#201 – Joann Kenyon
20 Years of Evolving Sobriety
Joann Kenyon grew up an Army brat to a family she thought gave her everything she ever wanted. It wasn’t until later that she realized that wasn’t true. She started drinking at 12 and found Meth at 14. That first night she used, she stayed up all night playing video games and felt the best she’d ever felt.
Things escalated quickly and suddenly she was a 70lb raver, selling drugs and peeing on everyone’s couch. She was a convicted felon by 18. In and out of treatment. Then back home, shooting ketamine and speed. Getting fired from drugs.
Then came recovery and young people’s meetings, but brought about other addictions outside of using. At the end of each road she would feel things narrowing and would realize once again what she was looking for wasn’t at the end of it.
Today she’s almost 20 years sober, living a healthy life and working to heal people who feel the same inner turmoil she faced for so long.
Tune in to learn about:
From Childhood to Chaos: Joann’s Journey through Addiction: Learn about her harrowing journey from a troubled childhood to addiction, and how she found solace in substances, only to realize the emptiness they brought.
A Life Unraveled: Joann’s Descent into Addiction: Discover the story of Joann’s descent into addiction, including her early introduction to drugs, criminal convictions, and the turbulent cycle of recovery and relapse.
Recovery, Relapse, and Resilience: Joann’s 20-Year Sobriety Story: Explore Joann’s path to recovery, the challenges she faced along the way, and how she eventually found healing and purpose after nearly two decades of sobriety.
Transformation from Addiction to Empowerment: Joann shares her transformation from addiction and chaos to a fulfilling life of sobriety, helping others navigate the same struggles she once endured.
To find other similar episodes by topic, click here.
Connect with Joann
Website | breatheitout.com
Instagram | @breatheitoutwithjoann
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Episode Transcript
Speaker 1:
Coming up on this episode of The Courage to Change, sponsored by lionrock.life.
Joann Kenyon:
I did have that fear of I don’t want to be normal. I got sober, now I’m doing all the normal things. I’m working a job and I’m paying taxes and I don’t want to do that. I want to be a reject still. And now I’m going to come back because this is still not working for me and I’m unhappy. I do have that fear that maybe I’m going to drink.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to the Courage to Change Recovery podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame and I am your host. Today we have my friend, Joanne Kenyon. Joanne grew up an army brat to a family she thought gave her everything that she’d ever wanted. It wasn’t until later that she realized that this was not true. She started drinking at 12 and found meth at 14. That first night that she used, she stayed up all night playing video games and it was the best she’d ever felt.
Things escalated quickly and suddenly she was a 70-pound raver selling drugs and peeing on everyone’s couch. She was a convicted felon by the age of 18, in and out of treatment. Then she made it back home and was shooting ketamine and speed, getting fired from jobs because of drugs. Then came recovery and young people’s meetings, but that brought about other obsessions outside abusing. At the end of each road, she would feel things narrowing and would realize once again what she was looking for wasn’t at the end of it. Today, she’s almost 20 years sober, living a healthy life and working to heal people who feel the same inner turmoil she faced for so long. I am so grateful that my friend Joanne was able to come on the podcast and share her story. It was really fun to remember why it is that we both started on this path so many years ago at this point, and all the things that we’ve been through and survived.
Joanne is a really special person. She is the real deal. If she can get sober, so can you, so can your mother, father, brother, sister, loved one, child, whomever, because her struggles are as serious as anyone’s. And I have had the privilege of walking the road of sobriety with her for the past almost 20 years. So I hope you enjoy this, some of the funny stories, some of the serious stories and everything in between, and that you are inspired by the work that she has done. All right, friends, without further ado, I give you Joanne Kenyon. Let’s do this.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to the Courage to Change, a recovery podcast. We are a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Joanne, thank you so much for being here.
Joann Kenyon:
And thank you for having me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This should be good. Joanne, I think you and I met in a bar.
Joann Kenyon:
We did. In sobriety.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
In sobriety.
Joann Kenyon:
Yes.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
In Arizona.
Joann Kenyon:
In my hometown.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
In your hometown, which takes us to your hometown. So I think it’s actually a great place to start. Let’s get into a little bit about where you grew up and what your background is.
Joann Kenyon:
Okay. So I am the second oldest of four siblings and you’re talking about Prescott, Arizona, which when I grew up there, it was maybe 30,000 people. I moved there in junior high, so not a great time to move, especially when you have some internal issues. My dad was a neurologist and that we had just kind of gotten out of the army stuff, I was an army brat. We moved around a lot. I don’t know if you can understand this, but I always had this issue that I wanted to be cool. I wasn’t cool.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Joann Kenyon:
And I was four eight until I was a junior in high school. I was a gymnast, my growth was stunted and I didn’t hit puberty until I was 15, and my mom gave me this… She calls it an Audrey Hepburn haircut, but it was a bowl cut.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
She’s wrong.
Joann Kenyon:
I looked it up and it was nothing like that. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to look older, I wanted to be cooler, and I kind of wanted to be bad. So I got into junior high in Prescott, Arizona, and I started becoming friends with, I want to call them the druggies, even though nobody did drugs yet. They were like the flannel wearers. They were the people that were more accepting because the popular crowd, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. The best reference that I have is that, probably nobody has really seen this movie, but Charlie’s Angels from the year 2000.
Sam Rockwell was one of the actors and he’s the bad guy, but everybody thinks he’s like this dorky good guy that Drew Barrymore falls in love with this guy. And then you find out he’s the bad guy and all of a sudden his good song comes on and he starts smoking a cigarette and all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, he’s so cool and sexy.” That is what I’m attracted to, and I don’t know what’s up with me for that, but that’s who I wanted to be or that’s who I was attracted to. This was what was wrong with me from a very early age.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Or right with you.
Joann Kenyon:
Or right with me. Absolutely.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. We joke about this now because when you and I were sober in our twenties, we were dating this group of guys and we called them Team Dirt Bag because-
Joann Kenyon:
Love Team Dirt Bag.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Team Dirt Bag because we just loved these… My boyfriend at the time was on parole. He had to get permission to come to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving. It was Team Dirt Bag was alive and well, one of us married team Dirt Bag, she who shall not be named.
Joann Kenyon:
She’s been on your podcast.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I know. She’s amazing and he’s no longer a Team Dirt Bag. But I just had this quick anecdote, which is that I was on a plane two days ago and this guy was walking up the aisle and this older stewardess looked, “Hi”, whatever. And he looks at her, gives her a really good eye contact look, not weird anything, gives her a really good eye contact look, smiles and says, “How are you?” And she’s well, whatever. And I literally was like, “He’s so hot. Oh my God.” We’re not talking about any of the rest of the things. It was like vulnerable, deep eye contact and respect and whatever and I literally thought to you and thought to like, “Wow, we’ve really moved on up in the world.”
Joann Kenyon:
We’ve come a long way. Yeah. I don’t know what it is, but this was what was fundamentally ingrained in me very, very early. So by the age of 10, I was medicated and in therapy, I believe something was wrong with me very early on. I had chronic migraines from the age of seven. I was a bed wetter way before I started using. When I started drinking and using, I was a bed wetter until I got sober. I mean, that was just if you knew me, I’d peed on your stuff. I was a very classy woman. Family dynamics were weird. I didn’t know really what was wrong, but something was up. Three out of four of the siblings are in recovery. Two, which I can personally thank you for helping them get sober, and one is an Al-Anon, so you can argue whether it’s nature versus nurture.
I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, and it doesn’t really matter, but we were really big into sweeping things under the rug and that’s emotions or things that happen. And I never knew that I was looking for relief, I never knew that I really was disgruntled as a kid. I just knew that I didn’t have a lot of childhood memories, I don’t think I had a whole lot of friends. I remember my first drink, which was I started with a hard stuff. It’s called Zima, which is a wine cooler. I remember the taste of it to this day. And it was nothing really phenomenal, it was just really that I wanted to try drinking and I wanted to try smoking, and I remember it was fun and I’m going to try it again. I wanted to try other substances and I don’t really know if it was a component of I wanted to be cool or not, but I tried smoking weed, I tried other substances but I remember when I found my substance.
And it’s probably because I had ADHD that was undiagnosed because I was diagnosed later, but I already had a drug problem. But it was when I found methamphetamine, that was when I was off and running. I didn’t have to sleep. I had a lot of fun. I had a lot of energy. I was known as, I think Spaz-Ann was one of my nicknames, and I had a ton of fun. A one story, and I’m going to warn you right now that this is kind of a trigger story. I was 15 and I was hanging out with my dealer and some of my friends and needles started coming around. I remember I was just really allured. I have an impulsive personality and I told my friends, “Do not let me chicken out. I really want to try this” and I remember I chickened out. I was like, “Oh no, I’m running” and I tried to run away and my friends chased me down and held me down and held me to that promise, and it was the best decision of my life.
I know that that sounds absolutely ridiculous. As Bill. W would say in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, I had arrived. I found that peace and comfort that I had always been looking for, and I didn’t even know that I was looking for it. That would destroy my life.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s interesting though because I was IV heroin and if you had told me that that was going to happen, I would’ve said, “There’s no way. I’m not interested.” Up until the very second that it happened, it was not interesting. And so it’s interesting to me because you hear a lot of stories that are closer to mine like, “Oh, I would’ve never thought that I was going to do that. I was not interested”, whatever. And here’s this other side where, no, I really wanted to be part of this club. I really wanted to do this. I wanted to be, I was afraid to.
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah. I was afraid, obviously. I mean, I tried to run, but I mean I really wanted to try it all. I really wanted to be a part of everything. It wasn’t like I wanted to be cool and I wanted to be a junkie, but I’m like, “I really want to see what this is. I want to see what this hype is all about. I want to see what this feels like and I want to party.” And what I didn’t know is that I was looking for relief, but I still really thought that I just want to feel good. And I’m taking pills, I’m smoking weeded, I’m drinking. I found the rave scene right after that, which is a whole nother area. I obviously did what any responsible person would do is that I started dealing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, because obviously have to.
Joann Kenyon:
I’m sure that there was an element of, “Let’s get her hooked and let’s get her dealing.” I was not very good at it. I made money for them. I made no money for myself because I obviously did as much as I could myself. And this is Prescott. This is Prescott, Arizona, and 30,000 people, what do you do? You get arrested and you get in trouble. And at 15 years old, almost immediately, I started getting arrested and getting ticketed for everything from jaywalking to smoking, to curfew, to huffing paint, to dealing acid on school campus. And that started my getting kicked out of school and starting to get in serious trouble.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You’re the daughter of a doctor and a stay-at-home mom and so by this point, when we’re describing who you are, you’re 15. A lot of the times parents or people listening are like, “Well, if I were their parent or if my kid did X, Y, Z”, or, “Where were the parents? What were they doing?” Give us a little color because I know from my own story that my parents tried to do all the things to help and they could not stop. I was on this train. It wasn’t like I was being neglected and it happened, it was I was going to do what I was going to do. Was that your experience as well?
Joann Kenyon:
Well, yeah. I was like a good kid, which is funny because I went to church every Sunday. When I started having problems then my mom started taking me to church on Wednesdays, like healing services. And I also had an identity crisis and I’m a really good chameleon. So I’m in the choir at school, I never ditched school. I have a letter jacket for being in the choir and being a cheerleader. I’m perming my hair, I’m wearing baggy pants. My parents won’t let me wear baggy pants, so what do I do? I wear different clothes and then I pack them in my backpack. I have a pager. So all the time my mom’s paging me, “911. 911. Where are you?” And I’m disappearing. I’m still doing gymnastics and still trying to keep it together, which is just not going super well. I’m hanging out with different types of gangs, but I’m also coaching gymnastics and I’m getting fired. But I’m doing all of these things to try to keep everything together and-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But it’s falling apart.
Joann Kenyon:
Oh, it’s totally falling apart. I’m doing the bare minimum of trying to not embarrass my family.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Joann Kenyon:
And what am I doing? I’m sweeping it under the rug and I’m pretending like everything is okay. My parents are absolutely mortified, probably in denial being like, “Oh, my daughter’s doing so well.” And there’s four of us so there’s a lot going on. My brother’s doing baseball, my sister’s doing swimming. I have a sister that’s 10 years younger than me so we also have a baby, a little one running around. Things are just complete chaos. And then I’m running around starting to drive and getting 13 people fitting in one little car and just driving around smoking cigarettes. Well, they don’t have a lot of time to deal with me, and I’m just a lot because I’m going to do what I want to do.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I remember when I first heard your story, and throughout this I’m going to refer to how you look as in I think you’re like maybe five one, five two.
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah. Five one, ish.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And blonde. You look like a really sweet good girl, whatever. And so I’m going to refer to it a bunch because in every situation that I’ve been in with you, it always plays a role in perception. But I remember meeting you and hearing a bit about your story, but then you told this one story about your dad’s tailpipe and huffing. I’ll never forget because I was like, “Oh, this girl is no fucking joke.” I know that I could give a thousand stories about that now, but that one will forever stick in my mind because as a fellow inmate, this to me is just the level of intensity of I need to get high no matter what. No matter what, no matter what.
Joann Kenyon:
I forgot that story. So I used to huff a lot of paint. Gold Dutch boy was my favorite with my friends. And also it’s a felony in Arizona if you get caught, which I did. And I was over the age of 18 and I went to jail for it, and I also had a minor with me, and that’s also contributing to a minor. So along with that, also if you huff gas, it is quite fun. And my friend had a 57 Chevy or something. It had this perfect little gas gauge, gas, I don’t know, filler.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Pipe. Tailpipe.
Joann Kenyon:
I don’t even know. It wasn’t the tailpipe because you didn’t do the exhaust, you actually huffed the gas itself. So you would just put your mouth right in the gas tank. And talk about desperation I had. I was just huffing gas. Now that I think about, I really didn’t have much of a frontal lobe. I was huffing gas and I got very lightheaded, which is the point, and I stood up and I had this vision of myself looking down at myself. Of course I told myself that I’ve lived hundreds of lives and this was the worst, most pathetic life I have ever lived.
And I had fallen down, but I had spit out this big thing of tar out of my mouth, and I actually was stuck in this tar, and I splat on the ground and I was stuck there, could not move. Then somebody started screaming my name and hitting me over the head with a sledgehammer, and I was stuck there in excruciating pain being hit over the head for all of eternity. It was an out of body experience, but I was stuck in hell for forever. And then I woke up and I had fallen and I had hit my head on a corner of an air conditioner.
That one, talk about trauma, that one really, really messed me up. The things that we do is just seconds and inches from dying all the time. And that was just one of hundreds of stories, and that’s one that I just forgot. I would black out for days at a time, or I would go into blackout drug induced psychosis and scared the shit out of my family all the time. They couldn’t wake me up. My mom would ice water or bang pots and pans because I would fall asleep for 24 or 48 hours at a time because I hadn’t slept in so long. And I would steal used needles out of sharp containers from my dad’s office, and I would just carry those around all the time. I was just a mess, I was a mess. So you would think that this is hitting bottom for me. I was 70 or 80 pounds, I was 18 years old, and I got busted in a raid.
And you would think that I got busted in a raid like I was in the house. I went and picked up some dope, went and dropped it off, and then I came back for more and I noticed there’s a raid going on. So I’m like, “I’m not going to stop” so I just do a little drive-by to be like, “Hi guys, how’s it going?” And I see all the police officers point at my car and run to their cars. So I’m like, “This isn’t good. Okay.” So I just speed off. I do what any responsible drug addict would do, I’m throwing things out the window, I’m going like 80. They pull me over and they’re like, “Hello, Ms. Brian. It’s time.” They’re like, “Do you know that you’re speeding?” I’m all, “Really? That’s what we’re going with?” And they take me back to the scene of the crime and then tie me to everything. And this was the big one so I go to jail and I get this opportunity, this great opportunity.
I’ve already been to AA, I’ve already been to… failed all these urine tests and everything else, and I get this opportunity to go to treatment that they do third party release that you can sit in jail or you can go to treatment. I remember being on the phone to being like, “I’m going to learn to drink like a lady.” I should have known at that point in time that I was not ready to get sober. Off to Chandler Valley Hope I go, 30 days. You would think that that would be enough to get me sober. I couldn’t even stay sober for the 30 days. I snuck out and I drank and I smoked a bunch of weed and I came back and passed out. It was miserable. And I had to go into a place for women coming out of prison. I made friends there.
It’s weird because as a doctor’s daughter, you would think that I can’t mesh with these people. And I’m like, “These are my people. I love these people.” And I get out again and I’m able to get through the program and have a real introduction into Alcoholic Anonymous. And I love being sober, I just wasn’t ready.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s hard. I loved where you’re like, “Learn how to drink a lady.” I remember thinking things like that, learn how to drink a normal person. I didn’t know how to be a normal person, let alone drink like a normal person. So it was completely all these things that we’re thinking about what we’re going to do like, “Oh, I’m going to make it work.” But the truth is, we were spending so much time using that even if we had wanted to go back to a normal life, we didn’t know how to do that anymore. We didn’t have those skills, we didn’t have that community. We weren’t in high school.
We had also spent so much time working our way out of the mainstream that it was going to be… We were going to have to actually fight to get back in the mainstream. And I think, I don’t know about you, but I did not realize how difficult that was going to be or how far away from the path, despite how crazy things were, I was. How far off the mainstream, because as far as I was concerned, this is what everybody I knew was doing.
Joann Kenyon:
I’m just jealous. You had some skills that I didn’t because you were a little bit younger.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah.
Joann Kenyon:
You had Depends.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I did. I had Depends. I used Depends. Instead of peeing on people’s stuff, I peed eventually in these diapers. Listen, Joanne, you know me. I’m a problem solver. When I see a problem, I try to immediately solve it. I just wasn’t solving the right problem.
Joann Kenyon:
Well, I had problem solving skills. With tweakers, you get those pits in your cheeks really, really easily. So I used to shove cotton balls in corners of my cheeks and so it filled out your cheeks. Which thinking now I could have used candy or marbles or something that didn’t muffle your speech because I would go to work for my dad or be around my family and they’d be like, “How are you?” And I’d be like, “Fine, how are you?” And they’re like, “What’s wrong with your voice?” And I’m like, “[inaudible 00:20:57] nothing.” Or I could have used colored contacts for dilated pupils. There’s so many different problem solving skills that I’ve learned in AA that I could have used, and I was really bad at problem solving.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
We tried to get sober a bunch of times. We went to AA, we went to treatment, we went to outpatient, inpatient, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You went to jail. Why did all those other times not stick and the last one did?
Joann Kenyon:
I was completely out of ideas. I was completely broken. I was a garbage disposal.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What do you mean out of ideas? Explain out of ideas.
Joann Kenyon:
Well, what happened? I had gone back out and I still had these ideas. I had stayed sober on and off for maybe a year and a half. And it just started slowly where I was like, “Okay, well maybe I’ll just try drinking and if I don’t touch a needle again or if I don’t touch meth again, I’ll be fine.” Then my second drug of choice was ketamine so I started shooting ketamine. So I touched a needle, but as long as I don’t do intravenous drugs. That’s a really classy drug by the way. You’re drooling, you’re face down, passed out. It’s not pretty.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Welcome to my world.
Joann Kenyon:
Totally, totally. Heroin was not one of my drugs of choice. Well, vomiting is just not one of my things. I pee my pants when I vomit, it comes out my nose. It’s just not one of my things. I tried it once and I was like, “Mm, no.” It’s just not good. I moved into my mom’s at 21 and that’s what grown up women do, and I totaled my car. I hit a rock, rock won. I got fired from my dad. And things got to the point where my mom was like, “Did you flush some syringes down the toilet again? Because I have to call a plumber and this is embarrassing.” But what happened for me was I got this bump on my arm and it wasn’t even a place that I shot dope. I was shooting speed again. I was like, “Oh, I got a weird spider bite.”
And then it started to spread. It wasn’t quite as bad as Requiem for a dream, but it started to spread around the arm and I was like, “Maybe I broke my arm. I don’t know. I have no idea what’s happening.” My dad sent me for an X-ray because he’s a doctor and he can do that. I ended up with a really bad case of cellulitis and this is like desperation. I ended up going to the hospital and they’re like, “You have cellulitis. You’re an IV user. We’re hospitalizing you.” I was there for a week and there I had that moment of clarity, and I knew sitting in that hospital bed that the fight was over. I had had many moments of desperation, but I knew that if I went back to AA, I never had to feel the way that I was feeling in that hopeless moment.
Many of my friends were dead, many of my friends had gone psychotic. I had friends on the streets. I had no friends left that wouldn’t rob me the second that I turned my back. My family had kind of given up on me and I was completely hopeless and I damaged everybody that I had known, not just hurt them, I had damaged them. I had no more reservations. I had no more ideas.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Had you been to a place where you wanted to stop and couldn’t?
Joann Kenyon:
Oh. So I remember this even came up when I was in jail the first time is they’re like, “Did you have contracts that were signed in blood?” And I’m all, “Yeah, we messed around.” We would sign a contract like I will not do any more dope, and I would prick my finger and put my blood on there. And by the next day I would have a beer in my hand by noon and no recollection that I had tried to even get sober. I desperately tried to stop all the time, but there was a difference in this existence of misery. I had tried. I had tried to stop almost every day for years, but you don’t have those tools. I was sitting in a hospital bed. I was in violation of probation again. I had been on probation for five years and I had all this jail time hanging over my head, and that moment was the beginning of a change, of a transformation.
I knew what AA was about. I’ve qualified for almost every narcotic’s program, but I called my probation officer and I said, “I’m going to have to go to jail. I don’t care if I have to go to jail, I’m going to die. So whatever I have to do, I’d like the opportunity to go to treatment. If I have to go to jail first, I’ll go to jail.” My probation officer said, “You can go to treatment.” What do you think? Why were you ready? Why were you ready at the time that you were ready?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I too was in a hospital and I too had infected. I didn’t have cellulitis, I had phlebitis and had infected all the veins in both my arms. Here was my calculation, if you will. I was 19. I had been doing drugs and drinking and doing drugs and pulling apart my life for most of my childhood, right? The early years it certainly wasn’t even remotely close to daily use, but I was abusing substances in some way, shape or form, whether that was emotional like people or sugar or whatever. My entire childhood was spent looking for something to make me feel better than I felt, and I was so tired and exhausted and it wasn’t working. I was just constantly getting in trouble. I’d either end up in custody or in the hospital within roughly 48 hours of starting to use. So it literally didn’t work anymore.
And like you said, I was seriously out of options. The only thing I knew was that people I knew were getting sober in AA. I had been with them, I had seen them. I had seen it happen. I’d experienced it and it was the only thing I knew and I had seen work for other people. My calculation was I can’t go on living, so I’m either going to do this thing and do what they’re doing and if it doesn’t work, I’ll just kill myself. But I don’t want to do this in and out of hospitals and all the drama that comes with it and getting sick and all this, I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m too tired. I’ve given my entire, I did. I gave my entire childhood to alcoholism and addiction. I did not get to be a teenager.
Joann Kenyon:
I had this miraculous way of drinking and using, and I had this blackout button that went off very quickly, that I really wasn’t able to drink and use and enjoy it the same way that I used to. And I was like the life of the party. I didn’t understand really what happened, that it started where I would rave and I would party and everybody would start to go home when the sun came up and I’d be like, “Wait, we’re still playing. Let’s have some more fun.” And that’s what the after party is for but I didn’t want the after party, I wanted the party all the time. And the problem is that it’s not a party when you’re at the party all the time, it becomes a way of living.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
One thing you mentioned that’s really, really important to our segue is fun and the party, and you said, “I just wanted the party to keep going. I wanted it.” And I remember getting sober and being like, “Well, am I ever going to have fun again?” And the reality was I was not… Blacking out wasn’t fun. It was people telling me what I did the next day and then getting blacking out again. But the core value of having a good time and laughing and having fun was really, really important. And we were so young. I was 19, you were 23 when you got sober. We needed to know that our lives weren’t over if we were going to give this stuff up and we were going to live this way. Were we becoming Amish? When they talked about giving up drugs and alcohol, I just assumed we were all going to start churning butter.
Joann Kenyon:
We were becoming squares and I was really not excited about that, especially my first sentence to AA was just miserable. When I first got sober, when I was sent to AA at 17, it was the young people’s community was not nearly as big as it is now. I came in and I was like, “No, this is just not going to happen.” When I came out here to California, I was like, “Oh, these are my people.” Of course, I came out here to California and I’m from Arizona and I was a raver. I had my Adidas visor on, I had red hair with these white stripes on, I had platform tennis shoes. I was a candy raver, but not like the candy ravers today. I had a couple bracelets. I was cool, okay?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Obviously.
Joann Kenyon:
I mean, obviously.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Obviously.
Joann Kenyon:
I got involved in young people’s sobriety right away. I was in sober living for four months. I couch-surfed for four months, which was super fun because I was just finding my roots. And then I was a house manager for four months. I stayed out of bars and stayed away from any kind of triggers for about a year, and that was a healthy way for me to stay sober and just really get grounded. Then the real fun really began where we had this group of people in AA that we were going to house clubs, we were going to bars, we were just going out and having a good time. I have to say that this really just allowed me to know that I can have these full belly laughs and have so much fun that I can remember, and that sobriety was not a death sentence.
Sobriety was just the real beginning of being able to go out and feel everything, remember everything, and know what real tiredness feels like. Trying to work a job and do all the responsibilities of life and still have a good time. But the fun that we had was just absolutely ridiculous, and you and I, we had a blast.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It was so important and it built the foundation for what we have today and for that knowing that we can stay sober, have fun, and we can stay sober through anything. And your sobriety got challenged in the first 90 days and on top of that, you were still able to have all the fun we would end up having. Talk to me about your 90 days.
Joann Kenyon:
Well, let’s see. It was a Sunday and my mom called and she asked if I was sitting down, and she had told me that my dad woke up with chest pain and went back to bed and did not wake up. He suffered a heart attack 53. And I think that I was on a pink cloud pretty much my entire sobriety. I actually had a couple of years sober before that and I had a little slippy do. For me, what’s interesting is that I was super connected to the program at this point in time, and for me, this is not about God. This is not really about faith. This was about connection and love with the program because I had a ton of people over at my house within an hour. Talk about anguish, I was on the ground crying. It was something that I had not played the tape through yet.
I was only 24 years old, I was not prepared for this and the connection and love, that’s my source. This is about leaning on others who have had the experience and can help walk me through that. That’s the power of the program. And it’s a messy process. Grief is something that I still don’t completely understand, but I’m stronger on the other side of that loss. That was the first time I really got to see the power of the program. Sobriety is about walking through life. It’s not all about being sober and everything else. It’s about walking through your feelings and walking through the hard things that happen in life, because I can talk about fun in sobriety forever because I have so much fun in sobriety, but I could also talk about all of the hard things that we have to do in life.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The value of the fun that you were having and the connections that you made is fun is connecting, right? We create happy memories, we connect with one another in community and fun, and that’s the biggest value. And we are playful creatures who need to have play. When you go through something that requires love and connection and relationship and tools and you need to use other people’s tools. The fact that you had been having all that fun and all that connection with those people in the program, that actually was a tool, that actually was a coping mechanism and an important piece of it, even though what it looked like from the outside was young people having fun in sobriety.
Joann Kenyon:
But actually what it was is young people carrying me through when I couldn’t carry myself. And that’s happened time and time again. I’ve had separation from the program and let me tell you, it’s really hard when you don’t have that connection.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And you have to build it when there isn’t the crisis. That’s the key is that-
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah. You can’t try to build it when there’s crisis, when you’re depressed, it’s really hard to do those things.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Getting sober young is a whole thing because you’re going through… You’re dating.
Joann Kenyon:
Dating alone you need a community, because you’re going to either get your heart broken or you’re going to break hearts and you’re going to need tools in order to walk through that. And you’re going to need your sponsor or you’re going to need some sort of advice because it is rough out there. It is rough as a sober person because you don’t have coping skills, or the coping skills that you generally have in sobriety are not healthy ones.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think the roughest part about dating and sobriety, I actually just literally just published an article in Women and Home. Can you believe that? My name is in Women and Home, that alone should tell you the world is upside down, about sober dating. And I didn’t include this, which is how many times did we call each other and tell each other a story of sober, and we’ll call it dating, I’m not sure we would… I’m not sure what it was, but it was our version of dating, whatever. And we’d be like, “I can’t even say I was loaded. I can’t say it.” You don’t have the excuse. You actually made all your decisions completely coherent.
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah, where you’re like, “What was I thinking?” I definitely wasn’t.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Correct.
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah, where you’re like, “I just need an excuse and alcohol can’t be it. Okay, I’m just dumb.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Nope, it’s just all me up here making decisions, all me all day. I was thinking about how, even though we’re talking about this, I was thinking about situations where old habits die hard. We went to a rave in Hollywood. At one point there was this girl who was coming up to me, she was like rubbing all over me trying to be hot bisexual chick for her friends. Do you remember this?
Joann Kenyon:
I remember this. And you kissed her.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. I grabbed her and then started making out with her and she was like, “Oh my God” and then pushed her away. And we turn around and you are doing a full light show for a whole bunch of-
Joann Kenyon:
I’m really good with glow sticks just for the record. It’s an old talent of mine.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Eventually, so you talked about we can do anything we want in sobriety as long as we’re willing to pay the consequences. Sometimes the consequences of things are positive, sometimes they’re negative, sometimes they’re neutral. And we tried though, we tested those waters a lot. Here’s a classic Joanne story. Joanne starts, I don’t remember how you started chewing Nicorette.
Joann Kenyon:
I love Nicorette.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You started chewing Nicorette. I don’t even think you were smoking.
Joann Kenyon:
I think I quit smoking and I went to Nicorette. I love-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Quit smoking, went to Nicorette.
Joann Kenyon:
Fruit chew Nicorette.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You got so addicted to Nicorette that you were ordering in bulk from eBay and you couldn’t figure out why you felt like such shit all the time.
Joann Kenyon:
It kept on making me sick.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And you were like, “Yeah, I’m getting these big orders of Nicorette.” It really takes one of us.
Joann Kenyon:
I actually went to a doctor because it was lowering my immune system because I was ordering like 500 pieces at a time off of eBay. And I was chewing over two packs a day, equivalent to two packs a day.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
More than you smoked.
Joann Kenyon:
More than I smoked, but it was delicious.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You were so sick.
Joann Kenyon:
Yes. I went to the doctor and I was like, “I keep getting sick. I don’t really know what’s wrong.” And eventually I had to quit because I was just jumping from addiction to addiction. What am I to say? I mean, I’m looking for peace and comfort.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So when we started hanging out, I was kind of the more experienced one, if you will.
Joann Kenyon:
Promiscuous?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I don’t think I want to use that word.
Joann Kenyon:
Sorry.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Maybe we use that word. I don’t know. I was the more… Yeah, that’s fine. Yeah, I was the more promiscuous, experienced whatever. I was more likely to be on Girls Gone Wild. Girls Gone Wild. Right?
Joann Kenyon:
That’s very true. That’s true.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For my nineties folks, the likelihood I was going to end up on Girls Gone Wild was high and you were much more what they would say like vanilla. So when you went to a couple of S&M things in our friendship in our twenties, I didn’t really think much of it until you started to go regularly. And I knew we were onto something when you were making your own floggers. You were reading books, studying that, studying. No, but it was a very studious thing. You were cutting leather, you were studying it.
Joann Kenyon:
I was learning.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And people have a lot of misconceptions about S&M being all about intercourse and it’s obviously not. Or not obviously.
Joann Kenyon:
It’s not all about sex, that’s for sure.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And I remember thinking, “Oh, Joann”, I’ve seen you go through so many different phases, careers, hobbies, all the things, and so I figured okay, this is just one of those things. It turned out that the community there, you got something out of it. You really liked what you got from that community. Will you talk a little bit about getting into S&M in sobriety?
Joann Kenyon:
Okay. I still seek peace and comfort and some sort of escape when I’m sober, so there’s healthy and unhealthy ways to disassociate. This was very educational for me where I found this community. And I still even tell my kids that when you’re feeling a certain way that you can exercise, or you can go outside or you can get some sunshine, or you can do something unhealthy, which is you could play on your phone or play video game or everything. This was something that was really fun until it was maybe not so fun, that this was I felt sexy and I felt good about myself and I felt powerful and it served its purpose. That I had been dating somebody that had made me feel very overweight and unattractive, and I had found this modality that had made me feel powerful and really good about myself.
But I fell down the rabbit hole, let’s just say that. I did what I always did, which took it too far. But to a certain extent, we haven’t gotten into what I do for a living, but it was also a healing modality that it gave me an understanding about human connection, trauma and a what happened to you approach. Because there’s a lot of healthy people in that community and there’s a lot of unhealthy people in that community, and there’s a lot of people in AA in that community. And there’s a big public community, which I was a big part of. I wasn’t really a private person. So I’m not talking about sex, I never did that for a living, or I was able to provide something to people that they maybe couldn’t get sometimes from the people that loved the most because it was considered weird or taboo.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What I think is so interesting about that transition is that you found something in a place that was the cool thing. It was the cool thing again, the middle school, the cool thing with the crowd, with the people, and it no longer worked because it wasn’t about real connection and it wasn’t real and it didn’t serve you. And when it stopped serving you, you left.
Joann Kenyon:
Correct. And you talk about the road gets narrower as you stay sober. I can try eating until it works or dieting until it works, or S&M until it doesn’t work I guess is the way that I should put it. The road gets narrower that I enjoyed this, but I was also single and I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. And then when I was looking for that real connection, that’s not something that I really… Do I want that permanently? Absolutely not. I want something true and real and not something that’s role play. Does that make sense?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah. I got to go and go to these S&M clubs and dress up, which I thought was really fun, and learn all this stuff. And it was really interesting and it really was about people looking for ways to connect. It was really interesting what I thought it was, like those memes you see online, what I thought it was going to be. It was all of these different ways of people finding connection and there were these guys who would come and just want to be snuggled. No, not snuggled. It was tickled.
Joann Kenyon:
Tickled, yes.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Tickled. There were people who were coming and paying for all these different ways to connect. And what I thought was going to be just a lot of sex turned out to be people looking for different ways to feel connected. Many of ways I didn’t understand, you didn’t understand, but that was a really fascinating piece and a really educational part.
Joann Kenyon:
And then, of course I always have the preface of you can’t knock it until you see-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, it’s not what you think it is.
Joann Kenyon:
… what goes on. It’s not what you think it is at all and it’s not scary.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Something I’d like to point out is that what you and I can see in retrospect is that, and I’m going to use the word work because I don’t know any other word, the work that you did with people towards the end of when that was working for you was about trauma healing. And it turned out that, and it turns out now that you’re doing that same work, but you’re using a different way of-
Joann Kenyon:
Modality.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Modality of trauma healing. And that it was the same thing, it was just in a much different package and that ultimately people are all looking for that thing. Okay. So talk a little bit about the transition where you’re like, “This isn’t what I’m looking for, this isn’t what I want.”
Joann Kenyon:
Well, what I was seeking was connection, love, fulfillment, maybe escape, but all the things that I’d been trying in my life, all the journey of everything that I’m looking for wasn’t there. And I realized that I had to continue on with my life, that maybe this was just a single escapade that I was going on and while maybe it was taboo that that was a way of me just acting out of being me, that there’s something on the other side of that but I had to move on. It was a way of maybe learning about people, learning about trauma, learning about what makes people tick. I thought it was super interesting. I was more fascinated, I believe, than anything else than all of the internal struggles that were going on with myself. I just feel like people are interesting and fascinating.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It was fascinating.
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah. It was super fascinating.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What was the most fascinating story you came across?
Joann Kenyon:
Just some of the things that were really, really interesting, somebody that maybe even just wants to put on a raincoat with you and hug you. I know that that sounds really weird. It’s not sexual in any way. It might be just a strange fetish of putting on a raincoat and maybe even turning on a shower and letting water run over an umbrella. I know that that sounds very weird, but where does that come from? You don’t necessarily know, but that’s just a strange fantasy that somebody maybe has that they’re unable to act out with anyone unless they pay someone.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Interesting.
Joann Kenyon:
And how sad that is that they can’t do that with their wife or with somebody that they love, that it’s just too weird. Or somebody that just can’t play with someone’s feet or whatever it might be. It doesn’t have to be humiliation or something aggressive, this can be really purely about connection.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And people feel like they can’t talk about it.
Joann Kenyon:
And people feel like they can’t talk about it. Wherever this internal belief system comes from or wherever… That people can’t learn about themselves, about maybe where this comes from, it just is sometimes really sad and disappointing.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I watched you work through the fact that something wasn’t working for you anymore and leaving it behind. And this is something that we actually deal with a lot when we get sober, which is that when we are using, when are in our childhood, whatever that looks like, we use lots of skills and alcohol and drugs are a tool. They’re a tool that we use to help us get through feelings, events, periods of time in our lives, whatever, and they work for a period of time and then they stop working. The difference between the people who make it out unscathed and the ones that don’t are the people who continue to do the thing longer than it works. They don’t stop doing it when it stops working. That’s really the breaking point there. The people who binge-drank in college, when they got out of college they stopped binge-drinking.
That’s how that works where it’s like something that worked stops working. With the S&M stuff, you went through a process where you were trying an identity, you’re trying something on and it stopped working. And in sobriety you had to use that tool of saying, “This doesn’t work anymore.” That’s a really hard thing to do generally with any topic or any change, whether you’re sober or not sober, it’s really hard to say, “This thing I’m doing. I’ve been doing it for a while, it doesn’t work for me anymore. I’m going to have to change this thing or stop doing it. That’s it.” It’s hard to make that. What was that process like deciding I’m doing something that no longer serves me?
Joann Kenyon:
I think that one of the biggest decisions was making a bigger return to a different community, which was back to AA. That I had replaced one community for another, and that community was not as healthy and doesn’t work on themselves the same way. And really making a commitment to myself in a different way, that I had been off on this journey of learning about a whole nother area of my life and a whole nother identity of somebody else. And really embracing this experimental part of myself and going back to being like, “Okay, let’s regroup over here.” Maybe even that part of me that I had feared about getting sober and becoming square.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right. Right.
Joann Kenyon:
And finding that rebellious part of me again because I did have that fear of I don’t want to be normal. I got sober, now I’m doing all the normal things. I’m working a job and I’m paying taxes and I don’t want to do that. I want to be a reject still. And now I’m going to come back because this is still not working for me and I’m unhappy. I do have that fear that maybe I’m going to drink because I’m not treating myself right.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. This no longer serves me.
Joann Kenyon:
It’s not it no longer serves me, but also I started treating myself really poorly. I started dating in relationships and everything else that I was getting burned over and over again.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. It wasn’t working.
Joann Kenyon:
And I knew that I was approaching my thirties, I knew that I wanted to meet somebody. I started having feelings of wanting to get married and have kids, and I knew that what I was seeking was not in that community. And I knew that what I was seeking may not be in the AA community, but the morals and values and everything that’s important to me about living an honest life lay in the community of AA.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That may seem obvious, but I know so many people who would not have been able to make that transition to say, “This community does not have what I’m looking for long term.” And to make that change, they would’ve tried to make it work, tried to fix, try to find someone, try to, and you really… It was brave and courageous. It was courageous that you stepped away and said, “I’m looking. This is not compatible with my long-term goals.” I love that about you because it really embodies this idea that we can be all these different things in different periods of time in our lives. We can change, we can evolve, we can digress, all the things. You have always been really great at doing that. And what I do really love is that you have shed things over the years. You shed things that don’t work. And as quickly as you are able to go into these new hobbies or try these new things, you’re also willing to shed them. Without that, it would actually be a really dangerous character trait.
Joann Kenyon:
Well, and you’ve seen me go through it and sometimes it is scary of where I go in order how much pain I have to be in order to make that change.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. I have seen that.
Joann Kenyon:
And I’ve done it again. I’ve done it again when I… I have a life beyond my wildest dreams. I got married, I had kids, I got lost again in that, and then I had to make the change again and come back just because I lost the community and I lost myself in family life. And I realized that’s not where I want to be, and I had to come back again just because I lost that community and things got tough. It’s that ongoing thing of trying to find that balance.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What was the thinking when you put distance between you and your 12 step program community?
Joann Kenyon:
I think that with you find the guy, right? I got the guy, I got the house, I got the kids, I went back to school, I got the career. You really are told that these things don’t make you happy, but I was happy. And slowly family life and everything gets in the way, and slowly I crept away from the program again. And I test the waters where I think I can do it. I’m fine. The problem is that I step away from the guide of life and it’s not about drinking. Drinking is my solution. So I stepped away from the solution again, where AA is my solution, where I hear all the things that I need to do.
And I’m still really AA based. Not everybody necessarily needs the program, that’s what I need. And I remember just being absolutely miserable again, just being depressed and not sure where to go. And I’m like, “I don’t know. I’m not a cutter, but maybe I need to cut myself. I’m pulling my hair out.” What’s funny is I actually do have the trichotillomania where I like to pull my hair out, and I have anxiety and I have overwhelm and I have depression and I’m just trying to do everything and I can’t do it. I ended up in a meeting, and I love this story, that I had a friend of mine that went out with about 15 years, started smoking weed and I said, “How is it?”
And she says, “It’s amazing.” I have that ease and comfort that I need. I have this overwhelmed feeling that’s okay, she has kids around the same age, that she is able to function. She goes into a room and she smokes a joint at night and she is calm. And that’s what I was looking for and it planted that seed, that weed was… I was smoking dirt weed when I was young. I was separating the seeds and everything else. It’s not like it is today. So I wasn’t seriously contemplating it, but it was still a thought. And I went in and I shared about it in a meeting, I finally made it to a meeting, and there was this guy there, his name was Mike, and he looked right at me and he shared, “Let me tell you what happens when you smoke a joint.”
He had 25 years sober and he had been out for three years. And he said, “Three days ago I had a gun in my mouth” and he started to cry. I cried the rest at that meeting because he said, “This is what happens when you have time and you go back out. I couldn’t make it back in and I want to kill myself.” I don’t know if you want to call it a God shot because I’m not much of a God person, but that scared the shit out of me. And I realized that I was in the right place with the right community at the right time. I am not always in a meeting for the newcomer. The newcomer is there for me, that he may have saved my life that day.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Tell me about what you’re doing now with breath work and why that is so exciting for you.
Joann Kenyon:
Well, so I am a breath work practitioner and I do breath work and tapping with people to help them move through their adversities. And there is something big on the other side where we can use our stories to help other people. So I work mainly with breath work and I have a new modality where I work with tapping as well. So I do classes, I do treatment centers, and I do individual sessions with people to work with their traumas, chronic stress. I’ve been doing this now since I found breath work at a retreat. It was a Bill. W retreat, it was a sober retreat, and it actually changed my entire sobriety. I’ve always struggled with meditation and this is more of an active meditation where it activates your nervous system, and it blew my mind. I know that I’ve worked with you, Ashley, with breath work. Basically-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I was skeptical.
Joann Kenyon:
Yeah. It’s a skeptical practice.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I was like, “You want me to breathe really hard? Okay, great.” But then you feel like, Zach and I joke, you feel like you get a little high in a good way and you have this really crazy spiritual, emotional experience. It was wild with nothing but following this instruction and this breath is very relaxing. At first I was skeptical and then I took my husband to do it and trying to explain what we’re about to do to your husband like, “You are nuts. Why are you paying someone to help you breathe?”
Joann Kenyon:
It’s like trying to explain what it’s like to be underwater when you’ve never been wet. But it’s an undeniable experience. And basically we’re just processing and rewiring the brain in order to change our belief systems, because everything comes from our childhood and learning how to celebrate the things that we’ve been through because they make us who we are. And then you can connect with me at breatheitout.com. B-R-E-A-T-H-E-I-T-O-U-T, breatheitout.com. Yeah. Or Instagram, Breathe it out with Joanne.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Awesome. Well, you’re amazing. Thank you so much for being here, being my friend and talking about all this stuff. And your story is going to help even more people now.
Joann Kenyon:
Thank you, Ashley. It was a pleasure. I love everything that you do.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What’d you think?
Scott Drochelman:
Well, let’s just say, I can tell why you guys are pals. She’s great and you guys complete each other, right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, pretty much.
Scott Drochelman:
I had the pleasure of speaking to her before the episode and it was just like within 15 seconds you’re like, “Oh yeah, of course. I totally get why these two are pals” and I wish I could have been a fly on the wall just on the adventures and misadventures of Ashley and Joanne. Oh, that’s a new TV program. Probably got to be HBO, I would say, right? At least.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Got to be HBO. I think I was 20. No, 21 something. We decided we were going to get our boobs done.
Scott Drochelman:
Sure.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Found this guy. Or it’s Orange County, it’s not hard to find a plastic surgeon. And I’m like, “We found him in the rubble.” Found this gentleman, actually he was the worst bedside manner anyone ever. And we went in for boobs and they were like, “You have to have separate appointments” and we were like, “No, our appointments are together.” And I’m five six and a half and she’s like five one so we’re just this odd couple and we go in, we eventually settle on stomach liposuction. But they were like, “Oh, it’s you guys” because all our follow-up appointments, all our whatever, we would come in with our belly bands and whatever and come in and say, “We’re here together” and they’re like, “Oh, these two again.”
All the misadventures, all the things that we… the weird shit we would try. So this guy, first of all, I just want a nip in a tuck. You know what I mean? This is just enhance the floor model situation. I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t trying to get rid of the floor model. I was cool with floor model, I just was like, “Hey, it turns out you can do this and it’ll make it a little bit better.” And it did. And we go in and he starts… I felt like I was rushing for some sorority. He straight up started circling shit and he was like… One of my boobs is an ounce bigger than the other and he was like, “Wow, when you have kids, you’re really going to [inaudible 00:57:12].” Thanks. I guess he wasn’t wrong, but I mean fuck. Anyway, he’s like, “Yeah, you’re really going to need this and you’re going to need this” and he starts circling and he’s like, “Yeah, your flanks are really” blah, blah, blah. I’m 20.
Scott Drochelman:
Flanks?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I’m like, “Fuck you dude. Fuck you but I want lipo.” And he was notorious because he had done boobs on some other people we know, he was notorious for doing boobs that were way too big. We decided just we were like, “Yeah, let’s just do liposuction.” And it was great. I had a flat stomach for 10 years. 10 years and I miss her. I actually had the right idea, which was I can currently spend money on myself, whereas when you really need it you can’t spend the money on yourself. Your choices are my kids’ swim lessons or a boob lift. And all my listeners are saying, “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with right now. How did you know Ashley? We are so alike.”
Scott Drochelman:
I get it. That’s how I feel for sure. Mine weren’t what they used to be.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, no. All of that is to say that Joann and I have had a lot of fun over the years and it’s been… I was there for the birth of both of her children, the only babies I’ve ever seen born, which was also a wild experience. And it’s really fun to grow up with somebody in such a dramatic way. I think most people have friends they grow up with and they see them transition from the college douche bag to the working person, to the parent, to the whatever. I know people have that experience, but we kind of got sober together and the transitions are a little more drastic as you can probably hear.
And it’s really fun to see Joanne in a minivan picking up her kids from school, and then her seeing me in my minivan with my kids and us sitting by a pool watching our kids swim and thinking they will never ever believe that we were cool. It will never happen. No one will convince them. I tried to convince her older son. I said, “I promise you, I know she’s not cool now. It’s bad. It’s gotten really bad, but I promise you she was cool.” I told her she has to tell my kids.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah. I think that’s a good role. I feel like maybe a nominal amount of money you could give to your pal to just be that, because it has to be in a hushed tone and it has to be like when you’re out of the room and be like, “Did I ever tell you that your mom once…” I don’t know what she did.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. What am I going to say?
Scott Drochelman:
That she liked to huff gas out of gas tanks.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I don’t think we can tell them. Also, I don’t think they’ll think we were cool for that.
Scott Drochelman:
No.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They’re going to be like, “What’s wrong with you?”
Scott Drochelman:
“Sorry, what? You’re responsible for my wellbeing?”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You don’t think that’s cool?
Scott Drochelman:
But it made you real dizzy. Don’t you get it? That’s cool. Right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I just want you to know I was the coolest person huffing paint in the group, just FYI, in case anybody comes by asking.
Scott Drochelman:
I did love that she had a favorite, which was what? Golden Boy or something like that was.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What was it? Paint?
Scott Drochelman:
I’ve never even heard. Yeah. Favorite kind of paint. I was like, “I’ve never even heard of this, but okay, sure.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That’s how I knew when she started talking about, so huffers are another breed. When she started telling stories about huffing gasoline out of the tank and shooting ketamine and all the things, I remember looking at her like, “What? You? Okay. All right. All right. That’s pretty serious, girlfriend.”
Scott Drochelman:
Prove it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Prove it. Yeah. You’re a tiny little felon.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah. Picturing when she described the candy raver who is 70 pounds and peed all over everybody’s stuff, pretty compelling. That’s a person, that’s a character. Certainly.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Do you love the rave story where we turn around and she’s back in her raver days and just putting on a light show for a bunch of fucked up kids?
Scott Drochelman:
That’s where she and I would have been. I would’ve been right there next to her aiding in whatever ways I could.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Exactly.
Scott Drochelman:
You and I would have to take a backseat to the show, but I would auxiliary-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Gifts of sobriety. Gifts of sobriety. We’re like, “I don’t know if we’re supposed to do that but you stayed sober.”
Scott Drochelman:
Seems in bounds to me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What surprised you? Because you knew the background of the story and the relationship and I’ve talked about her before. What about that interview surprised you if anything?
Scott Drochelman:
You know what? Honestly, I think it’s maybe a part that a lot of people were, I don’t know, just not very educated. Even just her talking about the S&M scene was just really interesting to me. And I think I’d put it into the place in my mind of just like, “I’m not really going to understand what’s going on, but as long as they’re consenting people, I don’t really care what people do.” But still, that’s not really a level of understanding. That’s just sort of like, I don’t know, some sort of acceptance or something. But to me, I was just really drawn into that scene where she’s talking about the guy putting on rain jackets and hugging while water is showering on you. That moment was so intimate and I felt like there was so much that was expressed in that. I just had all these ideas about what that could have meant for that person or what they were trying to recreate or what they were trying to recapture, or some sort of trauma that they were trying to work through.
And I think that’s an easier example to wrap your mind around because there’s, at least for me, there’s not something inherently sexual in that, but it opens my mind into thinking about the other pieces where it’s just like I don’t know what’s happening in that moment. I don’t know what’s going on with that person. I don’t know what that is giving to them, but there seems to be something about maybe a lot of the practice where it’s, I don’t know, it’s reaching something that can’t be reached through other means. And when I hear it like that, it’s exponentially more understandable to me too, where it’s like I have all kinds of thoughts or feelings or whatever that I don’t feel like I can access. Or I’ve only found one specific place where I can access those sorts of things. So I love those moments where you can see in to what is going on with people, and even ones that maybe don’t feel necessarily a part of your normal life or your existence.
And I really just resonated with her in general, just the idea of not wanting to fit things and feeling the pull to want to explore different personalities and different ways of being. I get that, I really do. And especially when she seemingly was pigeonholed, people said, “Oh, you look like this so you must be like this.” And the desire to be different than that I think is compelling. I’m sure everybody has had experiences where you’re like, “I’m not what I look like.” You wouldn’t know anything about that though, right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I don’t know anything about that, no.
Scott Drochelman:
I wouldn’t think so.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I think the hard thing about having been the wild child is that as you get older, it’s the things that are attractive. You want wildness, but you’re not attracted to the same wildness and so you have to find age appropriate, phase appropriate wildness. And she and I have, that’s the phase of life where we’re in now. We’re moms. We have to hold it together, pretend like we know what to do and we can seek this novelty, but we have to do it in ways that are compatible with our sobriety, with our family. There’s a lot more going on. And it’s an interesting process and it looks different, but ultimately, we’re still people. I know she is, I am, that look for intensity and novelty. And breath work is a really cool thing that sounds woo woo and what have you, but it’s very intense and it is novel.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Well, if you found yourself interested in that, I would hope that you would look up Joanne and see about getting into doing some of that breath work stuff this week. We are rooting for you. All of you out there, I’m talking to you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, you.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah, you. No, no, turn around. I’m right behind you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right behind you.
Scott Drochelman:
And we’re here and we’re rooting for you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Under your bed.
Scott Drochelman:
And we’re like, “Go, go. You’re great. Yay.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You’re great.
Scott Drochelman:
Wow. But more enthusiastic than that in the live version. Ashley, what would you like to leave the people with this week?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I would like for the people who need to try something new, I want to encourage you to try something you haven’t done before that’s always been a little bit interesting, maybe a little scary. And for the people who are feeling like that thing that you’re doing is no longer serving you and that voice in the back of your head is saying, “I don’t think this is working anymore. I don’t think this is good for me anymore.” I encourage you to do some writing on that to explore. Maybe use the prompt, is this serving me anymore? See what comes up. All right, have a great week and we’ll see you next time.
Speaker 1:
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