The Quiet Moment That Became My Rock Bottom
There wasn’t a car crash.
There wasn’t an arrest.
There wasn’t some dramatic intervention where everyone sat me down and told me I had a problem.
My ‘rock bottom’ was me, standing in my bedroom, trying to wedge a bottle of vodka into the back of my underwear drawer so no one would see it.
I had just come home from picking up my daughter from school. I’d done the usual thing: swear I wasn’t going to drink because I felt awful… then stop for wine and vodka anyway.
And as I stood there, rearranging folded clothes to make space for the bottle, something in me finally snapped into focus.
The only way I can describe it is like I suddenly stepped outside of myself and saw the scene clearly for the first time:
This is your life now.
This is who you’re choosing to be.
A woman hiding vodka in her underwear drawer.
I literally thought, Are you kidding me, Shannon? This is it? This is what it’s come to?
There was no audience. No dramatic soundtrack. Just me, a bottle, and the crushing realization that I had been lying to myself for years.
Because on paper, nothing looked “bad enough.”
I was the healthy one.
The holistic nutritionist.
The mom who cooked gluten-free, organic meals and bought all the supplements.
I was also the woman who:
planned her days around that first glass of wine at 4 p.m.
panicked when her husband suggested “maybe we should cut back”
made endless rules about when, what, and how much she would drink
broke those rules constantly and silently
started hiding wine in coffee mugs, wine in my home office, and vodka in drawers
None of it happened overnight.
I didn’t wake up one day as a woman hiding alcohol.
I became her slowly, one tiny compromise at a time.
“I’ll only drink on weekends.”
“Okay, just weeknights.”
“Only after 7 p.m.”
“Fine, only if I worked out that day.”
“Only red wine.”
“Only vodka because it’s ‘healthier.’”
A million little negotiations with myself, all designed to prove I was still in control.
So when people hear my story, they sometimes want to compare:
Am I as bad as that?
Do I drink that much?
Have I done anything that extreme?
But here’s the thing: the severity of the story isn’t the point.
The point is that moment when you can no longer un-see the truth:
This isn’t who I want to be.
This isn’t how I want to live.
And if I keep going, I know exactly where this leads.
My rock bottom was private. It was quiet. It was a flash of clarity in a bedroom with a drawer half-open.
And honestly? The bravest thing I did wasn’t quitting alcohol that day.
It was finally deciding to tell myself the truth:
I couldn’t get this under control on my own.
I wasn’t the exception who could “reset” and go back to normal drinking.
I did need help.
Within a couple of weeks, I joined a program. I admitted I couldn’t figure this out by myself. I started listening to women who used to drink like I did and were now truly free. And for the first time in years, I felt something other than dread and shame.
I felt hope.
If you’re reading this and you’ve had your own “underwear drawer moment” - maybe not with a bottle, but with a thought you can’t un-hear, I want you to know:
You don’t have to wait for your life to burn down to the ground.
You don’t have to collect more proof that it’s “bad enough.”
You don’t need anyone else to declare that you’ve hit rock bottom.
You’re allowed to decide that enough is enough based on one simple truth:
You don’t like who alcohol is asking you to be.
That’s it. That’s valid. That’s reason enough to change.
Maybe your moment is standing in the kitchen finishing the bottle you swore you’d save.
Maybe it’s hiding how much you poured.
Maybe it’s waking up (again) at 3 a.m. with your heart pounding and that quiet voice whispering, I don’t want to do this anymore.
You don’t need a disaster.
You just need to listen to that voice.
You don’t have to hit rock bottom.
You can simply choose to stop digging🖤
xx-
Shannon