The Nights I Sat on My Kitchen Floor

I used to sit on my kitchen floor in the middle of the night, sobbing.
Silent house. Lights off. Just me and the crushing weight of it all.

I didn’t know that so much of the anxiety I was drowning in was being fed by alcohol.
I thought it was just motherhood - the exhaustion, the fear, the overwhelm.

But the truth is, I was drinking gasoline and wondering why the fire kept growing.

Being a special-needs mom can feel suffocating at times. I adore my daughter, but our reality is hard.

Dylan can’t talk. She’s still in diapers at 18.
She needs constant supervision so she doesn’t wander off or hurt herself.

I worry about what her future looks like - what our future looks like.
I worry about my other daughters, about how to meet everyone’s needs, about how to hold it all together.
There’s always something to worry about.

But here’s what’s wild:
Since I quit drinking, I haven’t had a single one of those 1 a.m. breakdowns on the kitchen floor.

Looking back now, those nights always followed hours spent inhaling wine or vodka.

I thought drinking helped me “take the edge off.”

What it actually did was push me right over it.

None of my worries have disappeared.
Every single one still exists.
But they don’t consume me anymore.
They don’t take over my mind and body and become this irrational force I can’t escape.

Alcohol is a drug.

It tricks us, manipulates our feelings, hijacks our ability to reason or think clearly.

When I drank, my chemically-altered brain would take passing thoughts and spin them into full-blown, manic spirals.

I truly believed it was normal - that this was just part of being a special-needs mom.

It wasn’t. It isn’t.
It was what happens when you’re under the influence of a substance that changes your brain chemistry.

Alcohol is a drug. As addictive as heroin or cocaine - just conveniently marketed as “mommy’s little helper.”

We think it’s helping us cope.
But it’s the very thing making everything harder to bear.

So if you’re reading this and you’ve had your own 1 a.m. breakdowns - please hear me:
It’s not just stress.
It’s not just you.
And you’re not broken.

Alcohol is making your anxiety, your stress, your fear, your loneliness a hundred times worse.
Feeling better is possible.
It starts the moment you stop pouring gasoline on the fire🖤

Sometimes healing begins the moment you realize you weren’t the problem - the substance was.

You were never too emotional, too weak, or too overwhelmed.
You were just trying to survive under the influence of something that distorted everything real.

And when the fog lifts, what’s left isn’t perfection - it’s clarity.
It’s peace that doesn’t come from a bottle, and strength that doesn’t disappear in the morning.

You finally get to meet yourself - the calm, capable, clear-minded version who was there all along, just waiting for you to set her free.

xx -

Shannon