i’m 2 years sober: i’ve realized alcohol was only a part of the problem. - Ep.21
Brand Safe
Tana Mongeau celebrates her two-year milestone of sobriety from alcohol, reflecting on the profound shift between her first and second years
Key takeaways
- Tana identifies that removing alcohol revealed dormant issues like OCD, anxiety, and trauma.
- She describes a transition from substance addiction to 'dopamine addiction' through doom scrolling and shopping.
Main topics
- Two-year sobriety milestone
- Dopamine addiction and behaviors
Notable quotes
My addiction had lost its original address, but it was still looking for a new place to live.
Conclusion
A deeply personal reflection on the complexity of long-term recovery a
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Today we are two years sober and we are also so brand safe. Oh my God, you guys, I am two years sober today and this is gonna be a sober cast and for all the people that are gonna say, she's dragging and all she talks about is being sober and oh my God, does she have anything else to gnaw Speaker 1 (0:22) about? Gargle my Speaker 2 (0:24) balls. Speaker 2 (0:26) in your mouth and gargle them. I had a moment this year where I was like really beating myself up for that, like seeing a lot of comments about things like that and like the redundancy of it. And I just like felt really redundant. And as time has gone on, I've been like, how beautiful is it that I still have this thing to talk about? How beautiful is it that I'm not talking about another relapse? How beautiful is it? All of the girls and the gays out there, I get to talk to them and share the most meaningful thing I've ever done with people and let them know that they can do it too. So that is. proudly what today's episode is. And I'm so excited to get into it. It's so interesting. My one year of sobriety, it's always last year today and get this, she knows math. And it was such a different day from today. And I knew that for my one year, all I wanted to do was film a YouTube video about it. And I had written all about it. And I sat down and I knew exactly what I wanted to say. Now hindsight looking back, the way that I felt is so clear to me. One year is such a huge milestone. To do anything for one year. One year can be small in the grand scheme of life. But at the same time, that's waking up and choosing something not only for 365 days, but for every minute, every craving, every bad thought, every inconvenience, every thing that you had wired your brain prior to run to this thing, you had to unwire it. to not run to this thing. It was the best day of my life. Like it was the greatest day waking up and knowing that I had chosen to be sober every single day for an entire year. And when I'm talking about sobriety today, I want to be very clear that I'm talking about alcohol. I'm talking about her little sister that was my friend Snow White and anything crazy, you know, any of the Molly's of the world, all of those things, like just we are done with those. Like I garden now and again. That's about it. Speaker 1 (2:10) Yeah, I sat down. For my one year, I was Speaker 2 (2:12) in Hawaii. I got to spend the whole day relishing in it. Makoa was gone surfing and all I wanted to do was just stay home and look at the ocean and be in my place and, you know, reflect on how much my life had changed for the better and what the journey of one year looks like. And it's interesting because I feel like from day zero to one year and from one year and one day. to now, they couldn't be more different. And I guess at one year, I kind of thought like, okay, I'm just going to keep doing this and feeling this way. And I have a video coming soon where I talk a little more about this, but that was also the stark difference of 27 and 28 for me. I feel like I woke up on my 27th birthday and I felt like I had it all figured out. I was damn near like eating myself out about it. I was like, we have it all figured out. And I knew what I wanted to say to the world. And I knew who I wanted to present as. The year of 27 into 28 and now being 28 has felt so polar to that. Saturn really picked up the receipt and said, I'm returning everything to you. Like, do you have the tags attached? Has it been 30 days? You are making a return. It's been hard and it's been muddier. I don't feel as clear in knowing what I want. And I do feel like this Tana who's in a growth period of figuring things out. This milestone makes you reflect so much. And today I kind of want to reflect on my relationship with sobriety over this past year versus what it was like the first year. Ironically, there's something to be said. Speaker 1 (3:35) about the high of sobriety wearing off. And Speaker 2 (3:38) this is not to discourage anyone. I cannot stress enough. It's the greatest decision I've ever made. And I hope to continue to make it for the absolute rest of my life, right? Even recently, I've been like going through certain things and I've had a few people in my life while they're kind of watching me in the mental trenches. You can tell that people who love you will always have that fear or hope or they're projecting other things that they've like been through in life. But whatever it is that you don't relapse again. Right. And that comes with being an addict. I've had a few people be like, well, you're not going to relapse. Right. Like you're OK. Right. No. Like I feel like. I've gotten to a point where I never, no matter how hard something is, no matter how difficult it is, I don't ever want to go back to that Tana because I used to look at alcohol as this thing that made everything easier. When in reality, that was just such a temporary feeling and all it did was create more problems for me and it made overcoming things so much slower and messier and harder. And my decisions, I was not concrete in them. I had so much anxiety and regret and all of the horrible things. And I don't think that that would be conducive to my healing ever, no matter how hard what I'm going through is. But I always say this too, day 21 of going sober is damn near as good as a line, okay? If not better, honestly. It is the high of like the withdraw period finally coming off and like you start to see your life in color again and you're making cognizant decisions and you're so aware and you're just high on the fact that you've kind of like, you know, they say it takes 21 days to break a habit. I do think that with sobriety, it can take longer to really. rewire your relationship with the thing that you were addicted to but there is that high of that original like wait I'm sober and I'm doing this you know and then one year is this high of like oh my god it's been 365 days and I'm free from the shackles that are addiction and I'm perfect there's that high and there's also praise you know people rewarding you for turning your life around and for becoming your best self and the year glowings. And I feel like I was getting the year glowings left and right. And I was like riding them like a Speaker 1 (5:34) high, Speaker 2 (5:35) you Speaker 1 (5:35) know, it was awesome. Speaker 2 (5:36) But the reality is, is after hitting one year, you start to realize all of the things that you were numbing out for so long. And I think that I've always said like, oh, I never had anxiety. Like I Speaker 1 (5:47) Tana Mongeau Speaker 2 (5:48) before these past two years, never had anxiety. And the more that I look back on it, the more I can clearly see, like I had so many issues that I was just gray goosing. Like I did have anxiety. I just didn't want to face it, which then would manifest into OCD. I just wanted to numb it out. Like these things were always dormant. These traumas were always dormant. These memories were always dormant. And so from year one to two, it really felt like, I guess the high and the celebration of like, I'm sober, I'm sober, I'm sober started Speaker 1 (6:17) to subside a little bit. Speaker 2 (6:19) And it was like looking at all these broken pieces on the floor and being like, well, now what do we do with this puzzle? How do we figure this out? I was writing about this the other day and you'll see it in an upcoming video. But I think I came to this realization recently. My addiction had lost its original address, but it was still looking for a new place to live. That once you are an addict, I don't want to speak for everyone, but I feel like I will be an addict for the rest of my life. It will just manifest in different ways. It is something that I will always have to deal with. And especially as life can throw trials and tribulations at you, the search for dopamine can become relentless. I never really had the cognizant realization that's what I've been doing my whole life. Okay, if I'm not fixing everyone and everything, I'm on a relentless, insatiable hunt for dopamine. Obviously, that's a byproduct of a few things, you know. Whether it's my chemicals just not making it properly due to ADHD and due to certain different things. So I'm already kind of predisposed to like looking for it more than the average person or more neurodivergent or I'm neurodivergent. The Speaker 1 (7:25) normies don't have to look for dope as much as Speaker 2 (7:27) me. And I think that I used to think that sobriety was about just removing the bad thing. And two years in, I'm realizing that that was only the beginning, I guess. is, you know, you remove the bad thing and you celebrate it. Trying to figure out what I was trying to do in the first place by having the bad thing, you know? Was I lonely? Was I bored? Was I restless? Was I traumatized? How did this become my coping mechanism? And then becoming more aware of how that same hunger is still so alive inside of you, it just will manifest in different ways. I feel like I noticed that over the last year, I got caught up in this cycle. of just looking for dopamine in different places whether that's doom scrolling until 3 a.m ordering a million packages and them showing up to the door, whether that's wanting to go to Vegas and just forget about all my problems per the last solo episode, whether that's food and ordering the horrible thing that makes you feel good for 20 minutes, but then you hate yourself for the rest of the night, hitting a vape relentlessly like your life depends on it like a pacifier. And the fact of the matter is all of those things are less harmless, right? And I was writing about this the other day as well. It's like my buzz sentiment. Nobody's staging an intervention for you because you're buying another bag, right? They're happy that you're not buying the old type of bag that you used to buy. No one's taking away a chip from you because you're hitting a vape every six seconds. It's not as easy for other people to recognize that you're still doing that. You know, you're showing up the next day to a meeting and everyone's so happy that you're sober and you're there. But what they don't know is that you were like doom dopamine scrolling until 530 in the morning, which is such a form of self-harm. And even rumination can become an addiction within itself too, you know? replaying the same problems and the same thoughts, squeezing a conversation that you've had with someone in your head a million times until you go insane or overthinking until you go insane. And I think that I didn't want to recognize that I was familiar with creating pain for myself, that that was my most familiar coping mechanism, that I was familiar with. being stuck in the chase for the next hit of dopamine and that I was familiar with the hunger, always needing something new. And the reality is, is life isn't always an instant dopamine hit. Life isn't always spontaneity and excitement and insanity. Sometimes life should be consistent and linear and God forbid, boring. And the more I went from year one to year two, the more I realized that I had never built any tools. to cope with that, that I was on a constant hunt for more and why. And there's something so difficult about learning to live without constantly altering the temperature of your own life, of just being stagnant in it. Not everything needs to be euphoric, not everything. And I think that I had really bent over and. My neurons and my receptors and my nervous system this year for me has been figuring out how to undo that and how to just be and how to just be calm and how to just cope in ways that are healthy truthfully just because you get sober and you take away the bad thing it does not make you instantly the healthiest coper to ever walk matter of fact I had never learned to cope my whole life and then I took my binky and my baba away and I've just been trying to make shape Year two for me doesn't feel so much like pop the confetti. We did it. The milestone. It's kind of like, what now? 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PER.com and save up to 20 Speaker 1 (12:30) % off on the mattress you deserve. I had this therapy session the other day. Speaker 2 (12:34) The basis of the entire session was about how motherf***ing dysregulated I am as a person. And obviously, I don't plan on ever turning to alcohol to cope with that again. Once the celebration of being sober subsided, that left room in my brain for the demons to kind of unpack. To get creative, whether that is the OCD or the rumination or the constant hunt for dopamine. That's natural. It's something I was in fight or flight for 27 years. And I was just doing and going and going and going. And I finally got to this point where my body is like, we can't do that anymore. And then that comes with the like beating yourself up for the things that used to be easy feeling so difficult. But it's like everything is just shot, whether it's my cortisol, whether it's my dopamine, whether it's my sleep. That's kind of my current battle is figuring out how to become regulated. I was talking a lot to my therapist, too. She asked me a question that was really like profound to me. And she always asks this. And it's something that I really never thought about until I met her. She'll ask me about moments from my childhood, but then she'll ask me how I cope. I think I've always reflected on my childhood, right? I've looked back and I've been like, shit was ass. But I don't think I've ever been like, what was little Tana doing to cope through these moments? How did she get through her parents being incompetent? How did she get through her parents not being there for her? How did she get through these feelings of being hopeless and lost, right? And the more I think about it, the more I realize that little Tana coped through the chaos. by becoming a doer. She became a doer and she became a fixer because she realized that everyone around her wasn't going to do or fix it. And she was not satisfied with her current environment. And I'm sure I'm using some words wrong, but it's just like, we'll get them in the next episode. Okay. You know what I'm saying? Speaker 1 (14:27) Not on my two year. Okay. We're not going to get all Merriam-Webster Speaker 2 (14:29) on my two year. We're going to celebrate with what we have and what we know. And yeah, she was basically just asking me like, if you went to your parents with a problem. What were you met with? The word that came to my mind was incompetence and I guess frantic nature. If I ever went to my parents about a problem or about something, they only ever made it worse. And so I internalized, I have to do it all myself and I have to fix it all myself and there's nobody else that you can rely on. So you better go and you better do, girl. You better get your fucking ass up and work. Little Tana obviously became this Tana where my coping mechanism for everything now is do, do, do. Fix, fix, fix. Go, go, go. That was a good thing until it wasn't. And I'm so grateful that I got myself here, right? That I spent 15 plus years doing and fixing and going to get us to this beautiful life. But my nervous system got to this point where it's like, we can't do and fix and go anymore before we do and fix ourselves. And that coping mechanism worked as well as it could, not amazingly up until this point, but we are now. at a point where that is not the way that I want to go through the rest of my life. And I noticed my brain having so much resistance. Like I would have those rational thoughts about how I want to change that and I need to learn to just let it be and that there aren't answers for everything always and that I don't have to provide the solution for everyone's issues at all times and that I don't have to distract myself with a million other things and disassociate to certain degrees and just go and go and go. that sometimes it's okay to just sit with things through periods of life and regulate. And it's so much easier to make decisions and choices for yourself when you are regulated anyhow. And that's what I should be doing. But then I notice that it's like 2 a.m. or it's like the middle of the day and I'm staring off and it's like bingo. It's like rapid fire, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All these thoughts and then these frustrations with myself. You know, I want a crystal ball. I want everything to be fixed now. I want all these things. And that's my coping mechanism. And then my coping mechanism is upset because we don't have all the answers and we can't just do and fix our way out of this thing. It's actually a hard reset that we have to go through where we are