deeper understanding for my love of intoxication. When I was 16 years old, hanging out with James and getting high, I had no idea that was the beginning of nearly 15 years of self destructive behavior. I stopped doing hard drugs around the age of 22, but that only led to me drinking more.

I somehow made it through those harsh years of sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Despite it all, I have zero regrets. My obsession with this lifestyle taught me how to live for the moment, travel the world, and gave me the balls to move to New York City. It took me moving to the craziest city in the world to learn how to slow down.

I’m grateful that I lived through this so I can tell you my story while sipping chamomile in The Big Apple.