Inside Marcy's Mind

The Day I Chose Life Over Liquor: A Personal Story

• Marcy • Season 1 • Episode 60

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Thirty-seven years of sobriety doesn't come with a medal ceremony or a balloon drop, but it does come with a story worth telling. This deeply personal episode pulls back the curtain on a part of my life many of you might never have guessed existed.

Born into a family with alcoholism running through its veins, my journey with alcohol began at just 12 years old with a screwdriver mixed by my mother at a New Year's gathering. Though I wasn't a teenage drinker, everything changed when I turned 21. From that point forward, I never drank "normally" – there was no such thing as just one glass of wine or a single cocktail. What followed were seven progressively darker years that included a failed marriage, dangerous relationships, and moments where I would check my car for dents in the morning, terrified I might have hit someone during a blackout.

My rock bottom didn't look like losing everything – I still had a job and had avoided a DUI – but I knew those consequences were just around the corner. On January 11, 1988, after my final blackout, I found my way to Alcoholics Anonymous. In the 80s, AA was experiencing its first wave of young people joining what had previously been dominated by older men. We created our own meetings with atmospheres that resonated with us – candlelight gatherings, speaker meetings, dances, and even sober bowling leagues where I would eventually meet my husband Craig.

Sobriety has taught me that life is messy, hard, ridiculous, and beautiful – but at least now I'm awake for all of it. If you're struggling with alcohol, please know there's a better life waiting for you. Those who came before were there for me, and now it's my responsibility to be there for the next generation. You can find AA meetings online or call their hotline. Stop drinking today – you won't regret it. But if you continue, I can promise the regrets will pile up, along with the losses.

Have you found yourself questioning your relationship with alcohol? Reach out for help today – your future self will thank you for it.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, and welcome to Inside Marcy's Mind. My name is Marcy Bacchus, goodness gracious, and I am your host. Welcome back to Inside Marcy's Mind, the place where sarcasm meets sincerity, and we talk about all the things rattling around in my head you probably didn't ask for, but you're gonna get anyway. Today's episode is a little different. Instead of me ranting about travel drama or why people can't seem to figure out how to work a self-checkout machine, I'm diving into something very personal. Here's the headline for today. I've been sober 37 years, yep, since January 11th, 1988. And before you do the math, that's way back when perms were high, shoulder pads were higher, and people thought tab soda was an acceptable beverage. Spoil alert, it wasn't. Diet Coke is my drink of choice. Now, funny enough, uh, we are gonna dive into my very personal story today. Um, but before we do that, we'll talk a little bit about what's been going on. First of all, I want to say this is inside Marcy's mind, and I have done 60 episodes. Yes, 60 episodes of this one. I have uh way more of my other podcasts, Aging 8 for Sissies. I took a break from that one for a year, started this one, but Aging 8 for Sissies is up and going, and there's a great retirement episode, even if you're it's it's all about getting ready for retirement. So if you're young, you want to listen. If you're old, you still want to listen. Everybody needs to listen. So that's Aging 8 for Sissies. This is inside Marcy's mind, where I talk about all things Marcy and what's going on in my mind. What's happening this week is I am extremely overwhelmed. Uh, we put in an offer for a two-bedroom condo here in our building. We were up against an all-cash offer. We didn't think we'd get it, and we won. It doesn't feel like we won. As much as I, it's just again, stressful. It's financial decisions being made at 64 and 69. And when you make big financial decisions, the older you get, the scarier it gets. Because you have no time to recoup from those mistakes. So if my children are listening, if dad and I really screwed up this time, we may end up living with you sometime. So make sure you always have room for us. Kyle, that's going to be a little difficult for you considering you live in one room right now, but you know, keep it in mind for the future. I love my kids. I'm heading to California to spend time with my oldest Kyle. This will be the first time I've taken a trip to California specifically for Kyle. And that's not because of me, that's because of Kyle. Kyle's gone through a lot in the last 10 years, a very abusive, horrible relationship that Kyle finally got out of a year ago. Kyle spent six months trying to figure out life, made a few mistakes, but is on the path of all good things, Kyle. All good things. And one of those is happy that mom is coming to visit and to spend some time with me. We are going to see my nephew Chris and his wife. We're going to have dinner there and see their remodel on the Friday night. And then we're going to spend the weekend in Long Beach doing whatever Kyle wants. This is Kyle's trip. I'm there to do whatever Kyle wants. The last time I was there was to help Kyle dig out of what Kyle had gotten Kyle's self into. And we did it, and we did have some good times while we were doing that, but it was a stressful and important trip. This one is purely fun. And uh Kyle will have to work on the Monday that I'm there, but that night I'm picking up Kyle and we're going down to Disneyland. We're going to spend the night down there. And Tuesday, my bestie Lynn is going to meet us at Disneyland, and we're going to celebrate Kyle's birthday early and Lynn's birthday early. They have birthdays a day apart. So we're going to celebrate the two of them and have some good times at Disneyland. You know, my favorite. And then I'm going to come home. I'm going to be home for a few days and then we're going to head off to Ireland. And all the while we'll be buying a two-bedroom condo. So pray for me. Please. Because it's going to be a rough go. But it's going to be fun. All good things. So why am I bringing up sobriety today? Because people ask me what it's like to be sober for this long. And honestly, even I sometimes forget. It's been decades, but oh boy, getting here. That is a story. My story wasn't very long, but it's a story that I think is worth sharing. So hang in there. I'm going to get my mind straight so that I can share the story appropriately with you. And I'll be right back. So would it be weird if I told you Alcoholics Anonymous is the greatest thing that ever happened in my life? Well, it is. But how did I get there? Well, I got sober January 11th, 1988. I was, I believe, 28 years old. 27 years old. So how does a 27-year-old become an alcoholic? Well, let me tell you, you're born an alcoholic. I have a mom who was a, in my opinion, and my siblings could disagree or they could agree. I'm not quite sure. I don't think we've ever talked about it. My mom was a periodic alcoholic. Her father was an alcoholic. Alcoholic is passed down. And don't you know I have shared that with my children many a time. Ad nauseum. I worry about that for them. But it is passed down through families. You can break the cycle, but not necessarily easily. Um, and you are born with it. You can find other ways to deal with it. Mine was alcohol, and my first drink was at the hands of my mom. I my parents had some friends that had the the Obergs that had a ranch, a fun ranch, it was called. It was up in um the middle of California in the wine country. It was this great ranch. It had horses, it had a lake, we'd water ski. It was just the best place ever. And my parents started going there when I was a young kid, probably 10 or 11. And they'd go on weekends. They'd all go up there, um, big drinking crowd. Uh, this was New Year's, and they did uh a kind of a crawl, a food crawl from one ranch to another up there. And at the first ranch, my mom made me a screwdriver. I orange juice and vodka, and I just kept drinking until I was blacked out drunk. Um I remember that night my dad yelling at my mom to walk me and making me walk around the ranch. I threw up in the back of my dad's car. I remember waking up the next morning and everybody asking me how I felt. Well, I was freaking 12 years old. How did I feel? I felt great. I was fine. I was 12. Well, that was my first drink. And um, I didn't drink after that. I wasn't a young kid drinker. I I'm a rule follower. I think I had a few little glasses of wine or something from at my mom's house when I was in high school or I was graduating high school, my mom had some wine left over from my graduation party and they were out of town. They left me all the time, even when I was very young and traveled and went out of town. And I think I had, I remember sitting on my porch at my mom and dad's house having a glass of wine. Didn't really become a problem for me till I was 21. And at 21, when I could legally get it, I never drank normally. If you're an alcoholic, you don't have a sip. There is no putting a cork in the bottle. There is no one or two shots, you just pour the rum into the glass and the diet coke, whatever it is. My my drink of choice was mainly wine. When I was married to my first husband, I drank rum and diet coke. Oh my God. Anyway, uh, my first marriage was based on alcohol. I met him at a bar. He was a great guy, Pete. Pete has since passed away. We were married a year and a half. Um, it was an alcohol-driven marriage. It was not good. It was not smart. We were both great people, not good together for that. I knew I wanted more out of life. I was a functioning alcoholic. As I said, my mom, there's a lot of different types of alcoholic. My mom was a periodic. What a periodic is, is someone that doesn't drink every day, but has periods in their life where they do or periods of time they do. The problem with a periodic alcoholic is they can go quite a while without drinking, which tells them, no, I'm not an alcoholic. Well, yeah, you are. If you drink to oblivion, you're an alcoholic. If you drink to stuff and not feel you're an alcoholic, if you're worried about being an alcoholic, go to aa.com and might be aa.org, I'm sorry, and take the test. The test isn't wrong. If it tells you you're an alcoholic, I guarantee you are one. But that's not my judgment to make about you. It was my judgment to make about myself. I was working in a salon, everybody there drank. The, the, we'd go out and drink after work. I it just, it was a drinking culture. It was the 80s. And yes, cocaine was a big part of that. I could I stopped cocaine. Cocaine started with um my boyfriend Robbie and uh did a lot of cocaine. But that I could stop for some reason. But alcohol I could not. I got into a very, very, very bad relationship after my first husband. Um, that gentleman actually ended up shooting himself in the head and killing him, tried to kill me a couple of times. My road to sobriety was seven years, but it was seven really bad years. I left working in a salon where I was making great money and I was really talented. I became an insurance salesman. What the hell? I couldn't do well at that because it required someone that could focus, and I could not focus very well at that. I went a while without having a job. I lived in a trailer on a piece of property in Malibu after I left my husband because I had nowhere to go and I had no money. I hooked up with this crazy person that was an alcoholic, the person that ended up killing themselves. Uh, we got a place in Malibu together. Alcohol-fueled fights. I just I if you know me, you have no idea that this part of my life ever existed. It was horrible, it was awful. My parents were alive. I never let my parents know what was going on. I never let anybody know what was going on. You never do in shame. I did call my oldest sister, I think, to help me get out of that situation. I wanted to get an apartment away from this person. I did end up getting an apartment. I had a job then. I got a job. I'm always good at working. I was a productive alcoholic. I did get my job. I was doing great at it. It was a sales job in the hair industry. I did really well at it. But every day when I finished my sales calls, I'd go to the bar. Yep. Every day. Get up the next day, do my sales calls, go to the bar. That was exactly what I did. And um, but of course, when I moved into that apartment, I took my problem with me, that gentleman. Well, in that apartment, I ended up getting sober, threw him out, and stuck with it. I am a one and done sobriety person. I'm not saying it's the best way to do it, but it worked for me. Went to my first meeting and never looked back. AA was what I needed. It was a place to feel normal, to share my story with people that I wasn't judged. Um if you are out there and you are struggling, Alcoholics Anonymous is a place to go. It really is. I'm still a member of AA. I will always be a member of AA. So that is my that's my journey. It was a horrible journey. I drove and blacked out. I would wake up in the morning and look and see if there was a debt in my car. Um, make sure that I didn't hit anybody. Am I saying this is right? No, this is my story. You may not know this if you know me. I drank, and there might be a glass of wine when I'd wake up in the morning and I'd I'd take a sip of that if it was still sitting there. I did not know how to go to sleep without drinking. When I first got sober. So that's the drinking part. Let's talk about the sober part. So there were a few people in my life in the salon and a few people around in my world that had gotten sober through AA. So I did know where to go. Back in the day, you had to make a phone call, they'd tell you where a meeting was. Mine was on a Monday morning. My last blackout was a Sunday from the Sage Rush Canteen. If you know, you know. I got up that morning, I did my sales calls, and then I just went and wandered around a mall so that I wouldn't go home and fall into my same pattern. I went to that AA meeting. It was at the motion picture hospital in Calabasas slash Woodland Hills area, pretty close to where my last drink was, to be honest. And that was where my journey started. I was living in that apartment and I found that at the end of my street, funny enough, was an AA clubhouse. They are around people, you just don't know it. They're everywhere. Meetings are everywhere. They're in churches, they're in basements of places, they're everywhere. But there are meeting houses where there's meetings all day long. My meeting house happened to be on Sherman Way, and it was next to Follow Your Heart, which was one of our favorite um Whole Foods type restaurants. And I would do my sales calls and I would go there, and in the afternoon, there were a lot of bikers. So my first 30 days, I got sober with bikers. After that, I found all the meetings where the young people were going. See, in the 80s was the first wave of young people that entered Alcoholics Anonymous. Before that, it really was filled with older men. Women had started to come, but young people hadn't been there yet. There were a few and far between. But we came in droves in the 80s and early 90s. It created a different atmosphere. We created our own meetings. We created meetings that resonated with us. I had a candlelight meeting on Wednesday. We had the Big Friday night meeting in Saturdays. I would drive to Malibu to go to the big speaker meeting in Malibu because it felt like a day out. In order to get sober, I had to find, I still had to have fun. We had dances. I was in a sober bowling league when I met Craig. And the fact is, I never would have met Craig if I wasn't sober. He never would have. I well, I just I wouldn't have had the job. I had a really great job with Claire All that I got in my sobriety. I um met Janie, and Janie was married to Tom, who is Craig's friend, and they introduced Craig and I. Tom and Janie are no longer married, but Craig and I are. Tom is still our friend. Janie, I have no idea what happened to her. Her life went a little sideways, I think. I hope it's straightened out now. But in sobriety, I found what I was looking for. I found what I couldn't find in all of my drinking. People in a if you're out there drinking, people in that bar are not your friends. They're not going to be there for you when times get rough. In sobriety, the people in AA are going to be there for you. And the reason I still go to AA, I don't go into a ton of meetings. I have a Friday night meeting, I go here. I went a long time without meetings, and that was a huge mistake when I was raising my kids. Um, I'm sorry for that, and I wouldn't suggest that road of sobriety for anybody. Yes, I stayed sober, but I wasn't working a good program. And your program is what really keeps your mental stability as you move on in the years. I'm gonna tell you that if you're new at sobriety, don't think you're gonna ever graduate from AA because you're not. And we need to be there for the alcoholic who still suffers. That is our job as an alcoholic, and a sober alcoholic is to be there for the next generation. There were people there for me, and I need to be there for them. And I do try to do that as best I can. What does 30 years really meant? 37 years has really meant that I can face hard things. I can do hard things. I've raised children, I've moved several times because of Craig's job and had to restart my life. I restarted my life here in Chicago. I can do hard things and I can do them sober. I don't need alcohol to get me through anything. And honestly, the thought of not having control over myself is not attractive anymore. It was very attractive back in the day. I am a good friend today. The only person in my life that has been there through all of it has been my best friend Lynn. And Lynn, if you're listening, you know how much I love you. Lynn's seen me at my worst, and Lynn's seen me at my best. Lynn is probably the only one that knows my entire story. Was there with me through most of it? Lynn lived with my first husband and I for a while. She rented a room from us. She was had a front row seat to that train wreck. I still have that friend, and I only have that friend today because I'm sober. I have what I have in my life today because I'm sober. If you're out there struggling, there is a much better life. Call someone, go online, find a meeting, and go. Stop drinking today. I'm telling you, you will not regret it. But I can promise you this if you keep drinking, you're gonna regret it and you're gonna lose everything. For me, I still had a job when I got sober. I did not have a DUI. Those were yets. Those were things around my corner, and I was smart enough to know that those were yets and that they were coming. Oh, I got pulled over twice when I was drunk and drinking, and I talked myself out of it. One with a female cop, so you know, get your mind out of the gutter. I did. And that's because I was good at what I could do. And I was a good drinker. I was a good liar. I was a good way to get myself out of things. I'm not that today. I'm a good person. Do I have flaws? Yes. Does life stress me out? Yes. Do I have to drink over it? No. I don't. Sobriety taught me that life is messy, hard, ridiculous, and beautiful. At least I'm awake for all of it now. All right, friends, that's what it's been living inside my mind this week. Sobriety is not glamorous. There's no metal ceremony, no giant balloon drop after a milestone year, though. Honestly, if someone wants to throw me one, I won't say no. But what it is is a gift, one day at a time, stacked up into 37 years. Thank you for hanging out with me today and letting me share this part of my story. If you liked what you heard, share this episode with someone you think might need to hear it, or just someone who thinks it's funny. Either way, spread the love. Until next time, keep laughing, keep sassy, and remember life is too short to waste it on bad soda, bad perms, or bad choices. Go out and do something positive, especially if it's to get sober and do something for yourself.

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Marcy Backhus

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