What Your Doctor Might Not Be Telling You About Happy Hour
The original version of my TEDx talk started out with the words
Raise your hand if you’ve heard a comment or seen an ad about alcohol today?
In fact, I had practiced the speech so much beginning with that first sentence that my entire family will still joke with me about it. When I’m on one of my “alcohol harms women” tirades my husband will say back to me “raise your hand…”
In the end, my speech editors asked me to take that part out. If I remember correctly (which I probably don’t-thanks perimenopause) I think they said something like we don’t like to engage the audience in that manner.
Since that talk, my emotional outrage targeted at alcohol has softened some. So much so that I kinda wanted to stop talking about alcohol altogether. I made a goal to dedicate 2025 to working with more women writers, developing my course, writing my next book and maybe even move the needle forward on my big goal of owning a non profit publishing company.
It seemed that no one wanted to hear what I had to say on alcohol anymore. Either I internalized this as being true after being rejected from so many places trying to get my Influenced course out to teens. Or, I was just getting a little bored of it all. I’ve been talking about sobriety nonstop since 2017 so I thought it was time for a break.
But something happened.
First, there was a sudden interest in my Influenced course. Parents started reaching out to me asking me how they could use the course for their own children. Schools started reaching out (after I thought they ghosted me) to see if the course was still available. And there seemed (finally) to be an overall interest in my material.
Then, at the beginning of January The Surgeon General came out with their Alcohol Warning and I’ve been getting non stop texts and messages for weeks. Sobriety is having a moment and the work that I’ve done for years is finally getting a little attention.
As a writer and a sobriety advocate it sometimes feels like my work gets me nowhere. I show up day after day putting in the effort and getting little return. But overtime consistency adds up and something that felt like it was taking forever is now here and present and fully happening.
That’s exactly how sobriety was for me. Painfully hard. It felt like time stopped. I didn’t know when I would be okay, if ever. Then suddenly one day I woke up and I was okay. More than okay. All those days, the consistent small steps added up to something, something that mattered.
So here I am working on my next workshop called What Your Doctor Might Not Be Telling You About Happy Hour. This is focused on helping women find out about how alcohol affects our minds and bodies aside from addiction. I’ve learned over the years of talking about this topic that many women might not be clinically addicted but their relationship with alcohol has become toxic. It’s clinging to them like that boyfriend that they no longer like but they keep around because they don’t want to be lonely.
A few things I’ll cover are:
-Alcohol and Sleep
-Alcohol and Mental Health
-Alcohol and Numbing
-Alcohol and Coping
These are things that if you’re not bringing up to your doctor, they might not know to address. I’ve found most women are too ashamed or embarrassed to talk with their doctors after they’ve lied about their daily drinking intake on their forms (it’s me-I’m most women). I address the warning about alcohol being directly linked to seven different types of cancer as well as the cultural belief systems that have shaped our views about alcohol. Not everyone needs to stop drinking. But everyone in a toxic relationship (of any kind) should be given a chance to see a new way, learn the skills to become independent of that relationship and develop a sharper lens in which they view it from.
I share all of this just to say keep going at the hard thing that you’re doing that you think no one is noticing. Keep working on making your space in the world better. Keep speaking up about what matters even if you are being ghosted. Keep not drinking so that you can see the goodness on the other side of alcohol’s seduction. The work you do matters, your writing, your sobriety and your hope for the greater good.
Want to learn more about my course?
Contact me here and scroll down to get the free ejournal to explore your relationship with alcohol.