This business owner in Florida is grateful that she had access to abortion and wants that access to be available for other people who need it.
“Listen, we don’t want a bajillion abortions, but let’s make it safe, let’s make it available. And I just want to let women know this is a decision between a woman and her doctor. It is not up for public debate.”
ANNOTATIONS
Learn More: “What Are the Side Effects of In-Clinic Abortions?,” Planned Parenthood, accessed September 6, 2024.
Learn More [2]: “Abortion Methods: In-Clinic Abortion Procedure,” Planned Parenthood, accessed September 6, 2024.
Learn More [3]: Gotter, “Everything You Need to Know About Surgical Abortion,” Healthline, June 30, 2022.
Learn More [4]: “What Happens after a Surgical Abortion?,” Brown University, accessed September 6, 2024.
Learn More: “Abortion Trends by Party Identification,” Gallup.com, accessed September 6, 2024.
Learn More [2]: Amanda Terkel and Jiachuan Wu, “Abortion Rights Have Won in Every Election since Roe v. Wade Was Overturned,” NBC News, August 9, 2023.
Learn More [3]: Reem Nadeem, “Broad Public Support for Legal Abortion Persists 2 Years After Dobbs,” Pew Research Center (blog), May 13, 2024.
Learn More [2]: David Ludden, “How Early Childhood Shapes Your Political Views,” Psychology Today, September 8, 2020.
Learn More [3]: Andrea Michelson, “Why Some Kids Stick with Their Parents’ Political Views and Others Rebel,” Business Insider, October 30, 2020.
Learn More [4]: Alvin Chang, “Your Politics Aren’t Just Passed down from Your Parents. This Cartoon Explains What Actually Happens.,” Vox, November 20, 2018.
TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by Dan Swern
Conducted Remotely
June 29, 2023
Transcription by Allison Baldwin
Annotations by Ainsley Fisher
0:00
Today is Thursday, June 29th and it is 4:06 pm Eastern time. My name is Dan Swern and I am here in the coLAB Arts offices in New Brunswick. I am conducting this interview remotely and I’m here interviewing–
[Redacted]
[Redacted], thank you so much again for participating in this project and for your generosity in sharing your story, and whenever you’re ready just feel free to start at the beginning.
So, thank you Dan. You let me know a few minutes ago that this was going to be sort of free form. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go because our last call was kind of question and answer, so it was really to come in unprepared, but doing things extemporaneously is not foreign to me, so this is fine, but I would say that if I had to, if I had to thematically say what my story is ultimately about is probably, you know, having an abortion. What made a lot of things possible in my life, having the good life that I have today, uh, would not be possible had I not had an abortion when I was in my early twenties. And so, I don’t even know, it doesn’t even make sense that I got pregnant because, you know, my mom, growing up, she, uh, my parents voted Republican growing up, and they had three kids, and I have two older brothers, and I’m the baby and, um, and my parents came from [Redacted] and they wound up meeting in Florida together and they are Republican, they were Republican, somehow they’re both gone now, but, um, they had three kids, and all of us are– and I feel like I am having déjà vu like I told you this last time, but one of us is a Democrat, one of us is a Republican, and one of us is a Libertarian/no party affiliation. That would be me, the Libertarian. But, so my mom very much felt like a woman’s right to choose was, like, pretty crucial, you know, pretty, like, you know, almost like a civil right I think. She never explained that to me, like I remember my parents got divorced, and remember I’m the baby, so when everyone was out of the house, when I was like a senior in high school my parents got divorced and, uh, my mom wanted to take me to counseling to make sure I was okay, and the intake person was asking me about what sort of birth control she talked about in our household, and my mom was like, “abstinence,” and I was like, “Wait, what?” That’s literally, like, news to me. That’s the first time I’ve heard it. I’m like seventeen years old. But so, um, my mom made sure I had a boyfriend in high school. A nice kid who was in advanced classes like I was. He was like a year older than me and a really nice guy who, literally, if I passed him on the street today I would, you know, shake his hand and introduce him to everyone I know because he was such a nice person. He doesn’t live– we don’t live in the same city so we don’t bump into each other.
So, my mom– I became sexually active when I was a teenager, and my mom made sure I was on birth control, and also I worked in a pharmacy as a teenager in high school and college and so, you know, I was exposed to contraceptives, contraceptive methods, working in a pharmacy, even barrier methods like condoms and things like that so I really, you know, I was exposed to that, it was not a mystery to me and, you know, for the most part, I kind of understood all of the biology of how all this worked and, um, you know, I went to college, I was on oral contraceptives the whole time. And started college, actually took a class in human biology where we actually learned about contraceptive methods and how they biologically and physiologically worked. Like the birth control pill, like, if I take the birth control pill will I go through cycles throughout the month. And how, you know, an IUD that comes into the womb without hormones is considered a foreign body so it rejects it. It gets rejected by the body. That’s how an IUD works without hormones and things like that. And so I learned these things in college and I understood it and then I just kind of like, I don’t know what happened, but the end of junior year I had transferred to a big state school in [Redacted] and just kind of gave up, I don’t really know, I can’t really speak to that mental state now because it’s just so– it seems so distant and foreign to me now why I would just kind of like shirk any responsibility and just be so careless, but I quit taking birth control and I was fooling around with a guy from home and—a guy that I met through my job—and I got pregnant, and I had to move home from [Redacted], and about that time I found out I was pregnant, and I had moved back home and I was with my mom. And I was like, “Mom, I have messed up here,” and I’ll tell you what, my mom was crucially absent through many parts of my life, like the parts of my life where I was making all As and captain of the quiz bowl team and getting scholarships. She was absent. Like my high school graduation where was getting all these accolades–
5:37
My dad came to my graduation too, after they had just divorced, and my mom couldn’t handle it so she left, so there was crucial moments in my life where I was like my mom is not here. And then, for this though, she, like, saved the day. And, um, I was really grateful for that. She, um, I don’t even think there was much of a delay. It was either the next day or the day after. I was like, “Mom, I had a positive pregnancy test. This is not good.” Because at the time, I hadn’t even graduated college. I wasn’t making a significant income. Most of my income was coming from scholarships and financial aid and it was my mom and I. It was obvious that this was not a good situation so, you know, her natural response is we take care of this and so she took me to a clinic.
As far as I know in my town there are a couple of places where you can go for the procedure. This one that I know of, many years later, I have seen people picketing outside years later and I was like, I remember that place, but my mom took me there and it was like, I don’t know if just getting older like the distance from the events of the past just get more fuzzy, but like I just– the whole thing I just remember kind of waking up out of the twilight because I had never been put under anesthesia before and this was like they put you in twilight and do it, and they couldn’t, like, it was just so soon and I knew that something was different and I knew that, uh, I knew that it was too soon, and I knew that I did not want this pregnancy at all, like on a regular sonogram they couldn’t see it, and so they had to use a vaginal tool to see it because it was so early on, and I was like just get it and, um, ah, and they did, and I woke up, and I was kind of looking around, I couldn’t, I mean, I– you kind of have to laugh about it today or otherwise you’d cry your eyes out. But looking around there was just this other group of women who were in the daze who are handed a pack of Ortho Tri-Cyclen and are like, “Okay, don’t do this again.” And for me I was just like, uh, ah, uh, ah, for me I was like, “Wow, I do not wish to do that again.” And, you know, the aftermath afterward was just probably, you know, the physical things that anyone would experience, you know, just with a heating pad in bed and, you know, whatever pills they give you to expel any of the afterbirth and things like that. And so, um, it was just not the most comfortable thing, but I had heard about it from a couple of girlfriends of mine that had had the same procedure, so I kind of knew what to expect, and as I’ve gotten much older too, I’m in my 40s now and, my god, there are a lot of us out there that have had abortions and so– I actually can’t think of one of my girlfriends that I know that had the procedure that they regret it. It was just, like, it was like right timing, you know, just like a– a– the right thing at the right time. And so for me it was– and I, kind of like, got my act together and, not long after that, I actually got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and now I– I was sober for like fifteen years, like in a row, and then I resumed drinking after that, but, it sounds like a failure, but really it was not. It was after much research and after about fourteen years sober where I googled, “People in AA are full of shit.” And it came up with a million results or something and I was like, “Wait a minute, what is this?” Because, you know, it was just a place that I wasn’t feeling safe anymore and, um, a, but, you know, um, it helped me. Being sober, going to bed early every night, waking up early, going to work every day and doing a good job at work because I’m clear-headed. It helped me develop my career, which helped me make some excellent connections over the years. Which made it so that when I started my business in my mid-thirties, I had a lot of support and a lot of good and good will in the community to kind of lift me to where I needed to be.
10:05
And so, um, if I really think back on, you know, um, if I hadn’t had the abortion, I would have been towing a child behind me the entire time, and I just gotta admit that, you know, even when I was a kid I didn’t really like kids, and so, you know, that’s one of the things as an adult that, um, I just have known forever that I never wanted to be a mom, so of course when I got pregnant in my early twenties I was just, “I can’t, there’s– it doesn’t even compute.” It was like, um, it was like– it’s incompatible, so the abortion for me was like–
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with women who get multiple abortions. We all have our reasons for whatever we’re doing. For me, I just needed the one time. I don’t wish to– I don’t wish to do it again. But I’m taking precautions now, and for whatever reason, at the time I mentioned, I just quit taking my birth control and was being so careless and just not really caring about my future and things like that, and I couldn’t really envision a life for myself beyond maybe the age of 25, and I don’t know what it was, the self-destructive whatever. I’m sure Freud could list a million reasons on a whiteboard why that might have happened but, um, I just kid of neglected taking care of myself and found myself in a pickle, and the solution for me was the solution that made it possible for all the opportunities in my life beyond that to happen.
And when I say opportunities, I really mean career opportunities, because from the minute after that I was on oral contraceptives, some hormonal birth control of some sort. I have not stopped since then because I was like, “Oh, my god, if I stop this, I’m going to get pregnant.” And that was not– I just– I don’t want to have to get an abortion again because that seems like, it just seems like, you know, there are ways to prevent that and so, even though I truly condone any woman’s reason to do it, if we can prevent it, let’s try.
So, for me, taking oral contraceptives, I happen to be a person that, when I take hormonal birth control, like, I don’t really notice. I know other women have trouble with hormonal birth control and so for them it’s sort of a different situation and different sort of story, but for me hormonal birth control has always worked. When I don’t take it, I get pregnant and when I do I don’t. And I know that these methods are not foolproof, that they’re not one hundred percent and so, you know, with partners over the years, you know, I married my husband about three years ago, you know, you get to know your partner and then maybe you don’t use protection anymore and you say, “Hey, I’m on birth control and if something were to happen,” you know. I remember actually the guy I dated before I met my husband, it was like the summer before 2018. I was single, I wasn’t expecting to be single, and I was kind of just doing this cougar thing, like you know, I don’t have kids, I don’t want kids, I don’t really want to hang out with kids, so if I want to date and be sexually active it’s probably going to be some younger guys that have never had kids, and probably one day they’ll get married and have kids with someone else, but maybe I’ll have a series of long-term relationships or whatever and I was literally so cool with that. I was like, you know, okay, I’m great with my lot in life, that sounds amazing. I had started my business during that time and my business was doing well enough that I was attracting the right kind of mates. Whatever implications you take from that statement. But just guys that looked like they were the treasurer of their fraternity or whatever.
So, I dated these younger guys for a while and the one I dated before I met my husband– really great guy, a CPA, and I would do anything for him. He got married to a wonderful woman and wish them the best, but, like, you know, when we became sexually active and we weren’t using a barrier method, I said, “If I get pregnant I’m just going to have an abortion and not tell you,” and he was like, “Okay.” Like, probably the coolest conversation I had had about that and I, you know, we had parted ways and, you know, in a very friendly fashion, and when I met my husband, I met him not long after that and he, you know, kinda said the same thing to him and he was cool with it too, not as cool as the other guy.
Also, my husband, I have very libertarian views and I told him that, “Listen, we all know that heroin is bad. Why can’t we make it legal? If you want to do it, do it. Who cares?”
15:00
We all know it’s bad for you. We have cigarettes and alcohol and potato chips, you know what I mean. Like why are we restricting some of these things if people want to do that, and my husband was like, who was just my boyfriend at the time, he said, “That’s absurd,” and I will tell you I have made this man libertarian over the last five years. So, he like loves the gays and doesn’t care if anyone is trans, but he also wants to have a good economy, so I think that probably a lot of these, you know, you’re from Jersey, so in Florida we have a lot of Trumpers down here, but I think that if you had a conversation with these people that you would realize that they are socially, like, compassionate people who don’t give a shit because they have a gay uncle or whatever, you know what I mean. They really don’t care what people do in their private lives. And really, I think that’s how most people feel.
The part that makes them conservative is the part that makes them not want a lot of taxation, doesn’t want a lot of social welfare and things like that. I think you would find that these people are more middle of the road, but there’s just this, kind of like, you know, the bifurcation has to like, I don’t know, I think there’s some sort of like– I think I read a book about drama triangles or something. And how it can happen in nations too, and people in nations, and how they’re pitted against each other and things like that, and I think there always has to be a victim and a savior and things like that. And it switches sides. And so I kind of think that’s what we’re experiencing as a country, if I had to be really, like, deep about it, but I think you would find that, you know, the people that, like, I want to be friends with that may vote Republican may actually be more middle of the road. In the way that they think.
So, I actually quit voting, you know what I mean, like I gave up. Or I quit voting for people who were going to win and voted for write-ins, voted for a third-party or independent candidates and, you know, just not really, I actually discussed this on my first date with my husband, um, it was 2018 and we were going into a midterm election, or something like that, and I was like listen, like, “It had these amendments to the state constitution on these midterm ballots and the language is so misguiding and slanted to get you to vote a certain way.” And so, collectively, at least in Florida, the state, we learned, like, hey you have to read the Tampa newspaper and their analysis in order to understand like what the constitutional– the state constitutional amendment is about and so everyone was like, “Listen before you vote you gotta read, at the time it was the Tampa Tribune, you gotta read the Tampa Tribune to really know what was going on, and I’m in [Redacted]. We were still like, well, you have to read the Tampa newspaper in order to understand how to vote on the state constitutional amendments.
And also the next time I was like, I could read the newspaper, but I could also be like, why are these politicians trying to trick me. Into voting a certain way with the way this is worded on our ballet. This seems, like, counter-intuitive to the democratic process, and that was the point when I gave up on the democratic process and, um, quit voting, or quit voting for people that even had a shot at anything. And I thought that that would make me really compatible with everyone, and what happens is like people are like, “You gotta pick a side,” so it’s just bullshit.
And I know that I have turned this conversation into something political, but um, you know, I’m just really sad, I’m really sad that this has happened. The reason that we’re talking about this is there's some anti-democratic bullshit happening at the highest levels of our government. And to me that’s frustrating, even though I feel like I’m getting off easy because I’m 43. I’m nearing the end of my reproductive years. I can go– I went to a website. I went to a website in the last few months. It’s a UK website and an Indian Pharmacy. It’s called AidAccess.org and I was able to get a regimen of abortion pills that you can use up to ten or twelve weeks.
Because, listen, I take precautions because I don’t want to purposely get pregnant, because I know I don’t want to have children, but if I have an accident I want to– I don’t want to have children so I want to have a way to terminate it.
20:05
And, um, I, you know, I get a regular prescription that’s a controlled substance, and I’ve been doing this through COVID, like, on the phone, getting this prescription, and they– the law changed a couple months ago, so I just had to go in, I had to go in once a year to see them or whatever. And the practitioner that I saw, I had never seen her before, but I was going to be able to go back to my, you know, phone lady, but she just had to see me, and I mentioned that I do take oral contraceptives but I do also have an abortion pill regimen at home in case. And she was like, “In case of what,” and I was like, “Well, in case I get pregnant. I don’t want to have the baby.” And so it was, you know, this practitioner—in other ways besides that particular statement—made it clear that, like, babies are a blessing and things like that, you know. Not that they aren’t. For most people. But, you know, it was just not the sort of matter-of-fact medical care that I would have expected to receive.
And, um, so anyway, currently I’m in Florida, and there’s like a fifteen week ban on abortion. And so I kind of think of myself as, kind of like, the abortion fairy to, like, my friends, and so I have just had some candid conversations like, “You don’t have to mention it to me, but if you or anyone you know, listen I know where we can get abortion pills online because we are about to have six week ban, in Florida, that legislation is on the table. And if I can help in any way, please let me know because this is something I feel very strongly about because if I had had a baby, I would have been 21 years old.”
And my niece was born about six months before my pregnancy would have been coming to term. And so, my niece now is like, my gosh, she must be 22 at this point and so I would have had a 21 or 22 year old kid, and if I could just tell you, you know, going back thematically to what I was saying earlier, you know, if I had not had the pregnancy termination I would have been toting a child behind me for the last twenty-two years. And I would not have started a business. I would not be living the life I am today. I’m telling you, Dan, that when I was in my early twenties I had this far off nebulous vision that one day when I retired in my 60s that I would love to have view of the ocean and read the newspaper, you know, sit on my porch and drink coffee and, you know, I’m 43, and when I was 25 that was just, that seemed like something that would never happen. I honestly thought that I would have to marry well in order for that to happen.
And, you know, I started a business at 35, have been scaling it for the last four or five years, and my husband and I bought a home in April with a view of the ocean, and we have a covered porch with a sea breeze and we have rocking chairs out there, and I sit out there and, you know, I don’t read the paper anymore because it sucks, but I read books out there, and we have cocktails sometimes, and we have coffee, and we listen to music, and we’re right on this thoroughfare in our beach community. We see people riding bikes and, you know, honestly, the first weekend after we moved in, this was in April, so not that long ago, and this guy in this, like, Los Angeles/Hollywood-caliber Batman costume rode by in front of our house.
And we didn’t know our neighbors across the street at the time, but we heard them saying “Hey Batman, Hey Batman!” My husband had ridden his bike down the road so he had missed Batman, but Batman comes back every couple of weeks. And so, I am kind of just living this dream life.
And I know I had mentioned to you in our earlier call that my folks had passed away, and since then my relationship with my older brothers has kind of been fractured. And, um, I haven’t spoken to them in a number of years, and I also mentioned that my middle brother had been an employee of mine for about a year. And it kind of came to a disappointing end. They don’t know that I’ve moved. I don’t know that they would be all that happy for me. I believe that they still think that I am the problem person in our family and that I make all the mistakes. And I’m, ah, I just know that my business has been a vehicle to help people in a way that I never could have if I had never been able to start the business and if I had had a child all those years.
25:11
I just would not have been able to achieve the things that I have, and in my own way, on a very individual basis, I am able to give back in little ways. I’m not at the top of the donor list at the African Children’s Hunger Fund or, you know, or like breast cancer research or whatever, but in my own little way I am making an impact in my community. And I would not be able to do that if I had other responsibilities, if I had other financial obligations, if I had a co-parent and my love life would not be as fulfilling if I, you know, if I had a co-parent in the mix. And for a number of reasons I have never looked back from that decision.
But I also didn’t want to have to make that decision again, and so I wanted to be responsible and, you know, just knowing that I know that I know that I don’t want to have children, it’s been important to me to, um, you know, use a reliable form of birth control. And if, you know, I could really convey any message, this is like this is not a mistake. It’s a procedure. This is a decision between a woman and her doctor, and um, it’s not right and it’s not wrong, and it’s not good, and it’s not bad. Certainly no one wants more abortions, but let’s give women access to them. Let’s make it safe. Let’s make it comfortable. And then let’s give everyone access to the birth control that works for them. You know, we could go on and on about the studies of when women have education, when women have birth control, you know, when women have access to family planning they are able to succeed and get out of whatever socio-economic barriers they’ve been experiencing or generationally things like that and, um, a– I just think it’s kind of a shame what’s been happening lately.
I don’t know if your work came out of that. I didn’t kind of ask that question, but this is just sort of like, if I can kind of in the down low sort of way help a woman in a pinch, I will. And there’s a– I actually spend a lot of time on Reddit, and there are some subreddits that I frequent, like the child-free subreddit where we support other people, you know, the people that are middle age like me or getting into their senior years that never wanted children, never had them, and seeing these people who are 22 and they are saying like, “I don’t want to have children” and people are saying to me, “You’re going to change your mind. It’s different when it’s your own.” We call those Bingos and, um, the rest of us that, you know, have aged out of our fertility and, um, we’re like, look no regrets. I’m living the life of my dreams. And people will talk about whatever is going on in their lives. And it’s a great support community that I found.
But the other community that I found on Reddit, not that I want to encourage more people to spend more time on Reddit because, oh my god, it’s like, eat potato chips or smoke cigarettes or something like that. There’s the Anti-Network on Reddit and it’s a group of men and women that are allied to the cause of giving women assistance in their own reproductive decisions, and so women from all over the country can kind of post on this subreddit and get help and get rides and get rooms and get food and, you know, get transportation and, you know, I don’t know if money exchanges hands, but, uh, you know, it’s just a place where we can help women get what is just truly, you know, part of their rights as a human being.
So, you know, that wasn’t very long. Do you, I don’t know Dan, do I need to elaborate on anything here? I feel that was pretty complete for what I wanted to say.
[Redacted], if you’re open to it, I would love to ask you some questions about other parts of your life.
Sure.
Do you mind sharing a little bit about the development of your business, what your education was, and sort of what your journey was in creating what you have today?
Sure. You know, I went to college to a couple state schools in Florida and they more than paid my way. I made money to go to college, so I stayed in undergrad for a long time. And had a tremendous amount of credits and ended up graduating with a degree in [Redacted], just because, not because I loved it, but because it was kind of the thing I was closest too and they were going to stop paying for it, um, I had just some really lucky breaks in my working career where I got to work in [Redacted] that that beget the next job with a property manager where I [Redacted], met some great people there who helped me so much in my life, and then I moved into sales and learned how to sell things, and got really great guidance from my employer after that. I went to a [Redacted] after that and then I went to a [Redacted] job after that, which was kind of like boiler room and I hated it, but after that boiler room job when I was 35 I started my company.
I kind of had a bit of a life failure, um, I had a whirlwind romance with a fella. I mean, I was on birth control at the time, but he was also, like, infertile so that kind of worked in a number of ways. He had convinced me to quit my job. I had climbed the corporate ladder. I was in this really stressful, but lucrative, job and I sold my condo and my car and quit my job to go work for his small businesses. And I thought I was going to marry this guy and, um, the relationship did not work out, and I had some money in the bank but I was also kind of unemployed at the time, because I was kind of broken up about it and I was like, I have really fucked myself here, and, um, so I had decided to go back to some of those people who I had either worked with or alongside and I said, “Hey, I can solve some problems for you. Tell me what’s going on and let me solve some problems for you and help you make some more money.” So, went to a couple people without propositions and they hired me.
So, I started a company doing hourly consulting work for small businesses to help them improve their profit margins, and had some really good successes early on, and then in a networking group I had a commercial banker ask me if I knew how to write a business plan, and I never had before, you know, I have an undergrad in [Redacted], but honestly I googled it and was like, “Okay, I can do this,” and I did, and they actually loved it. And that was probably about nine years ago and, you know, those bankers who I did that first business plan for are coming to our house on 4th of July for our party and, you know, that worked out really well. So, I started this company, and it was just me for a number of years. I may have had some support help, like one or two contractors over the years—the first five years—and then I’ve been scaling it the last four years.
33:00
So, we’ve gone from just me, four years ago, to like thirty-two employees and my husband. Was able to quit his [Redacted] job and come do sales for us and, you know, he’s a way better salesman than an engineer. We have just found that we get to help a lot of people achieve personal wealth through owning businesses or buying businesses and also paying less in taxes is one of my, you know, personal sort of pet projects, helping people learn how to strategize with their taxes as a small business. And build wealth because of that and, so that is kind of what has happened and, um, I had hired a company about a year ago to help me scale the business and they have really come through. It’s really what I thought was some sort of wacky stuff. They talked about mindset first and this like this business coaching and for about a year I listened to this self-hypnosis. I closed my eyes and listened to this self-hypnosis on abundance and, like, really the message was we have all these messages imprinted in us from an early age and we knew how to change them, you know, if we could change this mindset and be wealthy, we would totally do it, but it’s like imbedded in our subconscious so we have to trick it through, you know, repetition or through, you know, going into the subconscious. And so, yeah, at first I thought it was real, you know, crazy and, um, when it started working and I tripled my revenue in the first year with this coaching company I was like, “well, there’s something to this,” and I kind of just gave in. So, did that answer your question?
35:40
[Redacted], do you mind sharing a bit about your life as a kid, just in terms of what the experience was like with your brothers and your family? Like, did you get into trouble? Those kinds of things. What was life like at school? Those types of questions.
You know, I was the top of my class. All the time growing up. I was in, like, the gifted classes and made all A’s through elementary school, made all A’s through junior high, made almost all A’s through high school. Got a lot of scholarships to college so that I made money every semester, but, um, I would say that in the household that I grew up in it was, um, ah, nobody ever, well, first of all, nobody ever pressured me to study. Nobody was saying you need to make better grades, you need to work harder or, like, or you’re not smart enough, or you’re not doing enough, or you’re not good enough. Nobody ever said that to me growing up. Because it wasn’t true. But when I made the best grades and the good grades and the top of my class I also didn’t hear like “Wow, this is amazing. I can’t believe you did this. This is so impressive.” It wasn’t until I was an adult and I looked back that I was like, “Wow, not everyone is in the top one percent of their class.” So what I did as an adult was like, try to funnel that and be like, “How can I use this for my benefit now?”
Because I went to a state school, I didn’t know, actually there’s this audio book that I’m listening to right now called The Forgotten Girls and it’s this woman who grew up in Arkansas and she, uh, her mom’s whole thing was getting her daughters out of Arkansas so they wouldn’t have a life like hers, and so the oldest daughter wrote this book, and she went to Bryn Mawr, and she ended up writing this book about this kind of Ozarkian, middle-of-the-country/ Appalachian women that succumb to these, kind of like, you know, depths of despair that we hear about, and that they are kind of forgotten because there’s this kind of even evangelical push to be subordinate to your husbands and make babies and things like that, and so I don’t know where we were going with that, but, pardon me, how did we get on that topic, Dan? Oh, you asked me about my childhood growing up.
And so, I will say that, um, even though my parents didn’t encourage me to go to the Ivy League, or, you know, I took the SAT once and that was like good enough and so they didn’t encourage me, like I could have gotten better and maybe gone to Harvard or something like, maybe, but, you know, I just went to this public school in Florida in, like, not a big county, and, you know, they just didn’t, like, teach me that even at some of these larger schools, or these Ivy League schools, they have endowments for people that maybe can’t afford it, so I didn’t know, and so I went to state schools, but still got a great education, had a good experience, and while my parents didn’t tell me there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, they didn’t make me feel like I was this amazing, like, they didn’t make me feel like I was something special either.
You know at some point my parents were dealing with my oldest brother who barely graduated high school. My middle brother and I never had any problems with school or anything like that. Now, my middle brother didn’t make all A’s like I did, but– he wasn’t gifted or anything like that, but our oldest brother barely skated through high school, like barely graduated. He started at a community college when, like, I’m five years younger than he is, and he was taking remedial algebra or something, and he was having trouble with it. I became an algebra tutor after that, but I was like helping him with his homework, and at that point he was like– he dropped out and went to the military.
And so, kind of grew up in this house where my oldest brother, who wasn’t that smart but was very handsome, and was kind of like the golden child. My middle brother was kind of like the forgotten one, so my mom’s favorite. She was like, “Oh my god, I forget him, so let me make him my favorite.” And then I was like the one, you know, this is– if you kind of read about these dysfunctional families, we kind of had the whole archetype where I was like the scapegoat and, um, a– I’m not, like, imagining that. Even though I don’t speak to my brothers today, you know, if you were to say to them, “It seemed like [Redacted] was the scapegoat in your family.” They would be like, “Oh, for sure.”
40:15
And there was a time after we had been beyond all that stuff when my brothers and our friends and stuff, we were walking to a football game in downtown [unclear] I heard my brother say to this guy, “Yeah, [Redacted] had it rough when we were kids. Nobody was easy on her.” And that for me, that was really, I was like, “Fine, that’s good,” like that was really gratifying for me that I heard that because, like, I had no backup on that. You know what I mean, like, my brothers were hard on me. My folks weren’t hard on me academically, but they were never pleased with my behavior.
But whatever, you know what I mean, like, I didn’t wish for my parents to die at relatively young ages. My mom was 64. My dad was 71. But with them gone I have just jettisoned into this whole other level of life gratification, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I’m like meeting on every level, you know what I mean, like, I’m really like having the self-actualization time of my life, but of course I would still wish for my parents to be back, and I wouldn’t have wished for them to die when they were living, but since they’ve passed away, I’ve just felt, I didn’t expect it, but I’ve just felt like a freedom and a permission to succeed to any level. That nothing is unattainable. But they– when they were living it’s not like they– I had asked my dad once, because I was confused, and, I don’t know, I was like 24 and I had bought, like, a couple-year-old Toyota Highlander, and let’s say this is like a 24 year-old middle class, like, dream or something like that and my mom would not talk to me. For like a year after that and it’s a very middling sort of– first of all it’s like a car and I have, like, debt, it’s not like I paid with cash or whatever, and my mom could not stomach speaking to me because it was like just too much of a level of success for her for me to achieve. Like for fuck’s sake.
And I remember about that time asking my dad like, you know, it was kind of a leading question, but like, I knew how my dad would answer, but like I was kind of like, “Don’t you guys want us to do better than you did?” And he was like, “Always, always. That’s my only wish for you guys. I love that you guys have become friends as adults because my brothers and I were friends at the time. I love that you guys have become friends as adults and I, of course, don’t want anything less than for you guys to achieve, if it’s possible, for you to achieve more than we have.” But still, my dad, you know, when I started my business, you know, they just thought it was like, blah, blah, blah, hobby or something like that. Or like what she’s doing while she’s unemployed so I would say that I have achieved these measurable external, you know, these visual measures of success where people measure that way since my parents have passed away, and I’m glad that it’s happened since they passed away because I think that they might have been kind of hateful about it if they were still living. In fact, I don’t interact with my brothers because they really kind of, you know, I can kind of tell they have been gunning for me, like my failure is like schadenfreude for them, but I wish them the best.
You know what I mean, I don’t have any ill will toward my brothers. It’s just that for whatever reason they’re not okay with me being happy and successful so I just can’t be around them. But my husband and I do surround ourselves with super positive, like, ambitious– and his friends not one of them is a criminal or a societal reject, you know what I mean, they’re all like, and I should mention that my husband is a bit younger than I am, [Redacted], so his friends are like– so we went to twelve weddings in 2021 and a ton of them were out of town. I was looking at my bank account and was like, “Why aren’t we getting ahead?” And it’s like, “Oh because we’re spending a thousand dollars every week at a hotel,” so we went to all these weddings, and now the people are starting to have the babies, and we could not be more thrilled for everyone, but my husband has kind of gone through this thing of when we got together and he was like, “Oh, my god, we sit on the couch all night and we don’t do anything, and I don’t see my friends anymore,” and I’m like, “Well, all your friends are coupled up with their significant others and doing the same thing, like, we can’t go to a concert every night, like I promise you.”
And now that they’re having kids, kind of this other, you know, level of, like, detachment from some of his friends.
45:40
Now this is unusual for my generation because I don’t have any friends that are like this, but my husband has a couple of friends that I’m now friends with them, um, that don’t want children either, and we’ve talked about it. We call it the Thirty Year Friends, like, we’re not looking for friends until we all go have children and hide, but we’re looking for friends for the next thirty or forty years until we’re all decrepit, and so what we’re doing now is a lot of trivia, a lot of boat days, a lot of beach days. You know, I know it’s not doing much for the propagation of the species but we are truly living our best lives and human beings, so, I feel like we got off track there.
Just to sort of lean into what you were saying about your parents’ experiences versus your own, can you share a little bit about your parents, what they did professionally, and sort of how does that compare? The way you grew up and how does that compare with the way you’re living now?
Sure. So, it’s very interesting. My mom grew up in [Redacted], and her mom was a single mom. My mom was born in 1947 and her mom was born in 1927. So, she was young when she had my mom and she had told– my grandma had told everyone that my mom’s dad had died in the military and so she was a single mom and raised my mom in [Redacted]. She had a bar that she owned and that’s how she supported my mom and put her through private school and then my mom went to [Redacted] after that in [Redacted] Pennsylvania, which I think is [Redacted] now. So my grandma lied about my grandpa, because my grandpa was living, and he had like four kids after my mom. My mom didn’t find this out until she was eighteen, so she grew up with a single mom born in 1947, which as you can imagine is unusual, but also she was in [Redacted], so it was, like, not totally unusual. And then my grandma had– she married [Redacted] and then they ended up moving to Florida after he retired and my grandma sold her bar.
But my mom went to college in Pennsylvania, and then as a 22 year-old moved down to [Florida] because I think that’s where my grandma was and she met my dad there. And my dad had grown up as the baby of four children in 1946 in [Redacted] in a little town called [Redacted], and they had a beach house in [Redacted], and so my dad came from a sort of a little bit different environment than my mother did. So, you know, my dad was born in ’46 and he had three sisters older than him, and that were born between 1935 and 1944, and all of my dad’s sisters went to college, and some of them have terminal degrees in their field, so on my dad’s side it was sort of this [Redacted], sort of, my grandpa had a business in [Redacted] and commuted from [Redacted], and so my aunt who was born in 1935 went to college, she had a Black roommate, who she will tell you today, she’s still living, my aunts are still living, all of them. My dad’s passed away but my aunts are still living. And my oldest aunt at this point is like 86 or 87 and she still hangs out with her Black roommate from college that she will tell you about. We hang out with her, you know, the roommate’s grandkids and stuff, they come to the [beach] and stuff like that because we still have this home in our family.
And so my dad kind of came from this family with [Redacted] kids, big family, I’m one of eighteen first cousins, I’m actually the baby of eighteen first cousins. And my mom’s side, she essentially grew up as an only child, only found out later in life that she had all these half-siblings. That I’ve only learned about and sort of spent time with. I did spend a Christmas with my mom’s half-sister in [Redacted] when I was very young. Like 22 or 23 and I’ve spent time with my, you know, after my– a mom’s half-siblings in [Redacted], my grandpa, who’s since passed, he lived a long time. To 97. So, my mom kind of lived in this sort of environment, and if I could even go back further to my grandma who grew up in [Redacted] and her parents were immigrants from England, and my grandma ran away from home when she was 15.
Like, she grew up in [Redacted], she ran away from home at 15 and joined an ice skating troupe, traveled the world, met my grandpa ice skating in [Redacted]. She, like, skated with Sonja Henie, but my grandma was so tall, [Redacted]. So, she skated behind Sonja Henie, [Redacted], and that was my grandma.
But if I think back to, like, what would propel a 15 year old girl to leave her home, she was an only child, presumably doted upon, I don’t know, my dad said that, like, when you would get my mom, her mom, and her grandma together in the same room it was like a three-ring circus. They were all only children: my mom, her mom, and her grandma; and my dad said when you would get them together it was like– you couldn’t even like– it was a nightmare. I’m so glad I didn’t see that. Thank god I didn’t emulate that behavior. Thank god I didn’t have children because these women were like, sound like, pretty awful to their kids, awful to their daughters I’ll say.
So, my mom came from this existence, and I remember, um, I was– I used to run marathons all over the country for a number of year, and I would run this one in Atlanta every year. My best girlfriend had moved to Atlanta with her husband and kids when we were in our twenties, and so I would stay with her for this Atlanta marathon every year, and one of those years my mom had called and she was like, “Your gay-gay looks like she’s gonna pass this weekend,” and I was like I’m sorry, but when I’m asleep I don’t know what happens, and so my mom had called me at like 1:00 in the morning, she’s like, “Your grandma passed away,” and I’m like, “Thank you for telling me,” and I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “Wait a minute, my grandma died.”
52:32
And I had just completely forgotten about it until I woke up. But my mom had said to me, this was like, I will never forget this. My grandma died. She was 82, which means my mom was 62. My mom died within the next two years, and my mom said, “How come my mom didn’t like me?” And I was like, “Lady.” I didn’t actually say that but I was like, “Oh my god, this is a, sort of like, generational, like, perk here.” My grandma didn’t like my mom, my mom didn’t like me, but my mom was, like, upset about it at 62, where I am at 53, I am not 53, oh my god, strike that. I’m 43 and my mom didn’t like me, well, yeah, we weren’t really compatible.
You know, my mom was friends with my oldest brother because they had that kind of friend chemistry, and she wasn’t friends with my other brother. She was a mom to us and that’s fine, you know. I think sometimes parents have friend chemistry with some of their children and others they don’t ,and that’s okay, but my mom just, but there was no one else in the family for my mom, you know what I mean? So like, her only family didn’t like her and I get that. I understand it. So, she kind of had that upbringing, and then she met my dad who had this other upbringing and, you know, my dad had three sisters and my mom comes in, like, and my aunts are not catty, but my mom did not stand a chance with my aunts, you know what I mean?
And so my folks got divorced when, after twenty-six years when I was a senior in high school and, um, they, um, my aunts took my dad’s side, which you can’t blame them. You can’t blame them at all, and so my parents had come from two different worlds and here’s the thing–
So, they met in [Redacted]. They met at a disco in [Redacted] in 1970 and they got married six weeks later, and they stayed married for twenty-six years, which for me is like, I don’t know, I’d call that a good run, and they had three kids: a Democrat, a republican, and a Libertarian walk into a bar. I’m just kidding. And, um, so we all turned out fine. We all have homes. We all have careers. My brothers have children that are very nice kids, like very nice kids. Not assholes.
55:00
Or like ADHD or whatever, and um, or like the crazy kids that, you know, they’re like going to prison. That is not my brother’s kids. So they have wonderful kids. They have nice lives. So our parents did fine, you know what I mean? But they just, kind of like, I read this book years ago that, it was the right book for me at the time, it was called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and for me it was so relatable because, you know, my parents didn’t beat me bloody and bruised, you know what I mean? I would get spankings and stuff, but they didn’t wallop me, like other kids that would say they got beaten and stuff like that. I had a band-aid when I needed it. I had extra-curricular activities. It was assumed that I would go to college. They were just sort of these, like, you know, middle class experiences and assumptions and, like, you know, these actualities that happened, even though my parents were, like, really into themselves.
My parents split because my dad, he kind of gave up on life. He had a hustle. He sold life insurance. And as he went– he– he got– my dad went to [Redacted] and he got a degree in English and a minor in Spanish. And he went to work for my grandpa’s company and he hated it, and so they came to Florida and my dad started selling kitchens at Sears and he loved it honestly. I wished my dad had been like a plumber because, like, for real, I think he would have loved it better than selling life insurance. But he sold life insurance, and I’m telling you it’s a hard living. Like, I interviewed with Western Mutual when I was like 28 and I was like, y’all have got to be fucking kidding me this is the fucking worst.
Like, you have to hustle and talk to everyone about when they die and how other people are going to be protected when they die. It’s the most dreadful conversation and it’s a lot of nights and weekends, and sometimes you have to bring, like, a scale and weigh people at their homes and, like, it’s a whole and it’s tough. So I said, “Hey dad, I’m interviewing with Northwestern Mutual, do you think I should take this job?” And he was like, “Do not do that.” So, you know, I didn’t go quit my job and go sell life insurance. So my dad had done that, you know, he had pounded the pavement and I would help him, you know, file his birthday cards. He had a whole rolodex of birthday cards of his clients and things, and he would send them birthday cards, which, you know, I kind of do something similar now for my clients.
I’ve just seen so much of what my dad did in sales. I’ve gotten so much of that from him. My dad was a great salesman, but in order for my dad to make real money at life insurance he had to sell, like, this whole life policies, which are honestly like a bad deal for literally everyone. I’m sorry, if you watch Suzie Orman you know that that’s like only for one to two percent of people, and that’s literally not you and people are paying $1200 a month for these policies–
It's financially crippling, and they really need, like, term policies, and so my dad really kind of felt, it is my opinion, I never asked my dad this, but it is my opinion that my dad had to kind of sell his soul in order to sell these whole life policies that made him the real money that he needed to make. To buy, you know, he was, oh my god, we were middle class, but my dad was feeling good, like, buying my mom fur coats and shit like that. By the way, we lived in Florida, the cold part of Florida, but not fur-coat-cold part of Florida. So, my dad kind of wanted to, like– because my grandparents, I think, his parents, they had a comfortable life, and they had a beach home and things like that, and my grandpa had a company, and my dad, I think, wanted to duplicate that, but was just like bumping right up against the edge but not quite there. But my mom also didn’t want any of that shit. She didn’t really care. She just wanted a partner.
So, anyway, where were we going with this, Dan?
That was great, thank you. The second part of my question was, comparing how you grew up to the life you have now. If there is, like, a comparison to be made there, yeah.
Oh my god. There’s, like, no comparison. And, you know, my husband and I get a lot of business by going to these lender conferences throughout the country where we meet up with SBA and USDA lenders and, you know, you have a lot of conversations with people over cocktails at the bar and, you know, the breakout sessions and things like that, and I’ve had this conversation with several of these lenders and they’re like, no.
The very best SBA lenders, I don’t know if you know this, but the very best SBA lenders in the country will be making more than a million dollars every year. And the top quarter will be making $700,000 a year, and even if you’re a shitty SBA lender you can hop from job to job and make the minimum salary and still be making $180,000 a year. So, it’s a great living. It's, you know, kind of a well-kept secret and, you know, I’ve had this conversation with these people, because I grew up in a very middle-class suburb of [Redacted], Florida. I mean it could not be,[Redacted]. So, to grow up in a suburb of a generic city is like, you know, like I could not be whiter I suppose, but I grew up in a– at least we had a four-bedroom home. My dad provided for us. My mom went back to school. To get a graduate degree.
1:01:06
When I started school, my mom went back to school, because she wanted to complete her education and so my dad supported that. My dad would go, you know, we lived in the suburbs and my dad would go to [Redacted] every day and go sell his life insurance and my mom would go south to [Redacted] to get her dairy science master's degree, which was like what was she going to do with that? She loved cows for some reason. Growing up in Manhattan. So I grew up in this four-bedroom house, maybe like an 1800 square foot house in, like, a suburban neighborhood where we would ride our bikes around until dusk, like I’m sure like any very younger Gen X kid did and older, but, um, ah, we were– our parents didn’t wonder where we were, but we were at Taco Bell every day is where we were.
And now? My life is kind of– so I told you I was in AA for fifteen years and in AA there’s this trope where they talk about your life becomes beyond your wildest dreams, and at the time when I was in AA, my life, as it was marching along, I was like, wow, this is getting better and better every year, but truly now, in my life post-AA, I don’t think it was the cause of it, that just because I left AA that my life is amazing, I think that I left AA and other things started happening in my life, and also I managed alcoholism and, you know, you know, we fly first class places. We live in a nice home, in a nice beach community, and I have a view of the ocean, and we’re having a party for the Fourth of July because the main drag in front our home is party central for the Fourth of July, so we’re having this party catered, and we’re having a DJ and, you know, my parents did not entertain. I can’t think of one time that my parents entertained when I was a kid. We never went out to eat. We went out to eat like a couple times a year. Like my dad’s birthday, we went to Ruby Tuesdays. For my birthday, we maybe went to Ryan’s Steakhouse, which is a buffet, delicious, they have yeast rolls and one of those soft-serve ice cream things so, like, as an eight year old I’m like this is fantastic, but now, yeah, like I think, we kind of live this life, I think everybody’s kind of– that grew up in my generation is living a bit of a different life, because I think most of us didn’t go out to eat a lot growing up, and now we all go out to eat a lot, and I think that’s just one of the things that has kind of changed with the cultural sort of zeitgeist, but certainly we went on very few airplane trips. I never went on an airplane trip with the five of us together.
My dad would only take one or two of us at a time on trip with him to see his side of the family, and then my parents took a lot of vacations without us because, my god, we were fucking monsters and so many babysitters fired us, but now this life that I live, I have to pinch myself that like, you know, it’s been years since I’ve had a budget. Now there are certainly, certainly numerous things that I can’t afford, but anything that I personally want in my life I can afford. There may be things that are out of my grasp that I don’t desire now but everything I want for my life I have been able to actualize for myself and, um, I didn’t plan it this way.
1:05:00
And, um, I didn’t plan it this way, uh, there were many different outcomes that I would have been satisfied with, um, starting my business started from a personal relationship failure of mine so, kind of, if I had to have an additional theme about my life, you know, just like anything that seemed bad to me turned out to be the best thing that ever happened. So, you know, I went to rehab when I was 23, went to AA, had fifteen years of sobriety building my career, like, you know, had an amazing time in that, and then I started my company and, you know, the company has been amazing, and anything that had seemed like an obstacle along the way turned out to be some sort of vehicle for success. So, I think part of that too is mindset, just feeling like there’s opportunity around every corner. If you believe that, I think that happens for you. And then, in that same vein, too, I have really very strongly believed that my mom had a very rare abdominal cancer that she died from, and she was negative, and she hated her job, and she complained, and she, really, after my parents divorced, had kind of a tough life, and she remarried, and she was very happy with her new husband, and there were a couple of very lean years before that, and I don’t think my mom was really satisfied with this life. And, um, you know, I really, I ache for her because of that, because I don’t even think it would please her to know that her offspring is having, like, the life of her dreams. For some reason I don’t think that would be pleasing to her, so I’m glad she isn’t in that now. But I think that she just did not have a great experience on earth and she manifested that, I feel that her negativity manifested, you know, that malignancy inside of her.
I do feel that. And I don’t think that positive feelings are going to shrink a tumor or whatever, but I do think that negative energy can beget negative things for people. Even somatically as well, so, um, yeah.
[Redacted], do you mind sharing a little bit about your relationship to alcohol before you went into AA and rehab?
Sure. So, I um, I discovered alcohol as, um, a sophomore in college. I was about 19 years old, and the first time I drank, in my dorm room, I went right to the hospital. I drank too much and then honestly didn’t improve much beyond that, and then a couple weeks after my 23rd birthday I, you know, woke up in a rehab and, you know, everything they said in AA, um, you know, from the time that I was there from 2003 to, I guess, I drank again in 2019, um, so almost sixteen years later, and in that time it helped me so much to have the discipline of AA, because it helped me go to bed early, wake up early, like I said. I would get to my job, do a good job at my job, excel, and move on and, you know, climb the ladder and things like that. So I needed that time and I’m so grateful for it too.
So, I had a very short relationship with alcohol before I quit drinking, and there’s sort of a sub group in AA called the Young People’s Groups, and they have young people’s conventions, called the YPA conventions where they meet in different cities and things like that. And YPA is Young People in AA, and had great fellowship in there, and at some point that turned and, um, you know it became kind of dysfunctional.
I think AA helps a tremendous amount of people, and they helped me for a number of years, but in my area it is very heavy Christian undertones whereas AA says pick a god of your own understanding, I really didn’t believe in any god, but I was encouraged to go to church and things like that, and I’m like this doesn’t seem right to me, and I started going to secular AA meetings, which were online, and, um, you know, just saw certain things with women that would be brand new to the program, and being relationship matched with men that had been sober twenty, thirty, forty years and that didn’t really resonate very well with me. I just thought that AA was, in my area. was an unsafe place for women and I wanted to get out. So that’s when I Googled “People in AA are full of shit.”
And you know, it came back with a lot of results and I started looking into it and I’m like “Oh my god, this is completely dysfunctional.” Where I am.
1:10:00
I have no idea about other areas, because I have not really, just maybe a meeting here and there in various cities, but I did not experience the culture of AA in different cities other than in [Redacted], where I am, so I can only speak for that, and, um, I actually looked into this thing called the Sinclair Method. So, the Sinclair Method is a method of treating alcoholism where you take one pill a day. The Sinclair Method says to take the pill one hour before you drink or you can take it every day. That’s the other method. And, you know, if you take it an hour before you drink you only have to take it an hour before you drink. If you don’t drink the next day, you don’t have to take it the next day. Or the other method is to take it every day. And the medication is called Naltrexone. It’s a generic medication. It was created in the ‘70s, and so you can get a thirty-day supply of this generic at your pharmacy for like less than twenty-five dollars. Cash price. Nobody’s making any money from this so nobody knows about it. But they use it low key at treatment facilities.
Like, I believe they tried it on Tiger Woods when he went to sex addiction treatment. They use it for chocolate addiction. They use it for heroin addiction. The heroin addiction really forces you right into, like, a rejection method. If you’ve taken heroin and take this medication, so it’s really a violent rejection if you have any opiates in your system. But they use it for shopping addiction. Any kind of addiction, they use it, and with the Sinclair Method, you take the pill and what happens is you are less interested in alcohol.
And so I started taking Naltrexone a few years before I started, before I resumed drinking after my period of prolonged sobriety, and so I noticed while I was taking this Naltrexone pill that I didn’t have to run ten marathons a year, that I didn’t have to read two hundred books a year, that everything in my life started to moderate and, um, everything kind of started making more sense, and I started my business, um, and then I resumed drinking. I had actually been dating my husband, and I brought him on a trip with me, and he was having a moment because his dad was– his parents had split up and his dad was having a moment, but his folks are in [another state] so he was removed, we were in [Redacted], we were away from home, and he kind of had a moment, and I had to ask him to leave our vacation.
1:12:16
And the next day I had a drink for the first time in like almost sixteen years and I knew, like, I was like this could either be a very terrible decision or it’s going to be fine. I’m prepared for whatever. Because I had been taking this pill for a number of years, and I had researched what happens when you do this. People moderate usually. Sometimes people quit all together on the Naltrexone. And yeah, so, um, yeah, that was about, that was way over four years ago actually. And I had to do some of the experimentation that people do in their early twenties because I quit drinking when I was 23 and didn’t resume until I was 37, no, 39, I think and, um, so I had to learn, like, don’t mix liquors, you know what I mean, like, you know, like, what is the point of having more than two drinks at an event, anyway? You know what I mean? I had to go through some of those younger missteps as an adult, but like my husband was right there as my boyfriend at the time to like pick me up so, um, you know, had a couple of like extremely painful hangovers and, um, a, and a couple of blackouts, and then I was like, well, wait a minute, that is that doesn’t even seem to make any sense. Why would we do these things? And so I was able to develop a relationship with alcohol.
And one of the things in, um, AA, in the AA literature as a matter of fact, it says that we, you know, one of the ways that we trick ourselves into moderating our behavior is to say, I will only drink wine. I will only drink on weekends, blah, blah, blah, but then when I actually got back out into the non AA world, I was like, wait, all these literal normal people have rules about alcohol. They don’t drink before five or they, like, only drink beer, or they only drink on the weekends or, like, you know what I mean? Like normal people who are not problem drinkers have rules for themselves around alcohol because having rules for yourself is a good way to promote self-discipline. I suppose. You know? So, that’s kind of one of the things I learned and I reconnected with a woman I had go to elementary, junior high, and high school with, her mom was my fourth grade math teacher–
We reconnected as adults in a networking group and that was probably in 2017 or something and we have been close ever since.
1:15:00
Essentially we were both in gifted classes growing up in the same school, so we had the same teachers and the same education, and it was kind of just like a homecoming, the experience that we had, and I shared some of these things with, like she’s very analytical, very high IQ woman, and I shared some of my resonances that I had from AA, my time there and she was like, “[Redacted], we all make rules about drinking,” and this is what I’m realizing, you know, so for me to have rules around drinking now and the rules like changed my relationship to alcohol.
My relationship to alcohol is, I don’t know, I still take a pill every day. And I drink when I want to, and I try not to drink too much. I actually don’t drink at concerts at all. That’s like, I have a rule, first of all because I want to drive home, but also, like, why would you want to miss a concert, like, I’m there for the music. That was probably one of the key indicators to me that I was like, “Alright. If I purposely don’t get drunk and don’t want to get drunk at concerts, how powerless am I over alcohol?” And it’s like, “No, I’m choosing every time, every concert, not to drink.” And my husband and I go to a lot of concerts, because my husband had a drum set when he was two years old or something.
And he played in, like, bar bands in college and stuff like that, so we love live music. So, my relationship to alcohol now is like, it’s a vehicle for fun. It has improved my quality of life. I keep close tabs on my medical indicators, because my dad did die of cirrhosis, but my dad was taking Methotrexate, which is– it’s a cancer drug. It’s also used for psoriatic arthritis, and other sorts of, you know, um, a– a– psoriatic arthritis, stuff like that, and he was taking that, and you absolutely, Dan, cannot drink when you take Methotrexate. And my dad couldn’t stop drinking on Methotrexate. So that’s what happened to his liver.
So, what happened was, I was sober for a long time, thought sober was the only way, came to– discovered that I could have a wonderful life while incorporating alcohol in it and having a reasonable relationship with it. Seeing that my dad, a blood relative, died of an alcohol-related disease while taking a medicine that will ruin your liver if you drink on it, and then also seeing my grandma live to 90 and drink and smoke every day, so honestly I feel like I have a pass. You know what I mean? As long as I don’t take something that’s going to kill my liver, maybe I’ll just be like grandma and smoke cigarettes in the hospital before I die. I don’t know. That’s my relationship with it today. If I were given a good reason to stop, I certainly would.
If the doctors said, you need to stop today, I certainly would stop drinking today. And I would smoke a bunch of weed is what I would do [laughter]. Sorry.
[Redacted], why did you want to share your story as part of this project.
So, it was really important to me, Dan, that women have a choice. Even teenage girls– I wish they had an autonomous, anonymous choice in this and whatever way that I can support that, I want to help. This is a cause that I want to help in every way that I can. We wrote a business plan for client–
Did you know that you can get an SBA loan for an abortion clinic? We had clients that bought the abortion clinic that they were working at. They got an SBA loan for it. We wrote the business plan. My team had written that business plan independent of me a couple years ago when I was really not involved at all in our production, and the client came back around and said, “Hey this deal is coming up now and I need some updates to the business plan,” and I was more involved at that time, and I was like, My god, we put someone on this that is very uncomfortable with the topic, and so we re-wrote their business plan for them to get their loan to buy the abortion clinic.
It’s in Illinois and I asked one of my staff members, we had interns at the time, and I asked one of my interns, he’s still with us today, and I said, “Hey, listen, we need a rewrite of this and we need it to be more compelling, and we need it to be more compassionate. If you can’t write on this topic, it is fine, we will find,” but he ended up writing this really impassioned plea for this group of women to buy this abortion clinic from the doctors that have started it, and we were actually predicting them to get fourteen times the revenue that they were expecting if Roe vs. Wade was overturned and those ladies are–
Listen, we don’t want a bajillion abortions, but let’s make it safe, let’s make it available, and these women are also building wealth too as a result of this, and they had the structure in order to scale with that too. So, I’m really grateful that I got to work with them to prepare for– they were preparing a couple years ago for this overturning and, um, we were able to help them get there and I’m so glad for that and so I was so happy to help.
In my professional life, I just don’t think in any other capacity I would have been able to help the cause in that way, but I had an abortion when I was 22 and never looked back, never felt guilty about it, never regretted it, and grateful that I had access to it, and grateful for my mom who knew that was the solution for me at the time. And took me. My mom came through for me. You know, I just– I think that there are some ways that people are misled by organizations that, um, you know, don’t have a woman’s best interest in mind. They have some other agenda.
And I just want to let women know this is a decision between a woman and her doctor. It is not up for public debate. And if I can help in any way to help a woman make her own reproductive decisions, I want to do that, so this is a way to say, I’m not guilty. I don’t regret this decision every day. It doesn’t plague me. I’m not haunted by this baby that I didn’t have. You know what I mean? I just don’t even think about it and I’m grateful.
And I’m just so sad that you know that, um, that kind of the tide has turned on this. That something we had taken for granted for so long has now been taken away from so many people. And I just want to do whatever I can to help in my own way. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. I am just an ally and, you know, someone that has experience.
[Redacted], thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Sure, Dan. Thanks.
1:22:36 (end of file)