It's a Colorful Life! Sobriety After the Storm
Using the word sober to describe how you live can make it sound like you’re missing out. Kristin Fuller is here to tell you it’s anything but that.
Photo & Text by Jennifer Cooper
“My life is so colorful now. I’m recovering who I’m meant to be.”
On December 26, 2020, at 11:45 am, Kristin Fuller knew she’d crossed a line.
The night before, she’d taken 30 milligrams of Ambien and downed a bottle of wine. She wasn’t trying to commit suicide, but after a difficult year that included the loss of her job, a failing marriage, and the realization this would be the last Christmas her family would all be together, she was hoping to feel less pain.
That morning, Kristin moved in and out of consciousness, eventually waking up just enough to find the bathroom. She looked in the mirror and saw someone she didn’t recognize. She was shocked by what she saw and knew she didn’t want her family to see her like this.
So she rubbed her face, brushed her teeth, and tried her best to pull herself together before meeting her family in the front room of their house.
But there was no hiding it: Kristin was in trouble. That’s when her ex said, “I need to talk to you.”
Kristin looked at her teenage children and met their eyes. Then she followed her ex-husband out to the garage.
Kristin experienced the trifecta of pandemic fallout: She lost her job, her marriage ended, and she drank more heavily.
She isn’t alone.
Considering the unrealistic expectations the pandemic made clear—juggling parenting with work, losing work altogether, relationships deteriorating under the weight of stress and quarantine, a fragile and deeply flawed healthcare system, and no real social supports for most—it is not shocking that many of us turned to alcohol as a coping strategy. It’s cheap, readily accessible, and we’ve been primed all our lives to normalize it as a stress reliever.
But the pandemic seems to have accelerated alcohol's dangerous side in one group in particular: women.
According to a RAND Corporation study, American women increased their heavy drinking (more than eight drinks a week) by 41% during the pandemic.
But before I get too far, I want you to know that this series we’re about to embark on is not an indictment on drinking. Instead, it’s a mission to discover how drinking affects us as we enter midlife, if there’s anything new we need to learn or unlearn about alcohol, and what we can do to live as well as possible in the years ahead.
“American women increased their heavy drinking (more than eight drinks a week) by 41% during the pandemic. ”
We’re going to hear from a variety of people in this series. Some drink alcohol, some don’t. Some have experienced alcoholism, but most never hit a “rock bottom.” Because the truth about alcohol is that like so many other things in life, alcohol use lives in a gray area for the majority of us, even if the advertising tells you otherwise.
But first, back to Kristin.
It was actually a mortgage adjustment that got Kristin into a bar. “At that time, I was a stay-at-home mom. I needed a job to cover the new mortgage but still wanted to be able to work in my kids’ classrooms and do field trips. A friend said, ‘I can teach you how to bartend so easily! You can make a lot of money quickly.’ So I learned it, got a job, and she was right.”
Because of the money she was able to make and the flexibility bartending gave her, Kristin could be home with her kids when they needed her and also put herself through college. In a lot of ways, Kristin was living the American dream.
She was good at her job, so she was promoted to manager. More responsibilities came after that. Professionally, things were humming.
Off the clock, Kristin was the go-to mom at playgroups and Mommy Meet Ups whenever a wine recommendation was needed or a glass needed refreshing. “The 20-teen mommy wine culture trend was big in the suburban East Bay area,” she says of her Californian town.
There came a point when Kristin realized alcohol was around her all the time. Then COVID hit.
“Suddenly, I’m out of work, the bar is closed, I’m now entering a divorce, and my whole world crashed. My only way of coping was to drink more.”
As alcohol is progressive and sneaky— you need more of it to get the desired effect and it tricks even the strongest among us into drinking more of it—Kristin found her tolerance increasing.
She was now drinking in excess of two bottles of wine a night.
Kristin stepped into the garage with her ex-husband. “He showed me 17 bottles of wine on the table. They were from one week of recycling. From Friday to Friday was 17 bottles, and that’s just what I had at home. It didn’t account for what I’d brought to friends’ houses.”
If you added those in, you’d have seen 20 to 25 bottles on the table.
“Rock bottom came really fast. It all happened so quickly that there was very little time between thinking, ‘I wonder if I have a problem?’ and ‘Oh my gosh, I’m dying.’” It was startling for everyone around Kristin, including herself.
But this isn’t where the story ends. It’s where it begins.
Americans have always embraced the idea of personal responsibility. And while it may be a founding principle, it doesn’t work in theory or practice. Not exactly, anyway.
Kristin did choose to drink, but she’d been primed to do so by both visible and invisible forces that are around us all the time.
There are the ad executives behind beer and wine campaigns. The celebrities who use their fame and connections to hock their gin or tequila lines only to then sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars to buy another house on a lake that’ll remain vacant most of the time. There are the politicians who vote against programs to support families, forcing them to juggle childcare with work, and the lobbyists who throw money at them to do it. And then there’s the DNA passed down from some relative who lived long before we arrived that makes us susceptible to the dangerous parts of alcohol.
Culture, politics, science. All of them collaborate so no one ever really drinks alone. And yet here we are being told it’s a personal failure on our part if we become addicted to alcohol.
“Drinking was putting gasoline on the fire. I still have bouts of worry since beginning recovery but the PTSD symptoms are almost completely gone.”
Kristin wasn’t really ever alone in her drinking, and she wasn’t alone in her recovery either. That too would take the intervention of others.
“I stopped drinking on December 26th. On January 4th, I started a treatment program with Kaiser.”
Getting through the first 10 days of withdrawal were the hardest, Kristin says. She experienced shaking and brain zaps. And while she was under medical supervision, she needed additional support to recover. That support came in the way of conventional medicine, Reiki, a chemical-dependency therapist, and others.
“By this point I’d been on and off sleeping pills and antidepressants for most of my life and I wanted to learn how to deal with everything through coping skills and therapy. But the only way out is through and I wanted to do the work.”
Recovery is work. It is rewarding work, but it is work. Through treatment, Kristin was able to identify when her PTSD symptoms—that she’d dealt with for years—came on and found ways outside of alcohol to manage the fight or flight response within her body. “Drinking was putting gasoline on the fire. I still have bouts of worry since beginning recovery but the PTSD symptoms are almost completely gone.”
Other things Kristin’s noticed? Her body has completely changed. Her skin has color again. Her adult acne is completely gone. Her hair and nails are healthy, strong, and growing.
And it’s here that Kristin wants us to know something. There is a strong correlation between mental health diagnoses and alcoholism. While it was alcoholism that got her into treatment, it was the double diagnosis that made her understand why she drank. And I want to make something clear: This was not a failure of personal responsibility. Kristin, like so many, was caught in a system in which it’s cheaper and less stigmatizing to buy a $3 bottle of wine to relieve pain than it is to receive care for mental health.
Today Kristin is using her experience, education, and resources to help others live their healthiest, most fulfilling lives.
She writes daily on Facebook to share her journey, and the response she’s had to her honesty and self-compassion has been extraordinary. “I have friends that I hadn’t been in touch with for 10 or 15 years message me to say they know what I’m going through. They were addicted to cocaine or meth. One of my friends had bulimia. These were things I never knew about them.”
She’s also organized a small hiking group with others in recovery. Getting into nature is healing and having a healthy way to bond is transformative.
She’s also founded a coaching practice called Forward Progression, where she specializes in trauma therapy and counseling.
Books like This Naked Mind and Quit Like a Woman were monumental in her recovery, and Kristin recommends Life Ring, Tempest Recovery, and One Year No Beer specifically. She found even more support in recovery groups. But there’s one shift that seems to have had the most impact: choosing the way she speaks about where she’s at in life right now.
“I say I’m in recovery or that I stopped drinking. The word sober sounds like I’m missing out and I’m definitely not missing out. My life is so colorful now. I’m recovering who I’m meant to be.”
Additional editing provided by Kathy Cornwell
Research assisted by Harini Dharanikota
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