Beyond the Wine Glass: Embracing an Alcohol-Free Life

Overview:
In this emotional episode Caytie Langford shares her deeply personal journey from questioning her relationship with alcohol to achieving 332 days of sobriety. Caytie opens up about her early encounters with drinking, the social pressures that escalated her use, and the pivotal moments that led her to confront her dependency on alcohol. She discusses the shame and fear involved in acknowledging her issues with drinking. and the profound impact it had on her relationships and self-perception. Through therapy, support communities, and a dedicated app, Caytie highlights the tools and resources that helped her navigate an AF life, and how reframing her mindset towards alcohol allowed her to truly embrace self-love and truly chase after the life she always wanted. Caytie's story is not just about giving up alcohol; it's about gaining a deeper understanding of oneself, fostering authentic connections, and living a life filled with purpose and joy. Her story is a powerful call to anyone feeling alone in their struggles with alcohol, offering hope and reassurance that a fulfilling, alcohol-free life is within reach.

Key Highlights:

1. Moment of Reckoning: Caytie recounts a pivotal moment in  2021 when she fell and injured herself after drinking, prompting her to realize the impact of her alcohol consumption.
2. Struggles with Moderation: Despite attempts to moderate her drinking, Caytie finds herself unable to control her alcohol intake, leading to feelings of frustration and hopelessness.
3. Turning Point: The turning point in Caytie's journey comes when she decides to prioritize her goals and dreams over alcohol, sparking her commitment to living an alcohol free life.
4. Seeking Support: Caytie finds support and tools for her sobriety journey through therapy, the ReFrame app, and online communities focused on alcohol-free living.
5. Newfound Clarity and Self-Love: Despite facing challenges and difficult conversations, Caytie emerges from her journey with a newfound sense of self-love and empowerment, inspiring others to seek help and make positive changes in their lives.

Resources:

• The ReFrame App -  Sign up now and get 1-Month Free Trial. Change your relationship with alcohol with the neuroscience-based app!
• On the Mocks Facebook Group 
• Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker 
• This Naked Mind by Annie Grace

Podcast Time Markers:

00:00 Opening Thoughts: Questioning Normalcy in Drinking Habits

00:24 Introducing 'Not Made To Be Subtle': A Journey of Fearlessness and Authenticity

01:33 The Courage to Share: Tackling the Fear of Judgment

03:40 A Personal Journey: Confronting a Relationship with Alcohol

04:58 Early Encounters: The Beginnings of a Complex Relationship

14:10 The Spiral: From Social Drinking to Questioning Control

20:13 The Realization: Confronting the Truth About Alcohol Consumption

31:20 The Struggle with Self-Perception and Isolation

32:20 The Vicious Cycle of Alcohol and Self-Criticism

33:42 A Turning Point: Therapy and Self-Reflection

36:09 The Harsh Reality of 3 A.M. Meetings with Myself

37:46 The Illusion of Normalcy in Wine Culture

38:50 The Decision to Stop Drinking: A Journey Begins

40:02 The Struggle with Moderation and Realization

48:42 Finding Community and Support in Sobriety

54:16 The Transformation: Embracing Self-Love and Sobriety

56:16 A Message of Hope and Support

Let's Connect!

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Transcript

Caytie: 0:00

but I remember thinking at this point in my life, 33, 34, is this normal? Like, am I drinking too much? Do my friends drink as much as me? And I started questioning, do I have problem? Welcome to Not Made To Be Subtle where we celebrate the art of embracing fear, pushing boundaries and making a statement in a world that often expects us to be subtle. I'm your host, Caytie Langford. I'm a full time real estate investor, but along the way I was a nonprofit fundraiser turned executive coach. I once stood at the intersection of This is everything that I've ever wanted. And is this really it? I've learned so much along the way. And now this podcast will be your go to destination for candid discussions with me and with other bad ass women who dared to ask the same, is this it? And decided to chase after more. Stay tuned for riveting stories. unfiltered conversations and actionable advice that will move you from where you are to where you want to go. Welcome to not made to be subtle because you, my dear, you were never made to be subtle. Today I am ripping band aids off. I'm gonna talk to you about something that is really freaking scary. It's really scary. You know, one of the things that I pride myself on when it comes to speaking is that I have the ability to be eloquent, that I have the ability to take my God given talent and use my words to hopefully inspire and motivate and impact your life. And as I sat down to think about this particular podcast, I thought about This is actually something I had been thinking about for months before I ever started this podcast. And I knew that I wanted to tell this story. I know that I want to share this piece of me with you, but I also know that it's terrifying. And you're going to hear more about in a minute. My hope is that by sharing my story, That one, I would release any of the shame that I've had and two, that it may inspire just one woman who is listening to this. Maybe it's you, maybe you're going to pass this along to a friend. Now I will also share that I want to be mindful that while this is my story, I am going to be talking about people in my life, including my family and the people who love and support me the most. And that is terrifying because I never want to let anyone down. Part of me thinks, oh gosh, you shouldn't tell this story because what if it embarrassed somebody? What if someone reacts? But I think that again, hiding this, Sweeping this under the rug will just perpetuate that we should continue to do that. So I'm not going to do that. I want to share with you my story and my relationship with alcohol. Whew, this is terrifying. Hands are sweaty. The extra deodorant I put on is maybe not working. So I call this my relationship with alcohol because in the not recent past I had an epiphany that I could either have a relationship with wine and alcohol or I could have absolutely everything else that I wanted. So I'm going to share with you how I got here, today, 332 days, completely alcohol free, not one single sip. Now that's not to judge you if you have questioned your own relationship with alcohol and maybe you have. Had a sip or two and I'm not gonna even assign what we would call that because it's different for everyone's journey But I'd like to share with you my journey and when we talk about alcohol, it actually goes way way Way back. I'm a 44 year old woman today But my journey with alcohol Started when I was probably 13 or 14 I remember telling my therapist that, and she was shocked. She had this face of horror. Now, I'm not saying that I was a drinker at 13 or 14, but I remember being at a slumber party with a few of my girlfriends. Her parents had gone out for the evening to go to dinner. They may have been gone an hour, honestly. Who knows? But there was beer in her dad's beer fridge. And so we thought that it would be interesting to see what it was like to have some. So we did. We did. And now I didn't get into it then. I didn't start drinking at 14. But a couple years into high school, I, like many young people and many people my age, went to parties where alcohol was present. Of course, this was back in the mid to late 90s when things like Zima and wine coolers were cool. I remember my drink of choice in high school was fuzzy naval wine coolers. Absolutely disgusting. It just grosses me out to think about it. But when I look back at why I started drinking, I did it because other people were doing it. I did it because I thought it was cool. It would make me accepted. Now the reason that I continued to drink it is for very, very different reasons. And I would say that in high school I drank some. I didn't drink all the time. It wasn't a problem, quote unquote. I don't even know what a problem would have been back then, but But what I recognized in alcohol was that it would take me to a place where I didn't have to feel and experience the feelings that I was having. You see, from the outside looking in, I think I came from a really great family. I had a mother and father who were extremely active in my life. I had grandparents who were extremely, extremely active in my life. My grandparents sent me to the best private schools. I got a brand new car when I was 16. But behind all of that was a lot of stuff. Just like you probably had stuff when you were growing up. I certainly had stuff. And part of it was that my dad was an alcoholic and he could be abusive. We also lived at a level where my parents didn't make as much money as my friends did. And yet I was going to one of the best private schools in Dallas. So there was definitely a keeping up. With the joneses that was happening As I was a teenager, I also really had to grapple with the fact that I didn't just have one dad But I had a biological father who had abandoned me when I was just a toddler Now this is not going to be the story of How my family was bad or things that happened. There was stuff that happened. I will not lie to you. I will say that if you came to our house and you moved a picture frame, there would be a hole in the wall where my dad got mad and punched something. That is the truth. I thought that was normal. It was years later that I realized that that was completely abnormal. But I had all of these things going on inside my head, whether consciously or subconsciously. And at 44, I can tell you that probably what was happening in my mind when I was 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, even 25. A lot of it was very subconscious. It was trauma that had sat there that I didn't have the capacity to deal with. And so alcohol kind of became a friend of mine. Ugh, just saying that out loud grosses me out. It completely grosses me out. But the truth was, In order to really understand a lot of the reasons why alcohol became my friend, why I got into this, what would later become a terrible, terrible relationship is that I was carrying some shame around. And one of the things that I was very aware of in my childhood and young adult life was my mother's age. Specifically, my mom had me when she was 17 years old. She was a junior in high school and I love my mother. I think she's amazing. She is a fucking badass. the O G. Like, not even lying. But as a young woman, when you are coming into your own and you hear the stories of your parents and how they came into their own, there was a lot that it felt like my mother missed because of me. Now, this isn't a therapy session and just so you know, I've spent thousands of dollars and my mother and I have this great relationship, but I did receive the message from my family Whether, again, they said it blatantly or it was very subtle, and I don't really know which, but the message that I received and from people who didn't even know me, didn't even know our situation, was that. You cannot screw up your own life, dot, dot, dot, like your mom did. Now I don't think if you talk to Mary Jo that she would say that she screwed up her life, but that's her story to tell. It's not mine. But the message that I received was become someone, become something. You're here for a purpose. You're here for a reason. And you've got to Make this life count because your mom was so young and had so many things that she wasn't able to do. She wasn't able to achieve. Again, whether that's wrong or right, I'm not here to judge that. I'm just telling you that that was the message that I received. So I did just that! I was that woman. I was that person. I went to college. I was the first person in my family to graduate from a four year university. I literally graduated on Saturday and I started my job on Monday. I got promoted. I got married. I got promoted again. I was really crushing it when it came to my career. Early to mid twenties. I mean, I was doing all of the right things. I was checking the boxes and let me tell you that it felt really, really great because I had gotten past the place where I would have had a baby at a young age like my mom. I avoided that. I'll never forget. When I was a kid, I was probably 14 years old and Oprah did an episode about teen pregnancies. And there was a statistic that was on it that said 83 percent of children who are the result of a teen pregnancy will then become teen parents. And I, from the moment that I saw that episode was like, that's not going to be me. So here I am, I'm in my mid twenties and I am crushing life. I mean my husband and I buy a house. We're buying rental property. Everything that's happening to me is is really good stuff. It's really, really cool, good stuff. And one of the things that also happened was I was opened up to this world of being a young, badass professional and there was booze. everywhere. I mean everywhere. Now in college, alcohol was sometimes in my life and it sometimes wasn't. I made good grades. I didn't let it get in the way. But here I was in my mid to late twenties and I am in the midst of all of this amazingness and having wine was absolutely part of that equation and it was awesome. Y'all, it was awesome. I didn't even realize how much wine was really going to be open to me and my experience of my 20s and 30s. At this point, when I look back, I can now see that I was putting myself in places constantly where booze was acceptable, and available. Join the junior league, make all these new friends and go to happy hour. Check. Go to happy hour after work with all of your professional friends. Check. Go to a committee meeting and then dinner and have more wine. Check. Y'all, I used to be able to name every single restaurant in Dallas and which ones had half price bottle of wine depending on the day. Go to non profit events, cocktail parties on a Tuesday? Check. Brunch with my friends on Saturday? Check. Join the board of my alma mater where they serve wine at dinner before board meetings? Check, check. I'll never forget when Whole Foods opened a wine bar in the middle of the store. Holy moly. Now all of a sudden, not only am I cool, but I'm shopping at Whole Foods with wine. Sometimes I'd meet one of my girlfriends. In fact, one of my girlfriends and I, we loved happy hour at Whole Foods because it was cheap as anything and we could get our grocery shopping done. Then go home, cook dinner for Shane Langford after he had been Working all day? Have more wine? Uh, yes, please. I thought that I was at the height of sophistication. I thought that I was Doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. Weekends, watching football with our friends, check. Crawfish boils, check. Season tickets to the Rangers games, check. Y'all, I can't even tell you how many plastic cups that said Texas Rangers that I just donated to Goodwill that I got because I drank so much beer at these freaking baseball games. Wine trips to Napa and Sonoma. Hello! That was the height of bougie badassness with all of my girlfriends. You want to go to Napa or Sonoma? Uh, flight is booked. I am there. Hell, I'd even go to a baby shower if I knew that I was gonna have booze. And let me just tell you that I do not like going to baby showers. You can ask a bajillion of my friends. They will tell you that I did not show up to their baby showers. I don't know. Maybe that's something I need to talk with my therapist about. But I was putting myself in every single place that I could. That booze was acceptable, that wine was flowing, that beer was there, cocktails, a martini. Um, hello, how cool did I look with a martini? Any opportunity that I had to be me. engaged with alcohol I absolutely took and not only did I take the opportunity, but I looked for constant ways every single day to have alcohol in my life. Now you might be listening to this and be like, damn Caytie, uh, I drink, but I don't drink that much. Cool. That's okay. I'm not telling you my story to judge you. I'm telling you my story because I do believe it will help at least one woman not feel lonely in this. And that is really what I want to talk about. Because I had put alcohol in a place of my life 365 days a year, 365 days a year, I could figure out how to drink, when to drink, where to fit it in. If I was sad, I had a cocktail. If I was celebrating something, you're damn straight I had a cocktail. When I was happy, I was having a glass of wine. When I was mad, well, might as well have a cocktail or two. No matter what the occasion was, alcohol and wine specifically found a way. To be a part, it absolutely did. And what's funny is when I was around 32, 33, 34, somewhere in that range. Again, my career is amazing. I am. You know, on the precipice of being an executive, I am in upper management at these amazing organizations that I worked at, but I remember thinking at this point in my life, 33, 34, is this normal? Like, am I drinking too much? Do my friends drink as much as me? And I started questioning, do I have problem? When I started questioning these things, I even went to Google. I would, I would sit in bed late at night, Shane would be asleep, and I would Google things like, how much is too much drinking? I would Google, When should you take a break from alcohol? I would Google how many drinks is too many for a woman. I would hear on the radio commercials for rehab places and I'd be like, Hmm. Maybe I should look one of them up, but I was always very nervous that Google would catch on to what I was trying to do. This is way before everybody was talking about algorithm. Nobody really knew that there was an algorithm, although it was Facebook was still trying to target you. But I didn't want there to be ads. about sobriety or rehab or any of that. You see, at this point in my reality, I was not going to at all think or describe myself as an alcoholic. You see, because I already shared with you, my dad was an alcoholic. His brothers are alcoholics. His parents are alcoholics. Now, my excuse was, well, this is my dad and we share a last name because he adopted me, but really he's not my biological father. And so whatever inherited trait that you could get, I didn't have. I didn't have that because he wasn't actually like blood related to me. I didn't share any DNA and I saw who he was and I was like, oh, that's not me. So, therefore, I'm not an alcoholic. These were the constant questions that I was asking myself, and I'll never forget, around the same time, I would tell people, now, I didn't go and blast it out, I just would have a conversation or two with a girlfriend or two. And I would say things like, yeah, I feel like I've been drinking a lot lately. You know, how much do you drink? Or I would say things like Yeah, I'm a little worried that I'm drinking too much. And I will never forget because I, I felt like if I was asking someone that they could see that I was reaching out, like I literally was trying to be like, Hey, there might be a problem, but I don't really know how to say that. And I don't want to say that because if I said that, then you might look at me weird and I already have shame around this. So I don't need you to look at me weird, but I need you to know that I think that, that something is going on and And so when I ask you, what do you think, I maybe need you to tell me like, maybe you should talk to someone. Maybe you should consider what this relationship with alcohol looks like. Maybe you should step back. Inevitably, what happened though is that my girlfriends would laugh and they'll be like, yeah, so do we. So do I. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Can't tell you how many bottles of wine I threw away this weekend. And this is the advice I would give. Well, maybe just stop drinking during the week. Just drink on the weekends. Maybe take like a week off. Lady. It's totally normal. We all do it. And so I Believed all of this. I believed all of this. I was like, oh Everyone else is doing it. This is normal this is normal. This is normal. This is what women my age do. This is what women who are my peers do. You know, at this point, most of my friends had given birth. And so a lot of them would say, Oh yeah, I, you know, I took those 10 months off. I took those nine months off. Oh, it took a year off with the baby. Right. I didn't have that experience, so I was like, well shit, should I take off for nine months? Should I just stop? Oh, and then here's the other thing. I remember a point in my life when I would not be drinking, and everyone assumed, or would ask, oh my god, are you pregnant? Caytie, are you pregnant? Uh, no, I wasn't pregnant. I was just taking a break from alcohol. I was just stepping back to see if I could do it. So then I would get so nervous to not take a break because I didn't want people to think I was pregnant because then they wanted to talk to me about that. And Lord knows that I do not want to talk about that. If you've ever met me, you know that like. I've been asked a bajillion times if I'm going to have kids and when I'm going to have kids and all of the things and listen. Lord only knows. 44 now, so that ship has probably sailed. However, I digress. I want to get back to this. I would take a couple of days off. I would take a couple of weeks off. And then every time I would get back into the cycle. It would just start again. And the amount that I started drinking, especially in my early to mid 30s, started skyrocketing, really, really skyrocketing. What could have made me feel really good at, you know, two glasses of wine was all of a sudden taking a bottle of wine. Um, my gosh, I'm just having a moment because I'm thinking back to this and this is really where, where a lot of shame came in for me is that, um, I almost had like good versions of alcohol and bad versions of alcohol. So let me explain. A good version of alcohol was our Oregon Pinot Noir. That we got from a fabulous winemaker who we knew and who we met, who we had actually tasted the wine in her kitchen. And so I would look at that as this is the height of sophistication and class. This is what people who Are becoming where I was trying to go, whether it was social climbing or company climbing or, you know, I just, I had this vision for my life and I wanted to be, you know, successful and I wanted to be. And I wanted to have everything that was the opposite of what it was like to be a teenager. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be like my successful friends. And so if I was having a bottle of good wine, nice wine, then it was okay. But at some point the bottle didn't, produce the right effect. It wasn't enough. The good feeling was going away. So I would stock my fridge with beer. I didn't drink a lot of booze. Maybe out to dinner, but I, I didn't really like liquor, especially at home, but I would have wine with dinner and then I would have beer when I got home. Shane would go to bed and I'd be like, yes, now I can stay up and drink a couple of beers, but I would be so embarrassed by it that I would literally hide them in the garbage. I would go to our kitchen garbage, I would take out a couple of things, and I would jam it into the bottom. I cannot even believe I just said that out loud. I cannot believe I shared that. There is so much shame and embarrassment around that. But that is exactly what I was doing and it wasn't because Shane was mad at me because I was drinking. I just thought oh my gosh I think it's too much and if I think it's too much other people will start to think it's too much. And so if I hide the secret from everyone that it's too much then no one will know. So while I'm battling this and thinking through this myself, everything will look rosy to everyone else. I would go so far as to finish a bottle of wine and then still put it back As if it still had something in it, put it on the wine shelf or I'd, I'd set it on our bar cart or on our bar. And if you just glanced over and I didn't like put water in it or anything like that, although I'm not shaming anybody who's done that, because listen, like what I'm talking about is really, it's, it sucks y'all. It sucks. The thing, the thing that I, um, haven't told you yet to share it a little bit about my background and. Then I shared like how I was doing all of this, but I haven't really told you about my relationship with myself and this will be the hardest part for me. I hated being by myself. I hated it. I hated it. And why? Well, I hated being by myself because I had gotten into a cycle and a pattern. I was drinking so much. I was never giving my body a break. I That it was producing this fake dopamine, right? Every, you may not know this, but when you take a sip of alcohol, you typically get 15 minutes. What happens over time is the natural dopamine that your body produces actually decreases. And so when you're using alcohol, you have to drink more and more for this new artificial level to produce this artificial dopamine. And so what would happen is that I would drink and then I would beat myself up and then I would drink and then I would beat myself up. And it was this cycle that happened every single day, every single day. The things that I would say to myself. We're terrible. Terrible. Because of this, I kept myself as busy as possible. I wanted to be around people as much as possible. I wanted to be doing something. I wanted to be working on something. I would watch tv. I would do anything to stop my mind from talking to myself, anything. And typically what anything meant was have another drink. So I'm gonna share with you this. In 2022, I went back to therapy and my therapist asked me to keep track of the things that I was saying to myself because I told her, you know, Hey, I'm really hard on myself. I'm really, I say terrible things, but she was like, let's just keep track for a week. And I remember keeping track and I remember going and telling her at the next session that I had and I was sobbing because these were the things that I was saying. I disappoint people. I am mean. I am a bad business owner. I am hateful. I wish I could just go away. I feel behind. I want to let go of being a perfectionist, but I don't know how or what that means. I don't know how to feel safe. I'm lost. I don't know who I am. I don't know how to get my life back. It's funny that I can sit here April of 2024 and read those things and not have the visceral reaction, but I was. saying these things to myself. And when I was saying I am mean, I would be like, Caytie, you are so freaking mean. Why do people even want to be around you? Caytie, you are such a hateful person. Caytie, you are disappointing every single person in your life. You need to just go away. I never wanted to be alone because These were the thoughts that I was having and yet, you know, if you look back and those pictures and those times, it looks like life was great and I had launched a business and I had done all these things and I was giving TED talks and I was speaking on stages in front of amazing badass women. But deep down, this is what was happening. And while I kept myself as busy as possible, there are always going to be times where you can't. You just can't. And that brings me to my 3 a. m. meetings. That's what I would call them. My 3 a. m. meetings with myself. See, because what would happen is I would go through the day and then 5:01, so excited, could have a drink. And then somewhere between 10 and midnight, I would. Go to sleep. Pass out. I don't know. It really depended on the day. And the booze would start wearing off. The wine would start wearing off. The effects of the alcohol would start wearing off. And at 3am, I would have a conversation with myself because I would be wide awake because alcohol does tragic, terrible things to your sleep. So I would be wide awake and all of these thoughts would start over and I would start telling myself how horrible I was and how I was never going to succeed and I was never going to have the life that I wanted and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then the next day I'd get up and I'd be like, Oh, I can't believe this. And here's the other thing at 3am, I also would say, you're drinking too much. You have to stop this. What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this? Right? Then I would stop. start beating myself up about drinking. So then I get up the next morning and I'd be like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe I had another 3am meeting with myself. It sucked. I hated it, blah, blah, blah. And then somehow I would get through the day. I would try and get away from those negative thoughts. But at 5:01 it started over and this was just my life. And I just thought it was freaking normal. I thought it was normal. I thought every time I tried to tell one of my girlfriends that I may have had a problem that I may have been drinking too much. I just kept hearing like, take a break. You're fine. This is normal. This is what we all do. Right? Wine culture. Good God, it's everywhere. Like, I don't even have a kid, but like, how many things did I watch my friends get? Like, things that said like, yeah. mommy juice or right like I mean constantly I can't tell you how much stuff I was given for wine now Listen, I am NOT complaining because at the time that is exactly what I wanted but All of this is happening constantly, constantly, constantly. And I was living in a place where I was living in a place where I just thought this was normal. I just thought this would be my life, that I would just do this. The summer of 2021, I stopped drinking. I stopped drinking because I was over at a friend's house. And when Shane and I got home, I was so drunk that I tried to walk up the stairs to our bedroom and instead I fell and had a huge gash on my face and I woke up the next morning sleeping on the hardwoods. Like literally I was on our living room floor and I was like, holy shit, Caytie, what are you doing? And so I took a hundred day break and it was great and it was awesome. And then come September, 2021 back into the cycle, I was like, yeah, I did it. See, I don't need alcohol. I don't need it. I can stop any time I literally said that to myself, I'm fine because I can quit when I want. I know I can do a hundred days. I bet I could do more. And I tell you what, ladies, I tried to do the moderation game for so long. I'd be like, okay. Tonight when I go to dinner, I'm going to mark how many cocktails I'm allowed to have. I'm only allowed to have two, maybe three. That's it. And when I get home, none. So only at dinner, you can have two glasses of wine. It's three total, right? So maybe two at dinner and one at home, but that's it. Y'all that did not work. It did not work. God bless all of you who somehow have something different in your brain who are like, yeah, no, I can have a glass of wine and then like not ever need it again. That is not me. That was not me. I wish it was sometimes. Well, I don't, and I'll tell you why in just a minute, but I didn't know how to say no. I didn't know how to put a governor on myself. I didn't. If Saturday morning we went out for brunch at 10 you best know that I would be drinking all day long all day. Couldn't stop myself. I cannot believe I just said that out loud. And I cannot believe that I'm going to post this. It is very weird. And I have like, Uh, rock sitting on my chest right now, but I do believe that this is important because one of the things that I know is that while all of this was happening, I felt terribly alone. I literally thought this was only happening to me. I did not know and I did not believe that anyone else was feeling this feeling. I didn't. I just thought it was me. Like, I thought, well, maybe I can't drink responsibly. Maybe I can't, you know, say no. Right? Like, I just thought it was me. I thought everyone else in life, in the world, all of my friends, all of my peers, all of the people that I see also having a great glass of wine, I That they are not experiencing what I was experiencing, and it was terrifying and lonely. And so the way for it to not be terrifying and lonely was to just keep doing it because at least I could shut my mind off for a few hours every single day. So this brings me to May of 2023 the weekend of May 7th, kind of everything changed for me. It was a beautiful spring weekend in Dallas. We had a crawfish boil on Saturday. Beer was donated. It was flowing all of our friends. We shut it down that night. We were, you know, it was so much fun. And see, that's the other weird thing. Like when your friends start having kids, then like there are Saturdays and Sundays are full of like kid activities, but there were certain times of year where we would all see each other and this crawfish boil would be one of them. And so we're back at this crawfish boil and seeing everybody, the kids are running around, going around, hugging and. Smiling and talking to people and it's so great. It's so great. And then the next day we met up with some friends and we went to lunch and it was such a good day and it was such a beautiful day. We're like, we need to leave lunch where I had a margarita probably two honestly have no idea. And we're like, okay, well, we're going to go to this other restaurant that has this fabulous outdoor patio and these great cocktail drinks, these frozen lemonade things. And so we went there and we kept drinking. And I switched from frozen lemonade to beer and then they said, you know, we've got to go home. But then another friend came up there and met us and then we had some wine and then we wound up going to our friend's house because we were going to have a steak dinner and then we were going to have the nice wine, right? The sophisticated, fancy wine. And Monday morning rolls around. And I am, I'm feeling like death. It is terrible. And y'all, I would try not to do that because I always wanted to be fresh for a Monday. This particular Monday I had a call with a woman that I had been introduced to through another woman that I met at a speaking engagement. She was like, you remind me of my friend. Sally, come meet Sally. So Sally and I had scheduled this call. I'd already moved it once. I didn't feel like I could move it again. And so I was like, well, you got to just pull it together. And of course it was a zoom meeting. So I was like, you got to get it together. You got to look presentable. It doesn't matter if you feel like death. Come on, let's go. This is what you have to do. So I'm on the phone on this is your meeting with this woman and she just gets through telling me her story. And one of the things she said was, yeah, I just published this book with Forbes. And I was like, She's like, yeah, you know, besides running my company and doing speaking and coaching, um, you know, I also just wrote this book with Forbes and it was so amazing. And I just, I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach. You see, I had tried to write a book. In fact, I had 11, 000 words of a book. I still think I have a book inside me, but I got off of the phone with her and I was like, Oh my God, Caytie. You say this is what you want. You say you want to write a book, but do you? You say you want to do big things with your life, but do you? Because every time that you have to choose between wine and the things you say you want, You choose wine. I had just turned 43 and y'all, I thought I'd be further along. I really did. I was like, by 43, I'm going to be here, here and here. Right? Like I had plans. I'm a lady with a plan and it hit me that day. And what I said to myself was, you can continue to have a relationship with wine or you can have everything else that you want. One of the things that I didn't mention was a couple of weeks before that Shane And I, I don't know, done something that weekend, who knows, friends, dinner, something, something involved in drinking. And I woke up Saturday or Sunday morning, I don't even know when it was, but I woke up the next morning and I came downstairs and Shane looked at me and said, do you want to apologize for being an asshole last night? Y'all didn't know why. Didn't know what I did. Didn't know what I said. Apologize. Didn't want to ask any more details because frankly, didn't want to relive that shame. So here I was that Monday and I'm thinking of this woman and her book and how I say this is what I want and how I say that there are big things that I want with my life and I'm like, but you're picking wine every time and not only that But it is literally getting in the midst of your relationship. And so how many more times is Shane Langford going to be okay saying, you were an asshole. Do you want to apologize? And I started to see that my life was going in a direction that I just couldn't take. Now, luckily that day I was so hungover that I didn't want to drink. So that's really what kicked it off. But I made a decision that day. That I was going to try and figure this out. And I am happy to say that today is day 332, that I am literally a month away. 365 days is coming up. So many people have asked me, what are the tools that I have used? One is I was in therapy and I decided to get really, really honest with my therapist about. My alcohol intake. Number two, I used the ReFrame app. I truly believe that this ReFrame app changed my life. It changed my world. It did things for me that nothing else could do. And, it was incredible. And what the reframe app does is it literally rewires and reframes everything around your relationship with alcohol. And for years, every time I had like stopped drinking, I always thought about what I was giving up. And the reframe app really taught me to focus on what I was gaining What are the things that are happening in my life because, alcohol was no longer present. It was a place for me to keep track. It was a place for me to keep track of how I was feeling, what I was dealing with. There was all kinds of content. Every single day, I was getting up in the morning and I would do every single exercise and You know, there's all kinds of exercises. I highly, highly recommend it. And I'm going to drop a link to reframe, for a month free. Uh, I've recommended this and given this link to so many people that I don't think I get anything. If I do, I think that I've already used up all of my, like, gets or whatever, but it's something that has been really helpful for me, and I think it could be helpful for you too. The other thing that I did was I started joining Facebook communities and following instagram accounts, around alcohol free, sobriety, sober curious, and listen, words still matter to me. One of the reasons why I have not gone to AA, people have asked me, is because I do not, will not stand up and say I am, and that word, I'm sure there's something that somebody could give me. some thoughts about that, but frankly, I don't really give a shit. The more that I know about alcohol and the alcohol use disorder, the more I know about how alcohol impacts us I just know for me, that was not the right place, but I still needed to be in communities. And one of the communities that I adore and love, and I'm so freaking grateful to the founder is called On the Mocks and it's A group that Christine Wayne started. Christine actually, hopefully will be a guest on our podcast in the future. I've talked to her about this. I follow lots of other sober women and alcohol free women on Instagram and I try and be really active in their posts and responding to other people. I also decided to talk about it. Like I found my friends who were doing this. My friend Liza, my friend Molly, both of them had Gone on their own alcohol free journey. I think both of them did it because of hard 75, but it doesn't matter why they did it. They were talking about it. They were posting about it. And so, I reached out to Liza right away and I was like, Okay, how are you doing this? What is this? What, what, what are you doing? Because I don't know how to do this by myself. And she recommended things to me, uh, Molly was also part of Liza's story. And so then I reached out to Molly and I was like, what are you doing? Right. I was not going to let myself do this in a vacuum. I knew that I needed support. And so Liza actually recommended a book called Quit Like a Woman. It was phenomenal. It was crazy. I started reading the book and I was like, holy shit, this lady has lived my life. All of those things that I felt like I was terribly alone with, she was describing. And for the first time I thought, okay, I really can do this. I also have read This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. Lots of people love that book. It was a little scientific for me. Um, quit like a woman was a little bit better fit, but I think both are great. So these are the things that I have used and I am consistently and constantly thinking about what I have gained from being alcohol free. I never think about, and if I do, I only allow myself to go there for a minute. What have I given up? And I will tell you. So that the other side, y'all the last 332 days, they have not been easy. I would love to tell you that they were, I would love to be like, Oh, it was so great. It wasn't. It was freaking hard. Every single relationship that I've had has changed. Every single one. I have had to get really honest with myself, with Shane, with some of my very best friends, with my mom. I have told people secrets and shame that I was carrying for decades. It was hard. I have some friends that I'm still trying to navigate what it looks like to be their friend, and it's not because of them, it's because of me. It's really hard. It really is. But I will also say this. Reading that list of what I used to say to myself, I don't think any of those things. I don't think them because they're not true. And I know they're not true because I live my life in a way that they, they're lies. And see my mind. It's recalibrated and I'm sure there's like some scientific right things to it. But like my dopamine levels are back to normal and I know how to produce dopamine in a really safe, positive way, the natural way that we're supposed to and going for a walk. That actually works for me, right? Doing fun things actually works for me. I talk to myself in a way that I am my best friend. I am no longer afraid to be by myself. I love me. I really freaking do. I love who I am. I love who I'm becoming. I love my big heart. I love that I have big goals and big dreams. I love that I can collaborate and convene groups of women and I can get people to believe it in themselves. I love that I can use my words to lift up other people. I love that I can go through a day that is hard and not. Drink. I love that I can celebrate super amazing, exciting successes completely alcohol free. I love me. There's about 2000 other things that I could talk about when it comes to alcohol and my relationship. But for today, that's it. I do want you to know that. If you are having 3 a. m. meetings, if you have told a few of your friends, Hey, I'm not sure this is normal. If you feel alone, I want you to know that you absolutely are not. I am here for you. I am one DM away. Message me on Instagram. Message me in LinkedIn. Try not to message me on Facebook. I get so many there that they get lost. I can't stand Facebook Messenger. But I want you to know that you are not alone. You are not alone. And as long as I am here, I will not let you be alone. I have gone to more coffees than I can even tell you about with girlfriends who've said, tell me about what you're doing. And here's the other thing that I will tell you. I'm not here to judge you. You want to keep drinking? Cool, sis. You go on with your bad self. That's between you and you. But if you want to figure out what your life could be like on the other side, on the side with no alcohol, lady, I am here to support you every f Fucking step of the way. I am here to tell you that you can do it. I am here to tell you that it gets better. I am here to tell you that life is freaking beautiful and it is amazing, and it is full of things that I just didn't even know. I'll see you next time, sis. Thanks for tuning in to Not Made To Be Subtle. Remember, life's journey is rarely straightforward, but it's the twists and the turns that make it worth living. Embrace the uncertainty, make bold decisions, and never underestimate your power to create the life that you envision. Will you do me a favor? Will you rate and review and subscribe? This helps more women like you find our podcast. Stay tuned for more episodes packed with insights, inspiration, and a touch of badass boldness.