She Lost Her Mom at 19 and Chose to Drink. Here's How She Got Sober.

She was 19 years old, sitting on her mother's porch, holding her mother's favorite beer. Her mom had just died. And Jessica made a decision she still remembers with terrifying clarity.

"I am going to become an alcoholic," she said out loud. "And I don't care. I will deal with it later."

Not everyone arrives at alcohol addiction the same way. Some people slide in slowly, barely noticing until it's too late. Jessica walked in with her eyes open, made a conscious choice in the middle of her grief, and spent the next decade making good on that promise to herself in the worst possible way. Blackouts she couldn't remember. Hospital beds with EKGs on her chest. Blood alcohol levels her doctors said should have killed her. A music career built on bar stages and hidden bottles of vodka in her stage boots.

Jessica joined us on the Sober Motivation Podcast to share what it took to finally quit drinking, and what life looks like now, 20 months sober, with a son who will never see her drunk. This is her story.

Growing Up With a Front Row Seat to Alcoholism

Jessica grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, the oldest of four girls, two sets of twins in a family of six. By her own description, childhood was pretty normal for a while. Dinner every night. Catholic school. A dad who worked as a lineman for AT&T and a mom who stayed home with the kids.

But on Sundays, her dad would disappear to the basement with his friends. The men would drink and smoke cigarettes while the girls were kept upstairs, out of the way. Jessica was curious, the way kids are, and she would slip downstairs to see what the adults were doing. One of her dad's friends handed her a bottle cap with a little vodka in it. She was maybe 13.

"It burned," she said. "But even thinking about it now, I remember feeling like, oh, that's an adult thing."

Her second drink was a sip of her dad's Samuel Adams cherry wheat beer. Something turned on in her brain. Not loudly, not dramatically. Just quietly on.

As the years passed, her parents' marriage began to crack under the pressure of raising four kids with tight money and her father's drinking. The fights escalated. Police got called to the house. By the time Jessica was 14, her mom packed up the girls and moved them an hour south to her grandparents' house, driving the kids back to school in Cleveland every day. Jessica eventually stayed behind with her dad so she could keep her spot in the high school marching band and flag corps. She wanted her life in Cleveland. She wanted her friends.

She also wanted to drink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI42WqNRQyQ

The Teenager Who Always Blacked Out

By 16, Jessica had a fake ID, a job at Starbucks, and a best friend named Kara who had been with her since age 12. The two of them had discovered the local music scene and were spending their weekends sneaking into bars and watching live bands, convinced they were living some kind of legendary story they would write about one day.

She also had a job at 13 at a party center for weddings, working 12-hour shifts alongside her twin sister. She was hanging out with college kids in dorm rooms drinking jungle juice. She snuck down into a nightclub during a concert at 16 and spent the night drinking while her friend waved her down from behind the bar.

What stood out about Jessica's drinking even at that age was not how often she drank. It was what happened every single time she did.

"I always blacked out," she said. "I can count on my hand how many times I didn't black out."

She knew, even then, that something was different about her. She would watch her friends drink and do something silly or just go home. For Jessica, it was always destruction. Always too far. Always waking up not knowing what she had done. She would hear the stories the next day and feel a wave of embarrassment and dread. She told herself it was just because she was young. She told herself she would figure out how to control it eventually. People around her told her the same thing.

"You just gotta control it," they would say. "You don't have a problem."

She listened to them. She wanted to believe it.

When Her Mom Got Sick

Jessica graduated high school and her mom was diagnosed with cancer. For the year and a half that followed, Jessica drove down every Sunday to see her. They were best friends. She poured herself into being present for her mom, and the drinking stayed mostly in the background during those months.

Then, on August 16, 2018, her mother died. Jessica was 19 years old.

She came home that night. Someone got her mom's favorite beer, Bud Light Platinum. They sat on the porch. And something in Jessica broke open in a way she had never felt before. Not just grief. Something louder. Something that had been waiting for the right moment to take over.

"I said, I am going to become an alcoholic and I don't care," she said. "And I will deal with it later. Who thinks like that?"

She was probably drunk for weeks after her mother's funeral. She had a 15-year-old sister to take care of. A house to manage. Bills to figure out. She was 19 years old and had just lost the person she was closest to in the world. Drinking was not a coping mechanism she stumbled into. It was a decision she made out loud, with full awareness, because the pain was unbearable and she did not know any other way through it.

She would not grieve her mother's death properly for years. She would not even begin to until she finally got sober and walked into a therapist's office and was asked why she was there.

A Music Career Built Around the Bar Scene

At 19, Jessica got pulled into the Cleveland music scene. Cover bands. Bar stages. A world of adults in their forties and fifties who drank heavily and thought nothing of it, and a young woman who fit right in because she had been pretending to be older than she was since she was 16. She was the youngest person in the room at almost every show, accepted into something that felt like a community, a family, a place to belong.

She joined her first band at 20. Her bandmate was a drummer who is still her friend today. Their bass player was three years sober. He watched everything. He knew what was happening before she did.

Jessica and the drummer would get blackout drunk on stage. People came to their shows because you never knew what was going to happen. She thought it was fun. She thought it was rock and roll. She thought that is just what musicians do.

At 21, she flipped her car. She had been drinking earlier in the day and left hours later, thought the alcohol was out of her system. It wasn't. Two weeks later she got a DUI, woke up with a cop tapping on her window, and blew a 0.220. In Ohio, that's classified as a super DUI. She went through drunk school. She paid the fines. She made sense of it the way the people around her helped her make sense of it: you joined a club. Life's a party. You're 21.

She also ended up in the hospital. More than once. Blood alcohol levels at 0.3 and 0.4. EKGs on her chest in case her heart stopped. Doctors telling her she should not have survived what she drank. She would wake up, hear the concern, wave it off, and go back to her life. When the doctors asked if she still wanted to harm herself, she said no, she was fine, and walked out the door.

"Even then," she said, "I would wake up and be like, okay, whatever. Like, you're wasting this hospital's time because you're drunk."

Hiding It from Everyone

In her early twenties, Jessica took an office job because she needed the money. Her car insurance after the DUI was nearly $500 a month. She owed money everywhere. During her lunch break, she would walk up the street to her dad's house and steal a few of his beers to get through the afternoon. Her coworkers smelled it on her. She denied it.

She dated a man for two and a half years whose relationship with alcohol mirrored her own. They drank together every day, went to the bars every night, and never judged each other for it. She says now that the relationship was entirely built on drinking. There was no bottom to hit, because the behavior was always normalized by the person sitting across from her.

After they broke up, something shifted. Jessica decided to try one week without alcohol. Just to see what happened. The week became two weeks. Then a month. Then four months. She was sleeping better. The weight she had gained from drinking was melting off. She started to feel something she hadn't felt in years: herself.

And then she met someone new.

The Relapse That Opened the Floodgates

The new relationship was different. He was the first person who ever looked at Jessica and said plainly: I think you have a problem with drinking. She was four months sober when he said it, and her response was to hide her drinking from him even more carefully.

On November 17th, 2023, she had her first drink after four months sober. One glass of white wine at a friend dinner. One shot of tequila later in the night. She felt fine. She felt normal. She told herself: see? You're not an alcoholic. You can do this like everybody else.

"That was the ultimate switch," she said. "That opened the door to the worst relapse of my life."

Within weeks she was back to full addiction. Drinking in secret. Sneaking shots of vodka at the bar down the street before coming home to make dinner with her boyfriend standing in the kitchen. Walking to the drugstore on the pretense of needing something, stopping at the bar on the way for a quick shot, going back through the bar on the way home for another. Hiding miniature bottles of tequila and vodka in her bag on the way to her audition for a band in Chicago because she needed the confidence to sing.

She got the job. A touring band doing 140 shows a year, traveling from North Dakota to Key West in a van. She told them she was sober. She was not.

She hid alcohol in her stage boots. She snuck shots from the bar side before shows. She got blackout drunk on stage in North Dakota, fell, and spent the entire set walking up to her bass player between songs to tell him she wanted to kill herself. She didn't remember any of it the next morning. She could feel the anger radiating off her bandleader in the van on the way home. She played it off. Bad day. It happens.

During drives from Cleveland to Chicago, a six-and-a-half-hour stretch she made every week, she would be shaking from withdrawal, gripping the wheel, counting down the miles until she could get to the bar at the end of her street and feel normal again. She got pulled over in Indiana. She is still not sure what was in her system. The officer gave her a warning and drove away. She kept going toward the bar.

The Last Night She Drank

It was her second night in Chicago after officially moving there. She had just quit her band in a drunk rage over a fight with her bandleader. She walked into a bar alone and ordered Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc. She doesn't know how many glasses she had. She woke up in the bar bathroom, alone in the dark, with no idea where she was, feeling her way to the door. A bartender found her and told her to pay her tab and leave.

A woman at the bar noticed her. She was not from Chicago, was clearly not okay, and had a car parked outside that she could not drive. The woman drove Jessica's car home, which was one block away. She looked at Jessica before she left and said something that cut through the fog.

"You are very lucky it was me who helped you and not somebody else," she said. "You're not in Cleveland anymore. You're in Chicago. This is a whole different animal."

Jessica woke up the next morning in her apartment and something was different. She had just moved to a new city alone. She had quit her band. She had lost her family, her best friend, her boyfriend, and nearly everyone who had ever tried to help her. Her own father had told her he was done. Her sister was gone. Her best friend of 15 years had stepped away.

She had no one left to disappoint. And for the first time, that felt like a reason to stop instead of a reason to keep going.

"Something came over me," she said. "This is it. No more relapses. This time you're serious."

The Appointment That Changed Everything

Jessica made two appointments. A therapist who specialized in alcohol addiction. A psychiatrist. She was terrified walking into the first session. The therapist looked at her and asked one question: why are you here?

For the first time in her life, out loud, to another human being, Jessica said it.

"I am an alcoholic."

She started crying and couldn't stop. Not from shame, though there was plenty of that. But from the weight of it finally leaving her body. She had been carrying the secret of her own addiction for years, hiding it from boyfriends and bandmates and her dad and her sister and her best friend, sneaking into bars and sneaking out, always one more step ahead of anyone who might make her name it. And now she had named it. In a room. To a stranger. Out loud.

"It felt like the biggest weight off my shoulders," she said.

She got on medication to help with cravings. She started going to yoga every morning. She built a routine. She called Chicago her rehab, because she was far from everything that had made her sick, surrounded by people who knew her only as the version of herself she was trying to become. She wrote. She went to the zoo alone. She took herself to the beach. She started a salsa dancing class on a whim. She started, slowly, to find out who she was without a drink in her hand.

Then She Found Out She Was Pregnant

In October of 2024, after a tour in South Dakota, Jessica felt something was off. She had a pregnancy test sitting in her apartment. She took it. It was immediately positive. She put it in her nightstand and went to a farmer's market instead of a bar.

The baby's father was her on-and-off ex-boyfriend. When she told him, he chose not to be involved. Just like that, she was facing single motherhood, alone in Chicago, in early sobriety, with her whole band as her only support system.

"If I did not have my band, I would have drank," she said. "I know that for a fact."

She kept the baby. She toured with the band while she was pregnant. She moved back to Cleveland at 35 weeks. She gave birth to her son. And she did all of it sober.

People sometimes say to her: well, you couldn't drink anyway because you were pregnant. She pushes back on that every time. The cravings don't disappear because you're pregnant. The urges don't disappear. The grief doesn't disappear. The hard days don't disappear. She chose sobriety during all of it. That was not a given. That was a decision, just like the one she made on her mother's porch at 19. Only this time it was a decision to live.

If You Feel Like This... You're Not Alone

If you are reading this and you have ever stood in front of a mirror and thought: I know I have a problem and I still cannot stop, Jessica has been there. If you have ever hidden vodka in your stage boots, snuck shots at the bar before coming home to the person you love, or woken up in a bathroom with no idea how you got there, she has been there too.

And if you have ever sat in a parking lot outside an AA meeting and cried and driven away, she has been there as well.

"Asking for help is not bad," she said. "Even though I didn't do it right away, I wish I would have earlier. But ultimately it is up to you if you want to get better. You have to make the changes. You have to be strong. It's not easy. It's a battle."

She also said this, and it is worth sitting with: the moment you admit you have a problem out loud is the moment things change. Not because the hardest part is over. But because you cannot unknow the truth once you have said it. And the truth is the only place any of this can start.

Key Takeaways from Jessica's Story

• Grief and alcohol addiction are deeply linked. Jessica buried her mother's death under years of drinking without ever processing it. Getting sober meant finally facing what she had been running from since she was 19 years old. If you are drinking to cope with loss, that loss will still be there waiting. Getting help means grieving it properly, finally.

• Blacking out is not normal, even when everyone around you acts like it is. Jessica knew from her very first night of drinking that she was different. She just had no one around her to confirm what she already suspected. If you always go too far, that pattern is telling you something.

• Getting sober for someone else will not work. Jessica tried to get sober for her boyfriend multiple times and relapsed every time. It only took when she did it for herself, in a city alone, with no one left to perform for.

• Environment is everything in early sobriety. Moving to Chicago and treating it as her rehab gave Jessica distance from the people and places that had kept her sick. If your current environment is working against you, changing it is not running away. It is strategy.

• One drink is never just one drink. Four months sober, one glass of wine at a dinner, and it opened a door she spent the next year trying to close again. For people who struggle with alcohol addiction, there is no such thing as a controlled experiment.

• Therapy gave her what willpower alone could not. Jessica had tried to quit drinking many times on her own. What finally made it stick was professional help: a therapist who specialized in addiction, medication to manage cravings, and a space to say the hard things out loud for the very first time.

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The Life She Is Living Now

Jessica is 20 months sober. She has a son who has never seen her drunk. She has a job on the radio, on a talk show she does every day. She still works at the brewery in Cleveland where she used to drink with her coworkers, and now those same coworkers watch her show up every day and see what is different. She still does music shows here and there. She made amends with the people she hurt. Her best friend of 15 years came back. Her family came back.

"I dedicate my life being sober for you guys, for myself," she said. "I owe you that. And I would never pick up a drink again, because I know for a fact I would lose it all."

She also said something that captures the whole arc of her story: she is the happiest she has ever been. Not because everything is easy. Not because sobriety solved all her problems or filled all the holes. But because she wakes up every morning and gets to actually be there. Present. Clear. Herself.

At 19, she made a choice on her mother's porch to become an alcoholic. And then, one hard year and one therapy appointment and one morning in Chicago at a time, she made a different choice. The same woman who said I don't care and I'll deal with it later finally dealt with it. And she is still here to tell the story.

So are you.

Listen to the Full Episode

Jessica shares so much more in her full conversation on the Sober Motivation Podcast, including what it was like to get sober while pregnant and alone in a new city, how therapy changed everything, and what she would say to the version of herself sitting on that porch at 19. If her story connected with you, hit play and let the rest of it land. And if you are looking for more stories like this one, you are exactly where you need to be.

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