Jill Marie shares her story of addiction and over seventeen years of recovery
I grew up in Los Angeles, one of six kids to a single mom. I had a stepfather at some point, but for the most part, my mom was always the head of the household. I can say now that she did the best she could with the tools that she had. But when I first heard that saying in the rooms, I really couldn’t take in the significance of that phrase. I had so much resentment directed toward my mom. As far as I was concerned, she could have done way better. So I looked at that saying “She did the best she could with what she had” as an excuse. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My childhood was a childhood of extremes. In many ways, we wanted for nothing. Emotionally, we were lacking everything. There was a lot of tension and a lot of uncertainty. I can remember having those bad feelings as a young child and I didn’t know why.
I was born in Detroit. Shortly afterward, my mom left me and my sisters with my grandparents. She went out to Los Angeles to make her way. Mom left us there until she could send for us. None of this I understood at the time. Growing up in Detroit, I had a trillion first cousins because my mom’s from a family of 13 – a big Catholic family and everybody had kids. I thought my grandparents were my parents. Then when I was three, my Mom sent for us. I remember the train ride out to California, sitting there and seeing the fields of corn. It was endless. I just thought it was the most amazing sight. I also remember coming to a house — and to a woman — I did not know. Those formative years I had not spent with her.
Because my mom was so young and overwhelmed, she ran her household with an iron fist. I realize now that she needed to have those rules in order to just keep everything functioning. At the time I thought she was super strict, though, and unreasonable.
My first escape for me was in books. First, I read my older sister’s books. I understood reading comprehension way earlier than the average person and would read her books. I just thought it was wonderful; these different lands and different people. And then I watched television. The shows back then were like Leave It to Beaver where the mother wore the apron and the pearls. Everything was all great and beautiful in the books and those shows. But I started looking around and my world was nothing like that. Something wasn’t jiving. There was such a disconnect.
One thing you have to understand is that growing up in our old neighborhood in Detroit, we didn’t realize that we were Black. Then one day my sister came home from school. I hadn’t started school yet. She said, “Jill, we’re Black.” And I’m like, “Rhonda, what are you talking about? What do you mean?” She said, “We’re Black people” because she was called names in school. I still didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it couldn’t be good. So I filed that away somewhere back in my head.
My mom had a very tumultuous marriage with my stepfather. I once described it as the Tina Turner story without the cocaine. It was the beatings, the abuse. My mom internalized so much of that stress and would turn it on us. If we didn’t hang up our clothes properly, that’s a whooping. If we didn’t do this, that’s a whooping. And in those days, a whooping meant the good old extension cord. It wasn’t just a spanking or a time out in the corner.
When I was ten years old, a seminal event happened. One day I went out with a young girl from the apartment building, even though my mom had told me not to leave the house. My mom was taking a nap. We went out to collect pop bottle caps to turn in for change to buy candy. Mom woke up, and I was gone. When I came back, she was furious. She said, “Go get the ironing cord, I’m going to whip you.” I decided I was not going to take another whooping and off I ran, out of the apartment.
Well, she caught up with me and got me back home. Then she proceeded to beat me within an inch of my life with the ironing cords. There was a long fight. So long, in fact, that the next door neighbor knocked on the door to complain about it and said she was calling the police. We lived on the top floor of a tall building. Before she went to answer the door, mom turned to me and said “When I come back, I’m going to kill you. I’m not done.” I believed her. So when she went to the door, I looked around, and the only way I saw to escape was through a window. I went to the window and knocked out the screen. I peeked over the edge. There was a crowd down there because they had heard screaming for the past hour. I hoisted myself over the windowsill. I saw the people were far below, telling me not to jump. But I was desperate, so I jumped.
I call the man who caught me and angel. I was only ten years old and was very thin. I probably weighed all of 45 pounds. I would have died had he not caught me. I was hospitalized and my mom was subsequently arrested. The whole incident made the newspapers, which was a big deal and very uncommon because of the publicity surrounding what happened. There was a trial. I was asked who I wanted to live with. Of course, I said with my mom. That was all I knew. That summer after she had been arrested, we had been put in foster homes and broken up. I knew that I had broken up the family. This was my way of getting us all back together.
Afterward, I think I had maybe a couple of sessions with the psychiatrist in a room with blocks and toys and someone watching through a one way mirror. But certainly there was no back and forth talking about what I went through. No one asked me how it was affecting me. No one offered any tools on how to go forward. There was nothing like that, probably because it was the 1960s and no one knew any better. But when I went back to school, I was singled out as “That crazy girl who jumped out of the window.” That experience affected me later on my road to addiction because I just kept all that in. I kept swallowing it, internalizing anxiety, fears, what have you.
In Junior High, I started going out to parties with my sister who was a couple years older than me. There were a lot of house parties back in those days, and everyone went. For the most part, it was quite innocent. There was alcohol, but not very much. It was the bubbly, fizzy, nasty stuff. I didn’t even care for it that much. But I do have an entry in a diary where I was talking about an upcoming party that night. I was wondering if so and so was going to try to kiss me. I wrote that I hoped not, because I didn’t like the way he kissed. Later, I wrote that I had a glass of champagne and that same person did kiss me, and it was wonderful. Somehow the alcohol changed everything for me.
Later on in school, my best friend was the school drug dealer. Now there was pot and acid and everything because that’s what everyone did then. It never occurred to me to say no to anything. I wanted to appear sophisticated, like I knew what I was doing. I wanted to be like the women in the books I read and the old movies I saw. You have this glamorous cocktail in one hand and this glamorous cigarette in the other, and you’re totally in control. I was just a young girl. I was a skinny nerd. But when I did that, it made me feel like a million dollars.
After High School, I began working. I got into the entertainment industry in television production. I was working behind the scenes and I thought I had arrived. We would work on the set, do a twelve hour day, and put the shows in the can. And then someone would say “Let’s blow some steam off.” Everyone was doing it from the runner and the lowest crew person. The director was doing it too. It was all very glamorous and exciting. I was in the business doing that for a decade: going coast to coast, doing shows, the limo picking me up. I thought, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”
This went on with me doing a lot of drinking and along the way ‘dry goods’ became a part of my story. Over time, the drugs became more and more prevalent until the point where I literally torched my career in television. That was the beginning of my burning many bridges. I would move for a new job, to a new town, and then blow it all up again and again. Then I moved to Arizona. It was that move that really crystallized and showed my family that I really had a drinking problem. I would call and talk to them on the phone. They would say, “Jill, you sound like you’ve been drunk.” No, I’d tell them. “Not, me!” But in reality, I was three sheets to the wind. It was Sunday at 10:00 a.m. and I was drunk.
Then I decided the problem wasn’t me, it was Phoenix. So I was able to transfer to San Francisco and things didn’t get better. They got worse. With my drinking came more depression, paranoia and that devolved into suicidal ideation. I just felt this pressure of “I’m not going to be able to do my job. Everyone knows something’s wrong with me. If they knew something was wrong with me, I would lose my job. I should just end it all right now.” It was horrible. At one point, I had an office overlooking Union Square. I remember I had just been promoted. But I literally walked out of my job, went to a bar, and started drinking. Then I went down into the BART station where these trains were coming in. I was going to jump in front of a train. I was done. Just then a mother and a couple of kids – a family – came down the escalator. They were standing just a couple of feet from me. I thought, “I can’t do this in front of these kids.” And I left.
I got into recovery in 2006 after one more time melting down. After abandoning my job and facing eviction, I was able to reach out to my mom and say, “I’m in trouble. Something’s really wrong with me.” Then my sister came and rescued me (one more time) and got me into the hospital. When I was admitted, I’d been hallucinating. I thought people were trying to get into my house. The doctor said I had a heart event. And the doctor explained if I didn’t stop drinking, it was going to kill me. I don’t know if that had much of an effect on me. But right after that, when I was still in the hospital, a man came in and talked to me about the hospital’s Chemical Dependency Unit. His name was Mr. Carter. He was a black man and he had been an alcoholic. I don’t know what he said or why I believed him, but I was willing to, and I did. Probably because I didn’t have another good idea in me. I also felt I had a spiritual experience the night before in my hospital bed. I know those two experiences together allowed me to say, ‘Okay, I’ll try your suggestion.’ And I did.
A couple of days after I got into outpatient recovery, I was on my way to my daily group. I was catching the bus, and I realized I had no desire to drink. I walked past the liquor store and had no desire to do a beeline and turn into the liquor store to get something to drink. I had money. I hadn’t lost anything. I hadn’t lost my job because I was on medical leave. There was no one watching me. I was in my house alone, but I had no desire to do that. That blew me away. I thought: “Whatever this is, I’m going to keep doing this.”
And I knew I needed to do whatever they told me to do in order to keep feeling the way I was feeling. I just knew that with every fiber of my being. And I did. I said, “I’m going to get an A in this outpatient program. I’m going to be an A plus student.” And I was. I’d think to myself: “Sure, do a surprise pee test on me. I’m clean!” And I just went to every meeting I could. I went to more meetings than I needed to go to. And it was a good thing. After I got out of Outpatient, I realized what I needed to do was get back to Los Angeles. I needed to get away from the people, from the environment I was in, and get a better support system. And I did. I got back here and got into meetings. The first thing I did was get a sponsor. She took me through the steps for the first time and that was a revelation for me.
I still take suggestions today. I don’t sponsor myself. I try to, but then I usually fetch myself up sharply. I have seventeen years of sobriety now but in many ways, I feel brand new in this program. I like that because I remain teachable. I’m the kind of alcoholic that can suffer from the disease of forgetting. I can forget easily when the job is going great and things are good.
Another thing I realized I needed was a specific meeting with women of color. One that I could go to along with my regular AA meetings. This was important for me because of my experiences as a child. There was a small group of black students in my school. I knew them since elementary school but when we got into junior high school, things changed. A couple of them, one in particular, started bullying me. That caused a lot of the fighting I did when I was a kid. They were bullying me for sounding too white. Since then, I found that when I’m in a meeting with black women, sometimes I am worried about being judged. Sometimes I worry about that more, than when I’m in a white meeting.
I knew this was an issue, so I talked to my sponsor and decided I specifically needed to work on that. Otherwise I would have just shut that part of myself off in my recovery. I found a meeting that was not far from where I live. As it turned out, there were a couple of black women who I knew from the old neighborhood! It has been so healing for me. I’m a people pleaser. I’ve always wanted everyone to like me. But then I’m always looking for the one person who doesn’t like me, rather than the ninety nine who do. Then I hinge my self esteem on their reaction. Today, I’ve accepted that what you think of me is none of my business. I don’t internalize it when people treat me badly, no matter where it is coming from. This is another way that my recovery has helped me.
I said earlier that back when I was in the hospital, I had a spiritual experience. One night, there were these people around my bed. They were women and they looked like angels to me. As I looked at them, the feeling I had was that I was being taken care of and that everything was going to be okay. I just remember this feeling of security and protection and love and that didn’t exist in me before. I think that just changed my outlook on willingness. It changed it enough for me to follow the suggestions, work the 12 steps, and not drink. It was just enough to allow me to believe in something other than me. They helped me take another leap of faith. That new little bit of willingness saved my life.
I’m nothing without this program. It just doesn’t matter. Job or no job, relationship or no relationship. I can’t do this without Alcoholics Anonymous. I can’t feel that sense of freedom without this program. I’m grateful to know I don’t have to do this on my own.
~ Jill Marie, clean & sober since 2006