In the summer of 2025, I found myself drinking every single day.

It didn’t look like what I thought a drinking problem was supposed to look like. It looked like beach days, boat days and long afternoons by the pool with friends who were doing the same. I wasn’t drinking alone. I wasn’t blacking out. I never drove drunk. From the outside, it felt normal.

But underneath that, something was shifting.

I started noticing that I was the one initiating many of these “social” plans as an excuse to drink. I started waking up feeling awful more often than not. I was what people call "browning out," not fully blacking out, but losing pieces of conversations and relying on others to fill in the gaps the next day.

Then came August Fourth.

I woke up in a hotel room with my husband and kids after a night of heavy drinking with friends. We had been driving back from a vacation in the North Carolina mountains and stopped to visit them along the way. That morning, I felt physically terrible, but it was more than that.

I looked over at my kids sleeping in the other bed and thought: I don’t want this to be my normal anymore.

At the time, I had about 100 followers on TikTok and posted casually about everyday life. But that morning, I did something completely out of character: I filmed a........

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