My sobriety date is October 18, 2015, and today my life looks almost nothing like the life I was living when I took my last drink.
I was raised by a single mother, and from the outside, my life looked pretty good. I was an honors student, graduated high school with all honors, and went away to college on a scholarship. But underneath all of that was a young woman desperately searching for acceptance, attention, and belonging.
I didn’t pick up my first drink until I was around 16 or 17, but I believe I drank alcoholically from the very beginning. One of my first experiences getting drunk ended with me drinking an entire bottle of Absolut by myself at a house party and landing in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. Looking back, the signs were there long before I was willing or able to recognize them.
My parents divorced when I was seven, and my relationship with my father became increasingly strained as I got older. The day after I graduated from college, we had a major argument and stopped speaking. That estrangement would last for 20 years. I also found myself repeatedly drawn to unhealthy and abusive relationships, constantly looking outside of myself for the love and validation I didn’t know how to give myself.
In my early twenties, I was introduced to drugs. What started as recreational weekend partying quickly became part of my lifestyle. My first husband was a club DJ, and we lived deeply in the nightlife and house-music scene. I left good jobs to work in bars, and for years my life revolved around clubs, alcohol, drugs, and relationships.
Then, in 2008, everything changed when I witnessed my best friend’s fatal car accident. I watched him go through the windshield of his vehicle, and after three days, I was there when he was taken off life support. I had no idea how to process that kind of grief, so I did what I knew how to do—I drank and used more.
My family eventually intervened, and I received a full scholarship to Father Martin’s Ashley. But I wasn’t ready. I actually smuggled substances into treatment with me and was discharged after 14 days when another patient turned me in. I remember riding home feeling completely hopeless and suicidal.
Shortly afterward, I discovered I was pregnant.
My son became the reason I stayed alive, but becoming a mother did not cure my addiction. I drank and used during my pregnancy, and he was born experiencing withdrawal. Child Protective Services became involved, and I began raising him primarily as a single mother while still trapped in active addiction. I desperately wanted to be a good mother. I loved my son more than anything in the world, but I couldn’t consistently be the mother he deserved while I was drinking and using.
By 2013, my addiction had progressed significantly. I was arrested for forging prescriptions. Over the next two years, my life became almost entirely about survival. I was unemployed, selling medications that had legitimately been prescribed to me, living on food stamps, digging through dumpsters for things I could sell or give my son for birthdays and Christmas, collecting scrap metal, and doing whatever I could to make it through another day.
By the summer of 2015, I was facing criminal charges, on probation, and had another warrant. My electricity was eventually shut off. For months, my son and I lived in a home without power while I tried to convince myself that somehow, I still had everything under control.
On Sunday, October 18, 2015, my son’s grandmother refused to bring him home because she had learned about the conditions we were living in. In my mind, losing my son meant I had lost the last thing I had to live for.
That day, I attempted suicide by taking a collection of medications with alcohol. I fell into a coma and woke up three days later in the hospital. I remember being angry that I had survived.
From the hospital, I was taken directly to jail because I was facing 13 felony charges and had a no-bail warrant. I was placed in a suicide-watch cell and began going through a horrific detox from alcohol, pills, and other drugs.
And that jail cell became the place where my life began.
I was on the floor, shaking and withdrawing, and since I was already on my knees, I prayed what I believe was the first completely honest prayer of my life:
“If you’re not going to let me die, you have to show me how to live.”
God has been answering that prayer ever since.
While incarcerated, I began attending AA meetings. One of the men who brought meetings into the jail had more than 30 years of sobriety. I couldn’t understand why someone would voluntarily come into a jail on Thanksgiving to sit with people like me. He told me that watching other people get sober and being of service was one of the brightest spots of his sobriety.
Then he shared that his mother had died by suicide when he was seven years old.
My son was seven.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I understood what my actions would have done to the people who loved me—especially my little boy.
I went back to my jail cell, found a Meeting in a Pocket booklet containing the Ninth Step Promises, and wrote my mother a letter. I took those promises and made them my own. I told her that no matter how far down the scale I had gone, I was going to see how my experience could benefit others.
I had absolutely no idea then just how true those words would become.
After more than two months in jail, I was released before Christmas and before my son’s seventh birthday. My mother took both of us into her home. I had been evicted and essentially had nothing, but she gave me something much more valuable than money—she gave me the opportunity to rebuild my life.
At first, she told me I had only two jobs: get up every morning and make my bed and figure out which AA meeting I was attending that day.
So that’s what I did.
I went to 90 meetings in 90 days—and usually far more than one meeting a day. Calverton became my first home group. I found my first sponsor there, and the women in those rooms loved me until I could learn how to love myself. They didn’t just teach me how to stay sober. They taught me how to show up, how to be accountable, how to be a friend, and most importantly, how to become a mother.
My mom later gave me another incredible gift. During my first summer sober, she allowed me to stop working temporarily so I could focus on rebuilding my relationship with my son. We spent that summer kayaking, biking, swimming, taking little trips, going to meetings, and simply learning how to be together again. Recovery wasn’t only giving me my life back—it was giving my son his mother back.
At ten months sober, I accidentally walked into an AA meeting I had never attended before and met the man who would become my husband, Brian. My sponsor told me I couldn’t date until I had a year sober, so for two months we simply became friends. We went putt-putting, sat in diners, talked, and actually got to know one another.
We became engaged when I had two years sober and married in 2019, when I had four years. Brian is also in recovery, and our marriage has been built around sobriety, faith, spiritual growth, and service.
At five years sober, recovery gave me another piece of my family back.
During COVID, I spent a lot of time in online AA meetings, Big Book studies, and Step studies. I kept hearing people talk about either the gratitude they felt for making amends to a parent before that parent died or the regret they carried because they never had the chance.
After 20 years of not speaking to my father—and, as I like to say, 20 years of drinking and drugging “at him”—I finally understood what I needed to do.
In December 2020, I sent him a simple card asking whether he might want to get to know his grandson, his son-in-law, and maybe even his daughter again.
He called me almost immediately.
He came to my house that same day, and we have never looked back.
That relationship is one of the greatest gifts of my recovery and one of the most tangible examples in my life of the Ninth Step Promises coming true.
Recovery hasn’t meant that difficult things stopped happening.
In April 2020, my husband, son, dog, and I went hiking on the first beautiful day of spring. While we were out, we received a call that our house was on fire. We rushed home and ultimately lost nearly everything.
My mom reminded me of something that has stayed with me ever since: I’m really good at starting over.
Our family and community surrounded us. A GoFundMe raised more than $25,000, and eventually Brian and I were able to purchase the first home either of us had ever owned. What initially looked like another devastating loss became another chapter of restoration.
Today, life is once again asking a lot of our family. Brian previously received a liver transplant and is now waiting for another liver transplant. We have experienced multiple potential donor calls that ultimately did not result in surgery. Each time, we have had to walk through the hope, fear, disappointment, and waiting all over again.
With Brian unable to work, I’ve taken on a second job in addition to the full-time career I’ve had for nine years. Some weeks are exhausting. Some days our faith is tested tremendously.
But today I don’t have to escape my life.
I get to live it.
I stay grounded in Alcoholics Anonymous, in my relationship with God, in my family, and in service. Today I sponsor six women, and one of the greatest privileges of my life is being able to offer another woman what those women in AA once freely gave to me.
My story isn’t simply about quitting drinking and using drugs. It’s about restoration.
Recovery gave my son his mother back. It gave my mother her daughter back. It gave me my father after 20 years apart. It gave me a husband, and a marriage rooted in recovery and faith. It gave me a career, a home, friendships, purpose, and the ability to walk through incredibly difficult seasons without having to destroy myself in the process.
On October 18, 2015, I believed the people I loved would be better off without me.
Today, I know differently.
The prayer I screamed from the floor of a jail cell was simple: “If you’re not going to let me die, you have to show me how to live.”
More than a decade later, God is still answering it.
And the promise I claimed from that jail cell continues to come true: no matter how far down the scale I had gone, my experience can benefit others.
