PART ONE | Blacked Out to Business Owner: My Road to Recovery & Entrepreneurship
I was only fourteen the first time I blacked out drinking: I remember parts of that night vividly, and others I don't remember at all. I remember the funeral. I remember the amber glow of the tequila that sat intriguingly on the table outside, and the taste of it as I took my first drink - and then another, and another. I remember waking up not remembering. Most memorably, I can still feel the stares of my family as they watched me, a girl who had just lost the most important person in her young life, and not knowing how to stop it; after all, everyone was grieving, and everyone was drinking How bad could it be?
Nobody could have known that this would mark the beginning of a toxic cycle of abuse that would last far beyond my adolescence and the pain of losing my grandfather.
The thing is, losing my Papa Tom was the first taste of real loss that I'd experienced. Even growing up around physical abuse, substance abuse, and everything in between, I had a pretty freakin' great childhood - my grandpa was responsible for a lot of that. Him getting sick and passing away all within a matter of months was such a core experience in my life, and my response to that was... alcohol. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how detrimental this could be to a young persons response to trauma. For much of my life after that, my first response to literally any situation, was to drink - and to drink so excessively that blacking out and not remembering became a completely normal part of my life.
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This story has many parts, but my REAL story begins much later; 12 years later, actually!
The day is July 25, 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many people were stuck at home with nothing to do but drink more than ever, I had decided a couple of weeks earlier that I needed to cut back on alcohol after getting in yet another brutal fight with my family and driving home drunker than I'd like to admit. (Now, the key word here is cut back; at that point I had still not come to the conclusion that I was a bonafide binge drinker. I was 26 years old, and it was, to me, still not that abnormal to be drinking to the point of blacking out every single week).
We drove from our place in Santa Rosa to Gualala for a little COVID getaway and spent a beautiful morning on the river after my fiance surprised me with my first-ever kayaking trip. I remember savoring every moment of that experience, including when we spent 20 minutes saving a bee from the water and bringing it safely to shore. It quickly became one of the best days of my life, even after what followed.
Of course we were starving after kayaking and having to walk it much of the drought-ridden way, so we blissfully made our way to get lunch at the supermarket in town. We sat in our car in the warm sun watching the ocean and eating our sandwiches, and I decided - hey, one little beer with lunch isn't gonna hurt, right? Wrong.
The thing about my alcohol consumption was that I didn't drink to relax or wind down, or even to just have fun - I drank to get drunk, and it took quite a lot at that point to actually get me drunk. I could put down a twelve-pack of cheap beer to myself and still be on my way to the store to get more. One was never just one, so of course, that one little beer turned into another, and another.... and another. Before the night was over I had drank enough to knock a grown man on his ass, and woke up feeling just as sick as what had become normal to me.
Now you might imagine that I would have regretted the decision I made, and at first I did... But looking back, that was the day that my entire life changed and I realized it's never too late to start over.
xo,
Kelsi | Beeyond Boutique