I Didn't Have a Rock Bottom

I Didn't Have a Rock Bottom

I didn't have a rock bottom. I had a window office and a 6-figure salary.

By day I crushed million-dollar decisions. By night I crushed a bottle of wine and whatever was in the cabinet. Most mornings I woke at 3am with the same shame and the same promise. Tomorrow would be different.

It wasn't.

Nobody knew.

My doctor said I was average for my zip code. My therapist said most of his clients drank the way I did. From the outside everything looked exactly right. The career. The salary. The composure.

The composure was the whole job.

The drinking and the eating were the only things nobody saw, and I had built my entire life around making sure it stayed that way.

I never hit a rock bottom anyone would recognize. I hit something quieter. I hit the morning where I realized I'd been doing this for almost two decades, and the gap between the woman in the meetings and the woman in the kitchen at 9pm had become too big to keep carrying.

That was the day I stopped trying to quit.

It sounds like giving up. It wasn't. Every method I'd ever tried had asked me to take something away first. Willpower. Rules. White-knuckling until 7pm and losing anyway. Every one of them failed.

I quit quitting.

I started adding instead. Meditation. Books. Running. A garden. Small things that made me feel a little less broken every day. I call it Add-First now. Back then it was just the only thing that hadn't failed.

I wasn't trying to stop drinking. I was trying to stop feeling like a fraud.

Somewhere in there, the wine stopped fitting. The old habits stopped fitting too. Not because I made a rule. Because I had built someone new, and the old behavior didn't belong to her.

That was almost nine years ago.

I work with the version of me who looked fine on the outside. The ones nobody worries about. The ones whose doctors aren't concerned. The ones whose therapists brush it off. The ones whose colleagues would never guess.

You don't need a rock bottom to deserve a different life. You just need someone to tell you the truth about what's actually happening at 7pm, and the right tools to do something about it.

That part nobody teaches.

I'm an Integrative Health Coach. I work with people who want to break the nightly wine and snack spiral quietly. Privately. No one has to know.

If you read this and felt seen, you're exactly who I wrote it for.