This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. Today I'm here with Simone.

Welcome Simone, so good to have you here. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's pleasure to be here.

Well, it's awesome. So why don't you just kind of take us back to sort of where everything started for you and kind of the beginning?

So my beginning, I think, is my when I was born actually when I wrote you the information at first, it was like, you know, I was brought into an already fractured family and it was kind of there was a lot of drama and trauma going on.

Actually, it was a divorce or so. I was born in 1961 in middle America. My dad was in the Air Force and he married my mom who was German and they got married in Germany and then they had my two sisters there and then he got stationed in the United States.

So they came over when my older sister was just six weeks old and three months after they got to the United States, which, you know, it was my mom was almost 30.

It was just a big transition for her with two babies and never been to the United States.

She didn't speak English. She did, but you know, not as she didn't have a great grasp of the languages she could or does now. So anyway, but three months after my they got here, my dad was diagnosed with the legs are comma.

And this is 1960. So the treatment for that is to amputate the leg at the hip and that was just three months after they came to the United States.

So the Air Force took my dad away from my mom and my two sisters for a whole year and it was really, you know, that was a big, you know, incident and struggle for them.

And so my dad comes back and then I was born. So I was born into all of this. And so my dad's coping mechanism was drinking alcohol. And so alcohol was always in my life, you know, present with I saw my dad drinking a lot.

And so that's how it started. So about 13 years old is when I started doubling in alcohol and with my friends. And, you know, the first time I didn't like it, like most of your other guests have said, I think it was ever clear and made me say, right to the juggerer.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, when I could I would, you know, drink with my friends, but it wasn't like I had to have it all the time. And then there was from about 13 to 18, I dabbled in drinking and smoke and pot and, you know, doing all the things that were in the 70s.

And so I just, I did all those things from like age 14 to age 18.

Another piece of my story, I think that started cause me problems and probably led to my addictive nature and using substances was I had a traumatic event when I was 14.

And I was raped and there was a trial and there was a conviction. And then after that, you know, it was like in the school there, it was around my junior high. And so I began to receive a lot of bullying from the people that knew the boys that were the perpetrators.

And so it just made me lose interest in school. And I asked my mom to let me switch schools, but that wasn't going to happen. This is in the 70s. It was just like deal with it and move on.

And so basically I dropped out of school. I was in the eighth grade school was easy for me, but it was just not a happy place for me.

And so I basically had been on my own since our 13 I started living with my first boyfriend when I was 14 I worked I am.

We broke up after two years and then my parents kind of didn't know what to do with me either one of them. My dad was still drinking my mom was they got a divorce during that time.

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