This Is My Life Right Now
- Jul 3
- 7 min read
Ten years sober — and the whole, honest truth of how I got here
Ten years ago, I drank tequila all day on a boat on a Fourth of July weekend.
That night was a disaster. I said things that weren't kind. I woke up with bruises all over my body from falling, trying to piece together what had even happened. And then a thought landed that I've never quite shaken: I could have fallen off that boat. It was dark. No one would have found me. I would have drowned.
This Fourth of July, I'll be ten years sober.
And I want to tell you the real story — not the tidy version. The messy, beautiful, true one. Because someone reading this needs to know it's possible.
I never thought I had a problem
Here's the thing — I didn't decide one day that I was someone with a drinking problem. I just drank like everyone around me. I started young because I thought that's how you socialize. That's how you have fun. That's how you belong.
And it carried all the way through my life. Decades.
I'm an occupational therapy assistant, and along the way I started meeting patients who had stopped drinking. A coworker stopped too. And honestly? It was so foreign to me. The idea that a person would just… not drink. One woman told me she missed sitting on her front porch with her husband on a Friday night with a drink. And I remember thinking, yeah — you should do that. Why would you NOT want that?
I couldn't see it yet. Because that's how alcohol works. You build a tolerance. One glass stops doing the thing, so you need a few. Then one bottle of wine isn't doing it anymore either. I never could just have one. I had to chase the feeling — and the feeling kept moving further away.
Yoga is what cracked the door. I'd started practicing, and slowly I could sit with myself a little longer. Long enough to finally notice the pattern I was in.
The day I couldn't do it anymore
After that boat, I just sat in it. And I thought about all of it.
The time drinking landed me in the hospital when my bladder shut down. The time I broke my wrist because I'd had too much and went ice skating. And now this — sitting with the chilling thought that I could have gone overboard in the dark, and no one would ever have found me.
What's next? How far do I have to push this before I stop?
I couldn't keep hurting myself. I just couldn't.
So I quit. And I didn't tell a soul — because I wasn't sure it would last, and I didn't want to fail out loud. I just started quietly Googling what to do. I found a woman online, followed what she was doing, followed the people who inspired her. One foot in front of the other.
I won't sugarcoat it: it was rough. I went through detox. I got so anxious — and that's when I realized I'd been an anxious person all along. I'd just been pouring alcohol over it for years so I'd never have to feel it.
So I had to learn — for the first time in my life — how to actually feel it. And move it.
The tools that kept me sober
I didn't do AA. That's not a knock on it — it's just not my story. Everyone heals on their own timeline, in their own way, and you can't do it for anyone but yourself. This is what worked for me:
Breath. I found that breathing slowly in and out of my left nostril calmed my nervous system right down. When the anxiety spiked, the breath brought me back into my body.
Journaling. I vented everything. All my frustration about why I couldn't have a "normal" relationship with alcohol, why I always drank too much. There's a whole page in that journal that's just the word FUCK written hundreds of times. I'm not even kidding. I needed to get it OUT — and that page did more for me than any pretty affirmation ever could.
Mantra. (More on this one in a minute — it saved me later in a way I didn't see coming.)
And slowly, the journal changed. The pages of struggle turned into pages of wins. Progress. I kept coming back to the breath, kept coming back to the page. And things started opening.
I wanted to become a yoga teacher. Then a Kundalini teacher. Then — I wanted to open my own studio. I was shifting and elevating so fast it got uncomfortable for the people around me, because so much of our life had been built around drinking together. And there was this pull I couldn't explain. It just became part of me: I have to share this. Whatever I'm learning that's helping me — other people need it too.
When the movie reel wouldn't stop
My second marriage couldn't survive how much I was changing. It dissolved. I moved out and moved back in with my parents — at over forty years old. I'm not going to pretend that wasn't humiliating. It was. But I did what I had to do.
And then I found out there had been an affair. That's when the movie reel started.
You know the one. The second I opened my eyes in the morning, my mind would start replaying it — every should've, every could've, on a loop I couldn't shut off. I was paralyzed in my own little town. Couldn't go to the coffee shop I loved. Got anxious grocery shopping in case I ran into them.
So I reached for mantra. The moment that reel started spinning, I'd start the mantra — and my mind would lock onto it instead of the loop. The reel would stop. I'd go about my day. It started again? I'd start the mantra again.
And one day… the reel just stopped. I needed the mantra less and less. To this day, when I catch myself stuck in my head — replaying, spiraling, living in the should've — I find a mantra and come right back to the present. It works every time.
"This is my life right now"
I'll be honest with you: I didn't take the time to fully heal back then. I just wanted to move on. So I traveled a little, got on the dating apps… and walked straight into a relationship with a narcissist, carrying wounds I hadn't even looked at yet.
I'm not going to lay out every dark moment here — that's a bigger story for another day. But there's one night I have to tell you about.
The nights with him got long. He'd keep me up entire weekends, screaming. My body was so flooded with anxiety and cortisol that I couldn't sleep, so I'd take NyQuil just to get a few hours. One night he stormed in screaming, and I said, "I just took NyQuil — I'm falling asleep." And he screamed back: "This is my life right now? THIS is my life right now?"
And I just laid there, crying quietly in the dark.
A therapist told me later she was shocked I stayed sober through that relationship — because so often, that's exactly when people pick the bottle back up. But I couldn't not stay sober. In the background, every single day, I was still doing my meditations, my mantras, my Kundalini, my breath. That practice was the floor under my feet when everything else fell away.
Eventually it got bad enough that I Googled "is my boyfriend a narcissist." And once you see it, you can't unsee it. He checked every box. He'd broken me down to almost nothing — I'd look in the mirror and not recognize the woman staring back.
So I finally did the thing I'd been avoiding for years. I sat in the discomfort. I healed the parts of me I'd been ignoring — the ones that explained why my relationships kept breaking. I spent time alone, uncomfortable, feeling the feels I'd spent a lifetime running from.
And here's what I know now.
He screamed "this is my life right now" like a curse. So I took those exact words and made them my anthem.
Yes. This is my life right now. A life I built with my own two hands, sober, through every hard thing. A life where I get to create programs and experiences for other women to heal — to get a little uncomfortable, to reach the root, to come home to themselves. A life I'm so honored and grateful to call mine.
This is my life right now. And it is beautiful.
If you're somewhere on this road
If you're reading this and quietly wondering about your own relationship with alcohol — or just exhausted from running from your own feelings — I'm not here to push you. You'll know when you know, in your divine time. Not a moment too soon, not a moment too late.
But I'll tell you this: the tools that pulled me out are real. The breath. The journaling. The mantra. The willingness to feel what I'd been numbing. These aren't just things I read about — they're things I survived with. And they're exactly what I'll be sharing inside In Your Divine Time camp, because I want you to have them too.
Ten years ago, I sat with the thought that I could have slipped away in the dark and no one would have known. Today I get to hold space for women who are ready to come home to themselves.
That's the medicine. The deepest wounds really do become the greatest gifts.
Happy ten years to me — and to every version of me who didn't give up.
In your divine time. Always.
P.S. — I'm pouring the fuller story into a little book, coming soon. If this stirred something in you, that's where we'll go deeper. Stay close.
