Self-medicating with Alcohol

I used to drink around 15 beers a day, all throughout the day -because I wanted to maintain a two-beer buzz. I wanted to feel slightly tipsy all day, but avoid getting "out of control." Everybody drinks in different ways, and there's no one "right" way to have a drinking problem. We're all on the same team in sobriety :) -no matter how we used to drink, but today I'm sharing my story, in case anyone can relate!

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Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Sober Scoop. I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend. MDW, baby. I know for me, man, I used to love a three-day weekend. Memorial Day weekend, I used to love it. I loved having a day that was socially acceptable to drink all day long. On Saturday, on Sunday, on Monday, probably on Friday too. I just loved it. It was like I could just exist as my normal self without having to pretend. And I would be out at the Memorial Day barbecue on Monday, pretending that this was like a special occasion, or you know, why not? It's Memorial Day, three-day weekend. I'm gonna have a beer right now, even though it's 9 a.m. Why not? Let's make some mimosas, let's do it. Like I pretended that it was a special thing and like, woo-hoo! It's the three-day weekend when really that was my normal everyday. I just had to hide it from everybody else. Whereas on Memorial Day weekend, I didn't have to hide it. I didn't have to pretend that I was anybody that I wasn't. I could just drink in the way that I always like to. I guess I was still pretending though, because like I said, I was pretending that that was out of the normal for me. That was very much in the normal. But anyway, I hope you stayed sober this weekend. I hope you had a great weekend and enjoyed it so much, whether you were relaxing or working or traveling or whatever. I hope you had an amazing MDW. Today's episode, we are talking about the two beer buzz. And basically explaining why I didn't really dip into hard alcohol that much. Even though I had this severe drinking problem, I didn't drink that much hard alcohol. And that is a hard concept for people to grasp a lot of times. Or like, why wouldn't you just drink less liquid and have a shot of hard alcohol instead of consuming like 15 beers throughout the day? Like, that's crazy. People think that the way I drank was crazy. And in today's episode, I want to explain why I did that and like my reasons for drinking. Because everyone's reason for drinking is different. And for me, it wasn't that I needed to like be wasted every day. I just needed to feel normal. And that explains why I kind of needed a two-beer buzz all day long. So let's get right into today's episode. So I made a video about this on TikTok and somebody commented that there's a famous quote from Jim Leahy. Jim Leahy, is that how you say it? Jim Leahy, I think. Um I'm unfamiliar with this person, but must be somebody famous. He says, sober enough to know what I'm doing, and drunk enough to enjoy doing it. And when I read that, I was like, yeah, mm-hmm, that was me. Like, I talk about this in a lot of my other episodes, but I loved to drink through mundane tasks. I loved to drink while I was doing laundry, while I was taking a shower, while I was getting my nails done, while I was grocery shopping. I loved to drink during mundane tasks. I actually found it very funny to like bring a to-go beverage into places that I should not, like the grocery store, for example. I would like fill up a water bottle or coffee tumbler or whatever and just like browse the aisles, and I just thought it was so fun. I always thought it was fun to have a buzz in places where you should not. And that quote really describes my drinking patterns so perfectly because I didn't want to be drunk. I wanted to be sober enough to get through the life, get through life, get through the work day, show up to work, present in a work meeting, whatever I had to do, but drunk enough to have fun doing those things and like loosen my nerves. So basically, I would drink like 12 to 15 beers a day. And when I say beers, that's like a general umbrella term for Coors Lights, White Claws, uh, red wine, you know, beers, wines, and seltzers, ciders too. Those are kind of the drinks that I enjoyed drinking. I would drink 10 to 15 of those a day. And I drank them all throughout the day, from morning until night, because I just had a desire to maintain a two-beer buzz. That's kind of the vibe I wanted all day long. I wanted to just feel like my brain wasn't running at 100 miles an hour. I wanted to feel like normal. To me, drinking was not to get woo-hoo, we're wilding out, like, let's get drunk. No. For me, drinking was just to exist. That is really how I felt to the point where I called it my medication sometimes, because I felt that it was the only way to exist in the world. I also felt that it made me more creative, and I've always worked in creative industries, and so I thought I would be drinking and thinking of these like really cool ideas to bring to the table, video concepts, like I would be more loosey-goosey and fun on camera, and I just felt that it made me better at my job, which I now know that to be untrue. But at the time I felt like it made me more creative. I felt like it also made me more patient because I found that I was kind of high strung, and I think that's a lot of the ADHD symptoms speaking. Like, I am very hyperactive, physically, mentally, everything. Like, I think it's hard for some people to keep up with how fast my brain moves. And alcohol would just kind of slow me down, it would make me just care a little less, which let's just quickly take a side note and talk about that. Like, why would you want to do that? Why would you want to dull your sparkle with alcohol? I am who I am, and alcohol made me a lessened version of myself. It was this dull version. I wasn't, I wasn't as fun. I wasn't my sparkly self. I would just kind of fade into the background, and I wouldn't let my true self shine. And although even now in sobriety I get annoyed with my own true self, it is my true self. It's what I was blessed with, and I don't want to dole any of that with alcohol. I'm proud of who I am, and I love learning and discovering more, you know, characteristics of who I am. So I thought alcohol made me just a bit more tolerable. That's what I truly believed when I was self-medicating with alcohol. And we talk about the ADHD stuff a lot, and if you're new around here, I'm undiagnosed with ADHD, but I've done enough research and literally hacked my home with all the ADHD hacks that I can find. Um I don't necessarily need a diagnosis. I'm kind of changing my opinion on that, by the way. But that's the beauty of life. We're always able to grow and evolve and change our opinions. Um, but my thought for a really long time was that I didn't need any sort of diagnosis because I didn't want to go on medication. And I didn't feel that a diagnosis would change how I operated because I was already doing so much work on improving myself and improving my life through like behavioral tactics. I didn't feel like I needed the proper diagnosis. But anyway, with that out of the way, I have struggled with some ADHD symptoms. That's how I typically phrase it. And when I was drinking a lot, I felt that I needed alcohol to exist. Like sometimes the thoughts are so intense and intrusive and truly life-altering. That alcohol I felt just let me live a normal life. And this is something that I don't often talk about, but and I'm I'm not gonna get too deep into it, but I also struggle with some um OCD stuff. And if you are somebody who struggles with that, now that that's the worst of it all. Like the having to touch certain things, having to close things so they feel a certain way, click a certain way. I touch a lot of edges and corners of things. Um and I'll stand there for a really long time after closing the door and touch every edge of the doorknob that I need to. Um now the OCD type symptoms are the ones that are the most agonizing to live with, I would say. And alcohol would just shut up my brain. And I hate that it worked. Like alcohol worked to numb that. So with all this said, I was using alcohol just to feel like a normal human being in my head. But little did I know, when you self-medicate with alcohol, in the long run, you are making things worse for yourself. I know that now looking back, like it was helpful in the moment, or at least I thought it was, but that's kind of like a band-aid fix. It instantly makes you feel better. It's kind of like a crash diet or something. Like you might feel a little bit skinnier the next day, or like see your stomach being a little bit flatter if you eat nothing all day. And you're like, oh my God, it's working, you know, but that's not sustainable. That's not gonna get you where you actually want to be. And usually the fastest route is not the best route. So anyway, I would drink alcohol and instantly feel better. But little did I know, all that was compounding into a worse ADHD, OCD situation. And on, you know, the weekends when I'm going out with friends or golfing or whatever, or maybe in the evenings, that's when I would kick things into high gear a little bit more. I might mix in some shots here and there to speed things up. I might be looking to reach a state of like drunkenness, but throughout the whole day, drunkenness was not my goal. Especially as somebody who still held a job throughout my drinking problem. Um, I wasn't trying to be drunk for work, but because I worked remotely and I only talked to my colleagues like once every month on the phone or on like Zoom. Otherwise, we were just texting, I could get away with being a little tipsy, having that two beer buzz literally all day long. And that is what I loved doing. So people hear 15 drinks a day, that's crazy. I think people are envisioning in their head, oh, you get off of work at five, you get home at 5:45, and you drink for, you know, five hours before you go to sleep, and you're having 15 drinks, that's a lot of liquid in that amount of time. But if you take 15 drinks and spread it out from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., it's not that many drinks per hour anymore. Should I do some math? Let's do some math. Okay, I just did the calculations and I was having a little bit more than one drink per hour. And that sounds about right. Like I would say I was usually on a one course light an hour pace. Sometimes during lunch I would have a little more. Sometimes I'd take some time off and then have another one later. And then once I was off work, that's when I would usually kick it a bit into high gear and actually try to feel some, you know, drunkenness or whatever. But all this to say, somebody commented this on the video as well. I I don't typically call it alcoholism. That's not a term that I love because I don't think it's a disease. That's just my opinion. I think it's something that you fall into, and I don't think we're sick or diseased if we fell into that. But, anyways, they commented that alcoholism comes in a lot of different forms. And I totally agree with that. I think sometimes we paint this picture in our head of like somebody just sitting on the couch in their wife beater tank top with their belly hanging out and grabbing a Jack Daniels by the neck of a bottle and drinking it at 7 a.m. And the wife comes out and she's like, What are you doing drinking at this hour? And he's like, Why? Sorry, I got laid off again, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hard day of work, you know. That's how it's always shown on TV. And no shame if that's you and you've made it out of that cycle. But what I'm saying is if it's you or it's not you, a drinking problem can look so different for everybody. And I think, although maybe in reality I wasn't hiding it as well as I thought I was, um, I think that my two beer buzz, 15 drinks a day, slow maintenance buzz, is the reason that I was able to get away with so much. Because nobody thought that I was drunk because I wasn't drunk. I was slightly tipsy all day long. And I, like I said, I would drink in these really inappropriate situations where they're probably not expecting that I'm drunk. For example, I'm sure we all know this in the intense drinking community, in the sober community now. Um, I used to go into Total Wine and more right when they opened, or Bevmo right when they opened, because, you know, some liquor stores will open later in the evening, but Bevmo, I think, opened at like 8 a.m. So you could go right away instead of waiting for the liquor store to open. Um, anyway, I would go to those stores really early in the morning, and I'd be thinking, like, these people can't think that I'm already, you know, a little buzzed. How would they just would never think that, right? Because it's like 8 a.m. They don't expect that you're drinking. Maybe they do, but that was my thought. Um, maybe let me give a better example because you are at the Bevmo. Um, like when I went to the nail salon in the middle of the day, you know, I'm sitting in the nail salon at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I have a white claw in my cup that I brought in. They don't know that it's white claw. And why would they think that I was drinking? It's the middle of the day on a Tuesday. Of course, they're not gonna assume that you're drinking alcohol. That's so random. And that's like what I loved about it. I loved sneaking around and being tipsy without people knowing. I loved drinking in places where alcohol was not a thing or like not available, where other people are not drinking. It like brought me joy to feel a little buzz. And I think, I think I might struggle with boredom. Uh, I mean, as we all do, it's human nature. Um, but I think that I really love to make boring things more exciting for myself. And I think that's why I drank a lot and why I just wanted to be buzzed through literally everything in life. But another way that this has come out actually in sobriety, I made another video about this topic. Um, I'm currently planning a couple more trips. I think I'm gonna do one in like August, one in the beginning of January in the new year, and one in February. So I'm planning where I want to go. If you have any recommendations, of course, let me know. Um, but I'm brainstorming all these different places. And one place I really want to go is Poland because I want to see Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. And I know that is like such a heavy and dark thing, but such a huge piece of our history, and I think seeing that in real life would just be like so incredibly impactful and just crazy to see what humans were capable of. I mean, it's it's nuts and it's so heavy, obviously, but that's just something that's been on my list for a while, and that would be the main reason I'm going, right? But then I was looking into okay, well, I'm gonna stay in Poland for a couple weeks. I really love to travel somewhere and go to one country. For the most part, I like to go to one country and just like see everything in that country. I think it helps me remember the trip better too, so it's not like, oh, I went to Poland and Sweden and Austria and Germany, you know, then I'm getting everything mixed together. I like to remember trips by one country. I might be flying into Sweden, but the trip will be about Poland. Anyway, this is such a long-winded way to say this. But as I was exploring different things to do in Poland, what a wonderful country it is. It seems so clean, so safe, um, nice people, easy to navigate. It seems like a great place to visit, right? But for me, I feel like I have stretched my travel experience so far that like a trip like Poland or Sweden, for example, I'm like, okay. Uh I feel like I need to be more stimulated, more uncomfortable. I have fallen in love with going to these countries that are uncomfortable to travel to, where, you know, you're squatting in a hole to go to the bathroom, where you literally cannot communicate with the locals, you have no cell service for days, you're traveling on the back of a motorbike, you're getting invited in to have dinner with a local family, or I don't know. Like I just love these more rural places. I love seeing how all different parts of the world live. And I love culture shock. I love celebrating all the different cultures and seeing them with my own eyes, I feel like is so special. And of course, Polish culture will be amazing, but it's not that intensity that like Vietnam has or Uzbekistan is really high on my list, Kyrgyzstan is high on my list. There's these more out there places that I really want to go to. I want to go to Chad. I want to go to Oman, not going to the Middle East right now, though. Um, but in general, like I just love being uncomfortable. I love testing myself. I love being thrown into the mix and having to figure it out. It stimulates me in some way. I it makes me feel. And I think in a far-fetched way, it's kind of similar to how I used to stretch myself with drinking. Like I just loved to do everything under the influence of alcohol. And it started with just going out and drinking with friends, and then it's like drinking to decompress at the end of the day, and then it's like drinking happy at a happy hour, and then it's like earlier in the day, and then it's like all day, and then it's like morning drinking, and then it's like drinking just to exist. It's drinking at church. I used to bring a to-go cup into church, alcohol into church. I'm sure the Catholics didn't mind, but um I used to drink at church. That's a sin, for sure. Um like I said, I used to love to drink during laundry or just chores, like anything boring. And in a similar way, I feel like uh traveling to uncomfortable places just like scratches that itch for me. It like makes me feel something. It takes me out of myself. It makes me in a weird way, being uncomfortable calms me. If that makes any sense. Like my brain can shut down when there's so much to think about. Like I'm not stuck in one place with my thoughts. When you're bored, when you're doing something mundane that you don't want to, your thoughts are racing. But when you uh drink alcohol, that helps shut them off. Or when you are dropped off in the middle of Uzbekistan, walking through the markets on the Silk Road and trying to communicate with people who have never seen a tourist before, and you're just faced with all these challenges and you don't know what to eat at the restaurant, so you just try stuff and the discomfort brings me peace in a weird way. It takes me out of myself. And I consider that to be a somewhat healthy replacement. If that's my replacement for my alcohol addiction, like I said earlier, I don't like the word addiction or alcoholism or any of that, but you get the idea. Okay, I really loved booze. I loved booze. So, whatever you want to call it. Um, whatever if this is my transfer addiction, it's Is uncomfortable travel, then I'll take it. Because I do believe that seeing the world is like one of the meanings of life. We all have our own meaning of life, right? Like another big one for me is spending time with my family. And like those are kind of contradictory because I love just staying local and being with my family. They bring me so much joy. And I can't wait to have my own family one day and all that good stuff. But the other like meaning of life, I think, is traveling the world and seeing how different cultures live. And it just gives you such an amazing perspective on the world. I think it makes you view your everyday life and your job differently. It makes you appreciate what you have. It makes you um just communicate with people differently. It helps you understand different people in this world. So I love it. I love it so much. And like I said, not everyone has to love traveling. Um, but I love it. And I think that I'm like addicted to going to random places. And I'm like, how wild can we get? I am on TikTok and Instagram looking at like these crazy trips that now don't even seem that crazy to me. You know, I'm sure a lot of us have seen that train ride in the Middle East. Like I said, I'm not going to the Middle East right now. Um, but you're like on this coal train riding for three days with your mask on and stuff through the desert. It's absolutely insane. And now it's becoming a bit more touristy, but things like that where you're like, what in the world is she doing? That's what I love. I love to go to these crazy places and just see something that's so different from my normal. So that gives me a little bit of that hit. It gives me that buzz that I'm looking for. And it also helps to just have something on the calendar. Like that excites me too. Even though the trip is three months away and then the next one's three months after that, just knowing that I have a tripped a trip booked and something on the calendar brings me so much joy. Every day I have something to look forward to. I can like book a tour or a reservation or watch a vlog of that place and um get some recommendations, save some videos from Instagram. It just gives me something to live for. I know that sounds crazy. I don't have a husband or kids right now. Um, I'm sure they will be something to live for down the road. But for me, traveling and having these trips gives me something to live for. It gives me something to work hard for. It makes me want to sit on the computer and grind away, trying to make as much money as I can, work as hard as I can so that I can go do these things. It's like if there's no end in sight, if there's no break, no trip, I kind of feel like I'm in this never-ending cycle, and that's boring. We're getting back to the boring thing. I think I and so many other drinkers struggle with boredom. I think a lot of people drink alcohol heavily to deal with boredom or loneliness. Those are very close neighboring cousins, right? And I was all of the things. I was lonely and I was bored and I was unhappy when I was at the height of my drinking problem. And I think if we can fix those things, this is why I always say find your why for why you drank in the way you did. Because people talk about finding your why for why you're getting sober. And let's be real, that reason is probably screaming in your face. It is probably so apparent. Like the reasons for why I got sober are bam, bam, bam. I could list them out so clearly. It's it was obvious for me why I was getting sober. But the why that I think we need to focus on is why we drank in the way we did. So just gonna rattle off some things that are close and personal to me. A narcissistic relationship or an unhealthy relationship, an injury that you drank to get through. That kind of goes with the boredom thing. Because I was just sitting at home on the couch recovering from this injury. Maybe it's mental health stuff. ADHD, OCD, depression, whatever. Anxiety, this, that, the other. Maybe it's the loneliness. I was living in Los Angeles and I had like the guy that I was dating and one close friend, but I was lonely. I had no coworkers, I would work remotely. I felt empty. In the modeling world, when I was a model for a really long time, I felt empty. It didn't give me that sense of community. Everything was one one-off jobs. I didn't see the same people over and over again. I didn't have anybody to lean on, and it felt empty, and I was away from my family. So I'm just rattling off some ideas to see if anything relates. If you're kind of like, oh my god, that was me too. Like, we all have our reasons for why we drank in the way we did, and I think those are so important to identify. Was it the loneliness? Was it the boredom? Was it the bad relationship? Is it a job you hate? Is it a city you hate? Is it a partner that you hate? What is making you drink in that way? Is it social anxiety and you just go out all the time and need to drink to get through those social interactions? It could be anything. Mental health, like I said. Whatever it is for you, those things are what we need to attack. Because when we actually address the reasons that we drank so heavily in the first place, when we address those and work on those, the desire to drink just melts away. And for me, one of the best decisions I ever made, outside of sobriety, was moving back to my hometown. I always thought, like, I mean, I've told you already in this episode how much I love traveling. I love being away, I love being on the move. But when I moved back home to my hometown after a decade of being in Europe, Asia, New York, and LA mostly, it felt so grounding. I felt so whole having my people around me. The familiarity, that community, the loneliness went away. I also got out of that toxic relationship. And then I was in a good relationship after that one. I broke that off as well because I just had so many things I needed to work on, especially early in sobriety. So I just I was cutting ties where I needed to. I moved away from Los Angeles. I pulled away from the modeling and acting world in LA. I broke up with that super toxic ex-boyfriend, and then I broke up with a good boyfriend as well. And I moved to Washington State to be around my family. It cured that boredom and loneliness and just void that I felt that was causing me to drink so much alcohol. And then if we're talking about the mental health side of things, like I said, I haven't gotten a diagnosis and I haven't got gone on medication, but it's something I'm considering because I still do struggle with these things a lot. But what I have done to combat that issue is I have learned so much. Oh my gosh, I can't wait. I need to do another episode about all the different ways that I have hacked my home for my ADHD. The thing that I got most recently is a triple basket hamper. And I have one hamper for the bedroom and one hamper for the bathroom. Both places where I get changed in my house. And in each of those hampers, there is three baskets. Okay, it's like a there's dividers in it, and there's three sections. The one on the left is for clean clothes that I am literally too lazy to put away. The one in the middle is for dirty whites. The one on the right is for dirty darks or colors. And so when I get undressed to go in the shower or to get changed or to get into bed or whatever, everything I'm taking off my body has a place. There is no reason why clothes should be on the ground. Because if it's clean, I have a compartment for that. If it's dirty, I have a compartment for that and separated by lights and darks. And I don't have to carry my clothes that I just took off back into the bedroom to put them in the hamper. I have a hamper in the bedroom, I have a hamper in the bathroom. It's easy peasy lemon squeezy. Because that is something that I struggled with a lot was just throwing my clothes on the ground, or I would like place them on the bed and be like, okay, well, to get into bed, you have to put those all away. And then I would never put them away and they just get brushed onto the ground. So now everything, every article of clothing has a place. It's clean or it's dirty, and no matter where you are, it's got a place to go. So that's one of my favorite things that I've gotten recently. But you walk around my house and there are hacks everywhere. And I would love to share more of those hacks with you. But what I'm saying is that I have worked really hard and done a lot of research. I listen to a ton of podcasts about ADHD, I read books about ADHD. Um, I'm just trying to learn and grow as best as I can so that I can put these practices into place to make my life easier, to minimize those ADHD symptoms so that the desire to drink is not even there. Because think about it, if you were drinking to self-medicate your ADHD, and then you take away the alcohol, all those ADHD symptoms are still gonna be there unless you get medicated. Even then it's gonna be different, right? You're like, alcohol was my medicine. It was working just fine for me. And then you take it away and you're like, well, here I am. Now what? If we don't work on those things that were causing us to drink, it will be suffering. Sobriety will be really, really hard. And the best way to make sobriety feel as easy as humanly possible is addressing your why for why you drank in the way you did and working on those things. For the really toxic relationship that I was in, that I drank to get through during that relationship, but I also drank to get through it as I was healing from that relationship afterwards. Because as I've mentioned on here, unfortunately, I was stalked and harassed and had to get lawyers involved and change my phone number and move and all this crazy stuff. Um, so I was drinking to get through the aftermath of that relationship as well. And I really should have gone to therapy. I recommend that once you identify what your why is for why you drank in the way you did, you should definitely talk to a prof a professional or join a group. If it's grief that caused you to drink, like a loss that you experienced, go to a grief group. Go to a grief therapist. Um, if it was a breakup, there's specific therapy for that, there's groups for that. I think that those resources that exist out there are so good. And for some reason, I've just always been drawn to doing things myself. I think it's why I never did AA or like join any sort of sobriety groups other than the one I created on Facebook, which is a great place to be. Feel free to join. Um, it's free. The link is in the description of the episode. But I just like doing things on my own. So after that relationship, I probably definitely should have gotten therapy because I'm still affected by that relationship today. And I do worry that when I do meet my forever person, like I want to make sure that I'm in a really good place and not still letting that relationship get to me so strongly. So anyway, I am doing better now than I was. I feel like every day I get better around this topic. And it's because I have watched countless videos on healing from a narcissistic relationship. I've analyzed different uh situations with narcissism. I've listened to a lot of books and podcasts about narcissists as parents, as siblings, as kids, as significant others, so that I can just understand how it comes out in different people. And it helped me understand why I fell into that relationship. It helped me understand why I fell for that man in the first place. Like, how could you fall for someone who treats you so horribly, right? Well, it didn't start horrible, you know. It was I still to this day say that I experienced the highest highs in that relationship, but I also experienced the lowest lows. So I was just ultra drawn to those highs. I think that goes along with the need for discomfort and excitement and my need for like crazy travel. I loved his crazy energy. I loved how all over the place he was, and he kept me on my toes and our back and forth. It was almost like infectious. And he's such a big personality. I was so drawn to that. It allowed me to kind of take a back seat and let him shine, and that felt good in the beginning, and then it felt really bad later. But anyway, learning about narcissism and like narcissistic personality disorder, like when someone really truly is a narcissist, not just in the way that we throw it around these days as a buzzword. When I learned about that, it just helped me so much to heal. What's that phrase? To be to be loved is to be understood or something. I am trying to understand that relationship so that I can love myself and move on and be able to love in the future. I need to just fully understand why I fell into that, why that person was able to manipulate me. I'm not saying that it's my fault, but helping to understand qualities in myself that may have been drawn to somebody like that is helpful. And also being able to spot it in other people. I've just learned so much about the topic, and it has been very soothing for me, and it's helped me grow. And with that growth, the desire to drink melts away. That is another one of my whys. Why I drank in the way I did was largely because of this relationship. And healing from that relationship makes the desire to drink go away, which makes sobriety so much easier when you don't even have the desire to drink. If we talk about the injury that I experienced, finding my why, uh, that was another why for why I drank in the way I did. I've done a lot of physical therapy. Um, I've gotten back into shape, I've been healing and getting back into things I enjoy like volleyball and golf and all that good stuff. That helps me not drink because I'm stimulated, I'm doing things I enjoy, I'm not bored, and I'm not depressed from this injury that is keeping me on the couch. So a long-winded way to say finding your why for why you drank in the way you did is so important. And learning all of those whys for me is how I learned why I loved that two beer buzz all day long. It all makes sense. And that's just the way that my alcohol problem showed itself. I wasn't downing shots, I wasn't, you know, the one getting insanely drunk at parties. I actually loved to pretend that I wasn't drunk. I didn't want anyone to know that I was drinking ever. I wanted to seem totally fine. I always wanted to seem in control. But I loved that two beer buzz. So, with that said, this episode was a little all over the place, but thank you for listening. And I I share this information with the hope that somebody out there might relate. Because I listened to so many social media videos and podcasts about drinking. I read some audiobooks that are out there, or um, I read some books that are out there, and I didn't relate to them. I was like, none of these people drank in the way that I did. And so when I finally found somebody who drank in a similar way to me, it felt really comforting. It's like, oh my God, somebody actually gets me. And I hope that in sharing this information, sharing my story, somebody else might relate as well. So if that's you, I'm glad we connect. Hey. And if you drank in a different way, that's okay too. We're all on the same team here. I'm rooting for you. I hope you're rooting for me. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of the scoop troop. Feel free to join our sobriety support group on Facebook. And I will see you for the next episode. Bye.