My interviewee this week is Jasmine*. She’s a friend of mine with lots of experience in recovery. I hope you enjoy hearing her valuable, nuanced perspective on reckoning with her past and staying sober in the present.

*Name and some identifying details changed

Katie: Hi Jasmine! Thank you for doing this. Tell me about how your substance use started.

Jasmine: I started smoking pot and drinking when I was 12 or 13. My older brother did both, and I hung out with him and his friends a few times.

Right away, it was clear that I didn’t drink or use like other people—even my brother and his friends, who drank a lot, were like ‘whoa, easy there.’ A few hours later, I was puking my guts out, and that trend continued the whole time I was drinking; I pretty much always drank until I threw up.

K: Yeah, it was obvious from the jump with me, too. Even the friends I was partying with in high school said, “Okay, you do this in a way that we don’t.” So I was hiding stuff pretty early on.

J: I got used to rationalizing and lying to maintain an appearance. My brother got caught drinking and with drugs, and it caused a lot of drama in my family. I was always maintaining this web of lies that I had to keep straight. I had to protect the most important thing, which was drinking and getting high.

Substances also freed me from a lot of the cultural shame I was feeling. At the time, I wasn’t out to anyone, even myself. I literally didn’t know the word “transgender.” I just assumed all little boys wanted to be girls. I thought that was a normal part of every boy’s experience.

In high school, I started experimenting with gender expression. I would get high and ride my bike to the city, where there was a stretch of thrift stores. I would thrift a bunch of women’s clothing and shoplift makeup from Walgreens. When my parents were out, I would put on all this stuff, look in the mirror, and feel more like myself. But then I would hear my brother open the front door, or my parents would come back early, and I would take everything off in a panic. I felt such shame that when everyone was in bed, I’d gather everything together and put it in a bag in the garbage. I did that over and over.

K: What happened after high school?

J: The number one thing I wanted to do was get my own place. I hated the suburban town I grew up in. I spent a lot of time in the city. I grew up in a suburb of Oakland, and I spent a lot of time in Oakland and Berkeley. So I got an apartment in Oakland with some friends. I knew if I did that, I could be high all the time. And I was.

My 20s are a blur. I tried to go to college, but dropped out. My high school girlfriend broke up with me because I wasn’t doing anything with my life. She was doing all these cool things, and I was just interested in one thing. In retrospect, it was very fair.

I did a lot of psychedelics during this time. I was all for anything that made me feel different. But I was also very depressed. I didn’t care what happened to me. I would show up late to work with puke on my shirt—I didn’t care.

There was this 18-month stretch where I was hitchhiking and bumming around the Pacific Northwest. The whole thing was very scary. I was doing a lot of drugs and doing a lot of sketchy things for money. I can’t believe I survived it, honestly.

K: What happened after the road trip?

J: I ended up back in Oakland and moved in with two people in a two-bedroom apartment, who had sectioned off a tiny area as a separate room to save on rent. When I unpacked, I found some of my quote-unquote cross-dressing stuff from my teenage years and was like, Oh, that seems like more fun now.

So I started wearing some of those clothes and asked my roommate if she would teach me how to do makeup. We started doing that together. She was a Women’s Studies major at San Francisco State University, and one day she took a book down from her bookshelf and silently handed it to me. It was A Transgender History by Susan Stryker.

In the introduction, she defines the terms she uses in the book and describes what transgender means. And I was like oh my god, I think this describes me. For the next few months, I was just preparing myself for coming out, socially transitioning, and getting connected with a therapist—it all happened very quickly.

K: From what you’re saying, it sounds like all the pieces had been in a fuzzy picture in the background and then suddenly became clear.

J: Exactly. I knew as soon as I had the word for it. It was a lot to process, and very scary because I didn’t know how my parents or my friends would react.

K: That must have been terrifying.

J: It was. I definitely relied on changing my emotional channel using drugs and alcohol. It’s weird because I was doing a lot of MDMA at the time, and I found it very useful to talk through all this stuff with my roommates. Even though it was messy and toxic, it was simultaneously very helpful.

K: There’s a reason that MDMA therapy is a thing that helps some people with PTSD.

J: It was a very exciting but also complicated time. Coming out didn’t go over super well with everyone in my life. When I socially transitioned [changing my outward appearance and how I identified], I was in danger in a way I never had been before. I was followed, harassed, and people would yell things at me on the street, things like that.

I started hanging out with the trans and queer community and learning about that culture and history, which was really valuable to me. But the people I was hanging out with were still people who drank and used like me. Even though I felt more connected to myself than I did before, I still felt like there was something else wrong with me.

K: What happened to make you want to get sober?

J: I had to leave a living situation that had become dangerous. I was taking refuge with some friends for a few weeks, and one night I had a dream that I was sober, playing board games with people who weren’t my actual family but whom I considered family. In the dream, I had a powerful sense of presence and calm that I hadn’t felt in real life for years. It wasn’t like I heard a voice, but the subtext of the dream was very clear to me—that this is something that was possible for me.

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The next day, when everyone in the house was doing drugs, and someone passed the pipe to me, I was just like, “No thank you, actually.” I spent the next two weeks holding on for dear life. I kept everything to myself because what was I supposed to say? Uhh, God told me to be sober?

I finally asked a friend who had previously been in recovery what to do. He suggested an AA meeting, which I initially resisted. All I knew about AA was that my uncle went, and it seemed like a big drag. In the movies, meetings are always in these concrete rooms, and it’s just a real downer. But my friend said exactly the right thing.

K: What was that?

J: He said you don’t have to be an alcoholic to go to AA. For some reason, that made me feel like I could go. From there, it was the classic AA story where I showed up, sat down, and wanted nothing more than to run out of the room because it felt like my whole nervous system was on fire.

But the meeting started, someone started sharing their story, and I had that moment of Oh, that’s me; maybe I am an alcoholic. I was so desperate for a solution, and the feeling I had after that dream was still really powerful. That kept me going back to AA.

K: I’m glad you did.

J: Yeah, me too. I’m learning that this isn’t the case everywhere, but my experience with Oakland AA was very welcoming. It wasn’t strict, exclusive, or dogmatic at all. It wasn’t perfect 100% of the time, but for the most part, it was. And AA has taught me how to navigate so many things—including some of the shitty experiences I’ve had with people in AA.

K: Like what?

J: Even in Oakland, I came across some people who were weirded out by my being trans. I encountered people who were fascinated with what’s in my pants and asked me about it in a weird and sexualized way. I had a sponsee drunk dial me and say really gross and inappropriate things.

K: That’s so fucked up. That’s not the way you talk to a human being.

J: It’s also not what AA is for. This is not why I shared my number with you.

K: You’re supposed to call me if you feel like drinking. Not if you want to know what’s in my pants.

J: I had access to support, including through my connections in [AA], so I feel grateful for that. I’m also grateful that I had so many instances of safely connecting with people in the Program because it showed me that the negative experiences aren’t a function of AA, they’re a function of people being weird or inappropriate.

K: You get to ‘practice these principles in all your affairs?’

J: Yes. But also, very practically, using these life skills and coping skills that AA taught me. And learning that major life changes still happen when you’re sober. And they can be good or bad changes, but the point is that I’m not directly pouring gasoline on the fire.

K: You recently moved to a more rural area in California, right?

J: Yeah, and that’s been hard. I was really plugged into the recovery community in Oakland. I helped start a meeting there. Then, I was suddenly away from my support network—both in terms of the people and the places where I would show up. There’s comfort in routine.

When I moved here, I tried really hard to be open to the meetings, but I noticed a lot of things that I was uncomfortable with or just weren’t working for me.

K: Like what?

J: It was hard going into a meeting and realizing that ‘oh, not only am I the only trans person here, I’m also the only queer person here.’ I obviously don’t know everyone’s identity, but it certainly felt like I was the only queer person. Even going to women’s meetings, I’ve found a lot of the women look at me like they don’t really know what to do with me. And that’s unfortunate.

K: It’s not the feeling you want when you’re going somewhere for support.

J: Yeah, it felt very precarious. I didn’t feel like there were people I could connect with at this moment in my life. I checked in with friends from home to be like, “Am I just not being willing and open?” But at some point, I realized I felt I needed to perform socially to stay safe. Which is obviously not ideal for a support system.

K: Right, a home group is supposed to be the place you can go when everything in your life is falling apart, and you know the group won’t judge you and will catch you no matter which way you’re falling. If you can’t trust that, what’s the point?

J: It was hard to learn that AA everywhere isn’t like what I experienced in Oakland. It’s a strength and a weakness of the Program. There’s no strict structure; you can say and do whatever you want. That’s what made the meetings I went to in Oakland so great, but also what makes me feel uncomfortable going where I live now.

K: How did you come across Recovery Dharma?

J: My friends were very patient and listened to me as I complained about all of this, and they kept telling me to keep trying different things. One in particular knew of Recovery Dharma and suggested I check it out.

I kept meaning to go, but several weeks ago, I had this weird experience where a non-alcoholic beer really triggered a craving on a deeply unsettling level. I was positive that even if I went out and got drunk, the craving wouldn’t go away. It was horrible. I talked to a friend who listened very sympathetically, listened to me, and said, “Okay, now what?”

I started talking about all these AA tools that I was going to use, and she responded, “Great, how about you go to a fucking meeting?”

K: Bet you loved hearing that.

J: I knew she was right, and I also didn’t want to. But I was desperate. I didn’t want to feel the way I was feeling anymore, and I didn’t want to drink or use drugs, so I went to the RD meeting. And I got that sense of relief I used to get with AA meetings.

I was really vulnerable in the meeting and told people that I’m new here and need to connect with people. I exchanged numbers with people after the meeting, and I’ve hung out with a couple of them, and that’s been nice.

K: Good for you. That’s a hard thing to say. And people can’t know it unless you put it out there.

J: Asking for help is huge. It sounds simple, but it’s so difficult for me. I feel like I have to be perfect and put together, or I’m a failure as a human. But I have to agree to just set that feeling aside and do what I need to do to stay sober.

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