It’s taken me a while to decide if I could write this. It’s not something most people just freely put out there. If you know me outside of this blog, then you know I’m a “sharer.” Likely to my detriment at times, I’m the kind of person who wears her heart on her sleeve and sometimes gives TMI. It’s how I’ve always been and it drives my mother nuts. Newsflash mommy, I’m almost 44-years-old and I ain’t changing!
This time, I’m sharing because I know for a fact that some of you need to hear this. Some of you need to know you are not alone. Some of you are living in a never-ending cycle of shame. Some of you need to see a person who seems to have it “all together,” but has spent a long period of her adult life hiding something she thought she could control.
Well, hiding is exhausting. And I know some of you are tired of hiding too.
So, here goes…
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Growing up, I attended Buckeye Valley High School. A very large district in miles, but small in enrollment, tucked away in Delaware County, Ohio. It was an incredible place to call home for multiple reasons. While I disliked the bullies and the peer pressure and struggled with awkward teenage angst, I recognize now that you’ll find those things everywhere you go. I have taught my kids from a young age that life can suck and so can people, but if you don’t learn to deal with it now it’s a recipe for unhealthy coping mechanisms as an adult. Trust me, I know this from experience.
From Freshman to Senior year, I had spent countless weekends at a friend’s house with a group of both boys and girls. We will refer to this friend as “Alex” Alex’s mom had transferred him to our school in an attempt to keep him out-of-trouble. Alex was the kid who wanted to be liked but didn’t understand how truly likable he already was. He would open his house weekend after weekend to a group of friends that started out safe and then slowly did the thing most teenage kids do—experimented with stupidity.
I don’t know when it started happening, but our innocent weekends playing pool in his basement, watching Tommy Boy and Billy Madison slowly morphed into something else. Alex had a brother who just so happened to be old enough to buy beer. So magically, there it was. That thing only parents could drink. The coveted buzz in a can. I didn’t touch it, but my friends slowly started to dabble. I knew things were beginning to get out of hand when I held one of my best friend’s hair back as she puked up spaghetti in the bathtub, apologizing to me between each gasp for air. Before we knew it, the kids that Alex’s mom was so desperate to shelter him from, realized there was a weekly “party” at a house with no supervision and a brother who could buy them alcohol. It was a recipe for disaster. Towards the end of our stint at Alex’s, some of my best guy friends were huffing gasoline and smoking weed. Looking back, I was terrified, but I kept going for my friends. I was the sober one. The safe one. Someone needed to be clear headed, so until the friend group started breaking apart, I offered my services.
My senior year, a handful of us went to prom together. I had my first serious boyfriend and my first love on my arm. The dress I had picked was royal blue with soft-focused flowers, cut on the bias that draped along my young curves in a tasteful way that also illustrated I was coming into my own. My hair was pulled back into a loose chignon and my make-up—while clean and natural—accentuated my brown eyes in just the perfect way. That night I felt pretty. Like really really pretty, for the first time in my life.
We had reservations at a local Italian restaurant and got a big round table for the group. As we settled into dinner, Alex laughingly shared that he had started sipping on a bottle of Absolut Vodka and we were welcome to partake if we wanted. My boyfriend was driving and although he had had his share of struggles in the past, he was the older, more responsible and mature one of the group. I knew he was instantly angry at the risk he was taking with an open container in his car.
When we arrived at the dance, Alex stumbled into the school; his date desperately working to hold him up straight. It was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when the scarecrow is first learning to use his legs. All attempts at masking his drunkenness were futile. Within moments of entering the dance, the group was plucked away to meet in an another room, stand in a line and face a police officer. As he walked down the line of kids, he asked each of us questions and had us blow in his face. When he got to Alex, he realized he had found the culprit.
Alex was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I can’t remember exactly how much he had drank, but when the police officer searched my boyfriend’s car, we were all shocked to see the bottle of vodka more empty than full. It was a dangerous amount. It was a foreshadowing of what was to come in many of our lives as we blossomed into adulthood with alcohol waiting patiently for our arrival.
I want to emphasize, this was a great group of kids. Honor roll, captains of sports teams, highly involved parents. Most if not all have since raised families, held down great jobs and are thriving. Many I’m still close with today. I count us all very, very lucky. As is with hindsight, I know now things could have ended up a heck of a lot worse. I credit our parents and our small little country school with staff and teachers who got into the muck and mire with us when necessary. We all made dumb decisions and paid the price for it, but the community around us never stopped loving and supporting us. Even to this day.
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When I graduated from Buckeye Valley in 1998, I had decided to attend Denison University. A gorgeous campus situated in the rolling foothills of Ohio. That fall, I packed up my purple Chevy Cavalier and arrived on campus alongside my parents and my brother. My mom will want me to tell you that at lunch in Huffman Hall, I couldn’t stop crying. She would want me to tell you it was because I was going to miss my family sooooooooo much. This is all true of course, I have an incredible bond with them, but once they were gone, somehow I felt pretty darn good. Amazingly, my fear and sadness gave way to excitement and wonderment at the possibilities…and boys. There were oh, so many cute boys! But, I digress!
Freshman weekend was a chance to get moved into the University with just our class and ease into the reality that was to come. While we comprised the majority of the students on campus that mid-August, we weren’t the only ones. The athletes were there preparing for their fall seasons. That Saturday night I was invited by a young man to a party with the baseball team.
It was my first college party and my first immersive experience with alcohol freely imbibed in every direction. I recall the team getting together to sing a drinking song and downing their Natural Lights in unison (insert vomit emoji), during which time I hugged a wall with my back and watched in horror. I refused the multiple beverages offered to me, but I knew I needed to figure this stuff out and figure it out quickly.
Within two months, my new friends and I were getting ready to celebrate my 19th birthday. I had made serious attempts at assimilation into the group—many from the Northeast—with East Coast accents and newly tapped trust funds. When the J.Crew catalog made its way through the forth floor of Shorney Hall, I had to shop. Luckily, I had spent the past three summers lifeguarding and teaching swimming lessons. I had saved enough money to justify the overpriced black leggings, skirt and powder blue crew neck t-shirt that arrived just in time for my celebration. My friends did some research and found a hook-up for alcohol so we could celebrate properly. I put on my new skirt and shirt and proceeded to get “19th Birthday Drunk” in a friend’s dorm.
That night, my high school boyfriend who I had broken up with the month prior, called to say that he wanted to see me. In my drunken haze, I agreed and met him on the front steps of my dorm, head between my knees in a desperate attempt to sober up and stay alert. When he got there, he took me to my dorm room and handed me a jewelry box.
“Oh God,” I thought. “It’s a ring.”
As I mentioned earlier, my boyfriend was older and wiser. Much of his wisdom came from the school of hard knocks. A high school dropout, he had been an incredible athlete, but playing on the Varsity teams at a young age meant getting involved with a group of kids and drugs that didn’t serve him. After losing everything a high school boy could want, he turned his life around, stopped doing drugs, limited drinking and got a job in construction to keep his small mobile home’s roof over his head. He was ready to settle down and start a life. I, on the other hand, was not.
When I opened the box, I was relieved to see it was a beautiful pair of diamond earrings. I thanked him and although we were broken up, I accepted the gift and placed them in my ears, then I subsequently passed out next to him in my twin bunk. When I woke up the next morning, the fog from the night prior started to settle. When I looked in the mirror I remembered the earrings sparkling under the fluorescent lights.
“I can’t keep these,” I thought to myself.
I gave the earrings back that morning, solidifying my decision to break up with him. He had no choice but to accept. He did so graciously and walked out of my dorm as I cried over a heart broken for a love lost at my own doing.
It was the first time I had made a decision while drinking that hurt someone else. Had I been clear minded the night before, he would have never come to campus. I would have spared him the hour and a half in the car, a tank of gas and his dignity. But, the alcohol spoke on my behalf.
Sadly, it would not be the last time.
Denison’s party schedule was Friday, Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. That is a daunting reality for a kid who barely touched alcohol for the first 19-years of her life. I pledged a sorority that first winter and had instant friends. I have to admit, it was a great group of girls all the way up to the Seniors. They did their best to look out for us and aside from some poor choices as it relates to alcohol-based hazing, we were mostly safe.
At the time, every sorority and fraternity was teaching the young ones “the ropes” and more experienced members kept a keen eye on us to make sure we didn’t push the limits beyond our control. Some were better at this than others and some, well, you know what you did and you know who you are. I call some of you friends to this day, but there really is no justification for your sexist, antagonistic, dangerous and all out STUPID decisions in the name of your Greek letters. Frankly, you are all lucky to be alive (END RANT).
We all did some very dumb things, but we justified them as a rite of passage and a coming of age. Before we knew it, we had the party cadence to a science. As I settled into a major, I was folded into another group of friends in the theatre department. We spent a little less time drinking and smoked a few more cigarettes, but most evenings were tied up in the Ace Morgan theatre rehearsing lines and collecting notes to study for the next evening’s rehearsal. Theatre kept me extremely busy and consequently out-of-trouble. I remember showing up fashionably late many a night, to my boyfriend’s dorm room in Sawyer Hall, caked in stage makeup and doing my best to catch up to my friends who were well into the alcohol-fueled fun.
I remember one fraternity who was notorious for their hazing tactics, encouraging their members to get girls drunk and take advantage of them while other members watched from a second story window. Or at their annual Christmas party, writing filthy poems about the dates they brought, requiring them to sit on Santa’s lap while the poems were read aloud and given boxes of sex toys all wrapped-up in bows as their consolation prizes. A few of those girls left the room crying with no one courageous enough to defend them. It was disgusting, but we all just chalked it up to “boys being boys” and then went to the kitchen to fill up our empty Solo cups.
I remember a 21st birthday with a girl adorned in a feather boa and a crown who was so insanely drunk, she couldn’t stand on her own. She had puked in her bed in her sleep, so her roommate removed her mattress from the top bunk and held her up in the shower to clean her and put her back to bed. And I remember that girl was me.
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My Senior year, we won the lottery, literally, and moved into the prized house on campus. The Rose House, was a former location of the Underground Railroad. With a small galley kitchen, three very large bedrooms and two additional bonus ones, a family size dining room and large living room, it was the perfect place to finish out our collegiate days. I loved that house and the women in it, but if I’m being honest, I don’t love a lot of things that happened there. There was something dark. Something seething. The start of future bad decisions and unhealthy choices. One of the roommates, whom none of us were particularly close with, had a drug problem. A serious drug problem. Her prescription medication for Adderall had morphed into an all out addiction with a pill crusher and a coffee table with enough room to snort lines. No, it wasn’t real Cocaine, but it was basically the same thing.
At this point in our four years at school, alcohol just wasn’t enough for some of us. Mix in Ritalin, marijuana, Ecstasy and actual Cocaine and you had a 360 degree view of partying on campus. Thankfully, my parents did a fantastic job scaring the hell out of me as a child, that I really had no interest in doing the “hard” stuff. That said, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t dabble here and there with a few things. One night, a male friend of mine commented on how rude I was after taking my roommate’s Adderall to stay awake at a party. It was then that I started really questioning my own decisions.
I graduated alongside my best friends from Denison in a unique ceremony. As we made our way down the front steps of campus to the lawn where our families were waiting, the skies opened and dumped buckets of water on our caps and gowns. Everyone (including families) scattered to whatever buildings they could and waited for direction. When the skies cleared, rather than line up in alphabetical order, we were told we could sit next to whomever we chose. It was fitting. The people I loved were the people surrounding me that day. When the ceremony was over, I rode a shuttle bus back to Rose House one last time. I sat on the top of the stairs with my best friend Molly (who had chosen to finish her degree at Xavier) and the wave of emotions overtook me. As I drove away from campus on old Route 161, I put David Gray in the CD player and listened to the song, Say Hello, Wave Goodbye as I closed the door on that chapter in my life. I have had to do this several times since and somehow, it never seems to get easier.
I left life at Denison and finally took a chance on moving to a big city. Washington, D.C. Just in time for the DC Sniper. My mom and dad were so concerned with my proximity to these events that they paid me not to leave my apartment until they found the gunman, or gunmen as we soon discovered. I had moved there with my college boyfriend where we settled into an apartment in Silver Spring, MD, just off of 16th Street and East-West Highway. We stayed there for six months and then decided to move north to a more modern complex with a pool and outdoor mall. We made fast friends and started hanging out on the weekends. Additionally, we became close with our group of co-workers whom we frequented happy hours with.
If you haven’t noticed, Americans have a way of justifying any reason to drink. Big sale close? “Let’s celebrate!” Football Saturday? “Tailgate!” First day above 70 degrees? “Sounds like a margarita!” There’s a hurricane racing up the eastern seaboard? “Well, that calls for a “Fuck The Hurricane” party,” where we proceeded to drink so much wine that we thought it was a good idea to stand outside in the eye-of-the-storm. Yes, I actually did that.
Every weekend was the same story. Friday night was a celebration of another week behind us and a fresh paycheck. In the fall and winter, Saturdays were for football at The Rhino Bar on M Street. Those nights were extra special as we would watch a Buckeye game and then go shopping at H&M for an outfit to wear when our little hole-in-the-wall dive transitioned from sports bar to nightclub. I will admit, I loved this stage of my life. It was carefree. I was finally living on my own and experiencing the world outside of Ohio, but the weekend routine most certainly set a tone.
In 2003, my live-in boyfriend dumped me three weeks before Christmas and “donated” our furniture to a college buddy whose family had more money than God. I’ll never understand this. But let’s just say, I wasn’t always the best judge of character. That said, I was a disaster. Far away from home and with a broken heart, I begged my mom to let me come back. She encouraged me to stay in D.C., get my first credit card, furnish my own apartment and be proud that I had something no one could ever take away from me. And I did just that. Once I dug myself out of the heartache and paid off my debt, I had the time of my life with some incredible friends and I wouldn’t change any of it—except maybe choosing to do more of it sober.
There are a lot of hangovers and foggy memories from those days. But then again, there’s always a reason to celebrate, isn’t there?
TO BE CONTINUED…