Episode 263 Minisode: Country Roads Take Me Home (2): Doubling down on my performance strategies

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This is the second of five episodes in my mini series, Country Roads Take Me Home. I’m going to walk you through a recent trip that I took back to the small mountain town where my first husband and I relocated with our four kids in 2009. We only stayed for two years, but when we moved back, I was not the same person. And going back this summer gave me a chance to reflect with fresh eyes on what really happened. In this episode,

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I’ll talk about how my first instinct when we got there was to do whatever I could to recreate our old life in a new place. But I was a fish out of water. And for the first time, I was in a community where image didn’t matter, at least not in the way I was used to. Nobody cared about perfect hair or having a perfect home or pretending to live perfect lives. They just showed up as themselves. And that freedom to simply be.

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messy, imperfect, and real was both  very uncomfortable and awesomely liberating. It cracked open the possibility of self-trust and gave me a taste of authenticity that I didn’t know I was missing. And while I didn’t fully understand it then, my new relationships and experiences became the compass that I still carry with me today.

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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies  to regulate your nervous system,  balance your dopamine,  and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life  so you can stop worrying about losing control  and trust yourself again.

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Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.

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I remember when  we were moving to West Virginia, which who knew that was a state? I thought we were moving to Virginia literally until we looked at the map to make our first trip here. And I was like, oh, it’s not the West part of Virginia. Oh, that’s a state. Okay. You know, and the stigma of West Virginia still is it’s  Appalachia  and it is,  but it’s also an absolutely beautiful place with beautiful people.

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we moved to a little town called Fayetteville, which is in the New River Gorge.  And I quickly learned  that there’s kind of two types of people. There’s the type of people who grew up here in the culture that is the stereotype, who have never been on the trails, who have never been in the river. They just live here and they’re in the hollers. And there’s some interesting characters. I mean, going to the Walmart, which is the only store on the highway.

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I got real used to shopping here, even though I’m technically morally opposed to Walmart, beggars can’t be choosers.  And you’d go in when the checks,  quote, you the state checks would come out first part of the month. And it was quite a scene. But there was also a completely different world if you were open to seeing it with the people who came here to play here, whether they grew up here or not. They were the rock climbers and the raft guides.

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and the forest rangers and the mountain bikers.  And then business owners  as the tourist industry here with the rivers  swells this community to  hundreds of thousands of people for six weeks a year in gully season. And these are the people that  became our social group. These are the women that I’m here to see now  that included me.

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Even though when I arrived, I had a face full of makeup and I was wearing heels in the parking lot of this little Appalachian private school where I was dropping my kids off,  decked out, you know, acrylic nails and my hair was all done up. And those are just not the values here. And so the same tricks that I had used to elevate myself, at least in my own mind, in my former community, quickly  became a joke.

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And yet for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I was the joke. They were just like, you do you honey, but we pack granolas and water in our backpack and you’ve got hairspray and mascara  and a little touch-up bottle of your spray tan in case you sweat some of it off.  And it was in the safety of these relationships where I felt accepted, where I began to drop the mask, the veneer  that I had been presenting to the world.

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and allow myself to be seen  and allow myself to experience movement and physicality, if you will, in my body without worrying about what I looked like. And no one had ever taught me to do that. I was simply never exposed to that. I hadn’t been athletic in high school.  And if you asked me if I was an outdoor girl prior to moving to West Virginia, I would have said,

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Well, I take my dogs outside and I have to go outside in order to get to my car. Does that count? I mean, I thought the only way to be in shape was to go to a gym.  And once I got to West Virginia, there were no gyms. Well, there was, and I did try to join it, but it was a small group of, you know, steroid users. My women, my people would not have been caught dead in a gym.  They didn’t need a gym. It was...

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Every day was a three sport day. ran, we hiked, we swam. I learned to swim, which prior to this, like, I wouldn’t have gotten my hair wet because my hair mats like a rat, like pools me, don’t mix. And here I am in West Virginia, quickly learning to swim  the distance of the Summersville Lake dam and then  hanging out afterwards without combing my hair. I mean, who am I? And these experiences awakened something in me.

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to be and to feel and to go and to do without worrying what I look like or how I measure up the relationships that I was forming. know, one gal, she and her husband make millions of bucks. We’re sitting next to another gal who cleans the cabins at their resorts and their best friends and looking at them, you’d never know who’s who. And this gave me my first taste of freedom.

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to judge people based on how I felt around them instead of who they are and what they do and what I could do for them or what they could do for me. For the first time in my life, there was nowhere to get. I was already here. And while it made me very sad when it came time to leave,  because of course,  my first husband had somewhere to get  and this was just a stepping stone.

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It made me very sad to leave.  also gave me something that could not be left, could not be taken away. And that was a relationship with myself, a confidence in who I am and how to feel my way through life versus simply trying to reflect whatever I think the people around me want to see. And so when we ended up moving back to Fort Wayne, which is where we had left boomerang effect in that town,

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I didn’t go back the same person. I wanted to feel what I was doing and not just look like I was doing it. And I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that at the time, but this was also the beginning of the end of my first marriage because my values had shifted and we wanted different things  and we couldn’t agree on what those things were. And because I still thought that the things that I wanted were external,

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I attributed the way I felt to the things I had been doing and the people I had been around. Even though my values had indeed evolved, I would spend the next decade of my life continuing to chase the feeling that I wanted to feel  by changing my external circumstances, going and getting it, trying to get there. And so I quickly found myself  in a new relationship with a neurosurgeon  where the main appeal was

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multiple, multiple trips every single year where we were scuba diving and mountain climbing  and  suddenly I had a lake home and three step children. And while I thought that I was getting the best of both worlds, the West Virginia me just flying first class to new and improved locations.  It was also an absolute shit show with all the kids  and the expectations that I accepted.

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from my new husband, as well as the expectations I placed on myself, to continue to perform the role of this new version of me that I thought I’d become, which required me to constantly anticipate what everybody else needed  and manage what everybody else thought to make sure everybody was on board with my version. I got the best divorce ever,  and this new blended family is the best family ever,  and we’re all going to be happy.

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So please put a smile on your face  and get your damn bags packed for our next vacation. I considered myself extremely highly emotionally intelligent for my ability to know what other people  are thinking or would be thinking before they even knew it so that I could manage their opinions, their emotions,  because I still thought that that was what was required for me to feel the way I wanted to feel.  And  as you might imagine this

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new job that I’d gotten, which from the outside looked like quite the promotion, led me to become even more emotionally disconnected from myself because there was so much that I would not allow myself to acknowledge. I was a professional at forcing  circle pegs into square holes and then gaslighting myself and everybody around me to insist that that was a good fit, which is exhausting.

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and why I found myself falling deeper and deeper into the whole of alcohol use disorder. I’d been a daily drinker in my first marriage, but never thought of it as a problem. And in hindsight, you know, there was a physical dependence. I now understand why I wasn’t able to take a night off because of low dopamine and the addiction to the...

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substance, know, addiction is a spectrum. I don’t use that word with any heaviness to it, but I was dependent, like one might be dependent on coffee for sure. But I didn’t hit the downward slope of alcohol use disorder until a few years into my second marriage when I had painted myself into such a pretty corner that the only option for saving myself would have been removing myself  and taking my four kids with me.  And it was easier.

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to just blame myself  and beat myself up for being ungrateful because  if I was not able to be happy in this life,  then evidently I was simply not capable of being happy.  And I sure as hell wasn’t capable of supporting myself anywhere near  any of the lifestyles I’d grown accustomed to after being home for 20 years. And so I just continued to take care of my kids and take care of the houses and take care of all the logistics.

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and did my best to try new things and make myself happy and stay connected and be grateful for the fact that I could afford really nice wine and top shelf vodka. And then  one day,  April 21st of 2020, my body decided it was done putting up with my shit. I was making a run about 10 miles to run off my hangover again that morning. was about five weeks into lockdown, April 21st,  2020.

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and my hand just took my phone  and impulsively dialed the AA hotline and I said, I need help.

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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.