I love my mom, but I can also admit that being her daughter has hurt me deeply.

In this episode of Trying in Public, I am talking about the complicated reality of loving a parent while also having to heal from parts of your childhood. I get into my mother wound, growing up too fast, the ways our parents’ pain can become our own, and what it looks like to stop organizing your life around things that happened years ago.

This is not about blaming my mom or reducing our relationship to the hardest moments. It is about making room for two things to be true at once: I can understand her, love her, and have compassion for everything that she has been through, while still being honest about what it did to me.

At some point, understanding where it came from just is not enough. You have to decide what you are going to do with it.

For me, healing isn’t about changing the past. It is about finally deciding what you want to carry forward and doing what makes sense for you.

Recovery is weird because getting sober was only the beginning. Then came the part where I actually had to meet find again.

In this episode, we are getting into what recovery has really looked like for me: the good, the bad, the ugly, and, of course, the funny. The rebuilding. The uncomfortable realizations. Learning how to exist without constantly trying to escape myself. Figuring out who I am outside of survival mode and slowly finding my way back home to me!

Recovery definitely has not been this linear journey where everything suddenly made sense. It’s been messy, hilarious, painful, freeing, and sometimes deeply uncomfortable. But somewhere in all of that, I started recognizing myself again. Challenging, but beautiful! This is what trying looks like in recovery.

In this episode of Trying in Public, I’m telling the story of my relationship with alcohol. From some of my earliest experiences with drinking, to college, New York, and eventually the moments that forced me to really confront what alcohol had become in my life.

This story happened over the span of about four or five years, and trauma has a funny way of impacting your memory and your sense of time. I tried to tell everything as honestly and accurately as I could. I do have a phenomenal memory unfortunately, so it should be pretty accurate lol.

There are funny parts, embarrassing parts, things I can laugh about now, and things that are still hard to revisit. But more than anything, this is the story of how something that started out feeling normal and fun slowly became something much bigger, and what it has looked like finding my way back to myself on the other side of it.

I’m not telling this story because I have everything figured out. I’m telling it because this is Trying in Public, and healing counts too.

Be kind to me! I’m just a (healing) gurl 🤎

Love y’all xoxoxo