Recovery Journey - Part 2 of 3

By Terri Rimmer

In the fall of 1985 I started my sophomore year of college and then my drinking really escalated. The newspaper staff of which I was a part of really took me in . They were big drinkers, as I had said, so I went to all their parties. I was a staff writer and felt included for the first time in my life. I was still having problems with a new roommate but it didn't matter what all the problems I was having with my family, roommate; etc. because I could blot it all out with alcohol. My friends in the dorm and I would make strawberry daquiris, watch "Saturday Night Live" and play Trivial Pursuit sometimes on the weekends and go steal food. I had no moral compass. My mom and step dad would never let me come home on the weekends like all the other classmates' parents did and to numb that pain I would drink.

I got more and more submerged with the newspaper staff and their drinking lifestyle that I lost myself completely. It became my whole identity. I went to summer school in between my sophomore and junior year and so did the newspaper staff and during that summer something really tragic happened to me that still haunts me due to my drinking. Though I received a small journalism scholarship during my junior year and continued serving on the newspaper staff I continued to have blackouts and was a total blackout drinker every time I drank from the time I was 19 ever since that first blackout drunk at 12. My friends would tell me things I did in blackouts and I didn't believe them. I was an obnoxious drunk but another time I hit a guy I'd had an ongoing fling with. I was in a blackout when I hit him and I was stunned when my friends told me this afterwards.

I remember the hangovers, walking home in the snow, losing my car, getting pulled over three times and getting three DUI warnings that would be DUIs today. But back in the 80s in Georgia things were very lax when it came to drunk driving. Everyone drank at school. In fact, I remember being at a party once and some guy asked this girl if she wanted a drink and she said she didn't drink and he thought it was so odd.

I had a couple of religious friends, one of whom was my best friend, Peggy who would invite me to her Baptist Student Union lunches and she would try to get me to quit drinking. She would comment about all the wine cooler bottles in my car and I would get defensive.

At one point in college I did try to kill myself, which was the second suicide attempt but it failed.

Then the summer between my junior and senior year I was in summer school again, still on the newspaper staff but this time serving as editor, a job which I didn't deserve. Another big tragedy happened to me, which would later come back to haunt me three years later due to my drinking. I was so drunk that something so tragic happened to me that I would have to seek counseling for it on an on-going basis. At the time I didn't think anything about it but I later learned that it was something far more serious than I thought. And that is why with my daughter going into her sophomore year of college and still not drinking, I pray she stays on the right path.

By the fall of my senior year, even though I was editor of the school paper, my managing editor and news editor had to pretty much handle everything because my drinking was totally out of control. I was just an editor by title. Although I was still doing the writing and editing, I was not equipped to handle the rest.  By the spring of my senior year, having attended four years of college but no degree, I had to drop out of college due to my drinking. I continued drinking after getting my first apartment and dating a guy who was a bartender and even getting a job as an editor at one of the neighborhood newspapers which was part of my hometown newspaper but he dumped me after a few months due to my behavior.

I tried to go back to school in the fall by commuting but it just wasn't the same with all my friends having graduated. I felt isolated and depressed. 

My sister Cindy, who had been sober since 1987, wound up doing a three-way phone call with me and her friend Nancy, also in recovery and 12-stepped me. I reluctantly agreed to go into a 30-day treatment center in October 1988 but was terrified to tell my bosses who were practicing alcoholics. I tried to bargain with the insurance lady as to how I could give them an alternative reason but she told me I had to tell them the truth.

So, humiliated, I met with them and human resources and told them, "I have a drinking problem." Much to my amazement they told me they'd hold my job till I got out of treatment.

I went into treatment for 30 days but I wasn't ready. I just did it to please my sister. I said all the right things and did all the paperwork. The treatment center had us do steps 1-5 while we were there. I slipped into one of my other addictions while there so I wasn't concentrating on emotional sobriety at all. Even my counselor at graduation said she didn't think I'd make it. The program assistants told us 1 in 40 in treatment make it. I did my 5th step with the priest there and when he asked how I felt afterwards I lied and said "Better." But I was just going through the motions.

When I got out it was around Thanksgiving and I went to a few meetings but my heart wasn't in it. I couldn't get this Higher Power thing because I wasn't ready and I never made the connection. I had so many resentments against God. I only drank for ten years and I was 22. I didn't relate to all these older people, people who had been to prison, people who had lost everything. But, I had nothing to lose. I forgot about the tragic things that happened to me drinking. That that was enough. That you don't have to lose everything. I didn't know that in sobriety later I would lose everything more than once because I wouldn't change my behavior. That you can still hit bottom in sobriety if you don't work the steps. That you can still hit bottom in sobriety from other addictions which did happen to me later. That there is still further down to go if you don't work the steps which did happen to me years later. I didn't know.

I thought it was just about not drinking. I didn't know. I didn't know that if you don't have God in your life horrible things will happen because that's what happened to me later.

I had also been attending some after care meetings but they really weren't helping. I attended a Christmas party there and got some insight.

Then on New Year's Eve I went to a party with my sister. As everyone said, "Happy New Year" as the ball dropped I burst into tears because I wanted to drink so bad.

In January I moved out of state and in with my sister Cindy in FL. I decided it would be a good idea to live with her so I could be with someone in recovery and be accountable to attend meetings on a regular basis.

That would keep me sober, I figured.