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May 15
  • Written By Scott Drochelman

    • #184 – Annie McDonnell

    #184 - Annie McDonnell

    Annie began to see the cracks in her family at 7 years old. She and her 4 siblings lived a happy life in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, but she could feel something happening. It wouldn’t be fully understood until years later when her mother revealed she was pregnant with the child of an influential man in town who was not her father. 

    Everyone turned on her mother and she was forced to leave the family, taking Annie’s sister with her when she went. Annie was left with an immense wound. She’d done everything she was supposed to. She was the good girl and still her mother left. 

    At 25 she began a career in the wine industry. It was the perfect place to hide what would become an all-encompassing addiction that ruined her life. The alcohol took hold of everything in her life. In the later years of her addiction, she was left with panic attacks that left her unable to even hold a teacup.

    Today, she’s recently celebrated her 3,000th day of sobriety and helps others on a journey of healing through her work with her organization Powerfully Sober where she helps people re-create and re-imagine their one extraordinary life.

    Episode Resources

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    Episode Transcript

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Coming up on this episode of The Courage to Change, sponsored by lionrock.life.

    Annie McDonnell:

    At this point I’m so constantly overcome by anxiety and panic and drinking, and it’s just this horrible cycle and I can’t do it anymore. And so I’m sitting there, I’m pondering, “What do I do? Come on, what do I do?” My partner’s cooking soup and I’m in the corner and he says, “Come and have your lunch.” And I come over and I cannot pick up a spoon, can’t pick up a spoon to feed myself, in my own house, Monday afternoon, just with my partner, and I have nothing, nothing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to the The Courage To Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame and I am your host. Today we have Annie McDonnell. Annie’s life began to fall apart at seven years old. She and her five siblings lived a happy life in a small town in Australia, but she could feel something happening. It wouldn’t be fully understood until years later when it was revealed that her mother had a child with an influential man in town who was not their father. Everyone turned on her mother and she was forced to leave the family, taking Annie’s sister with her. Annie was left with an immense wound. She’d done everything she was supposed to. She was the good girl, and her mother still left. At 16, she found alcohol, and a few years later began a career in the wine industry. It was the perfect place to hide what would become an all-encompassing addiction that ruined her life.

    The alcohol took a hold of everything. In the later years of her addiction, she was left with panic attacks and was unable to even hold a teacup. Today she’s recently celebrated nine years of sobriety and helps others on a journey of healing through her work with her organization, Powerfully Sober, where she helps people recreate and reimagine their one extraordinary life. Friends, such an awesome interview. So fun to talk to her, and such a great example of how consequences of alcoholism and addiction can look different for different people. Annie’s career in the wine industry very much masked her addiction and allowed it to go much longer than it might have in another industry.

    We see this all the time in people with big sales careers that revolve around a lot of drinking as it relates to business. People are able to mask their addiction, and Annie was certainly one of those. Her career in corporate America today is very, very different and such a testament to what we can do in sobriety when we want to make our life the best it can possibly be. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And without further ado, I give you Annie McDonnell. Let’s do this.

    You are listening to the 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.

    Thank you so much for being here, Annie. I really appreciate it.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Thanks, Ashley. It’s great to be here.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So you were a listener or are a listener and are now a guest. This is very exciting. You’ve been listening to the podcast as a sober person, and now you get to share your story.

    Annie McDonnell:

    I know. And it’s my nine-year soberversary tomorrow.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wow. Nine years, that’s incredible. That’s incredible.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, congratulations ahead of time.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Thank you so much.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So I want to start a bit about your childhood. Maybe we start around seven and where you lived, where you grew up, and what that was like.

    Annie McDonnell:

    I grew up in a happy little suburban family in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and young parents, very young parents. I’m the eldest of six now, but back when I was seven, I was the eldest of five and mom and dad, center of our existence really. Just us, the kids, living in suburbia, playing sport. Pretty much the normal things really. And I guess around about the age of seven, I began to notice things were a little off. There was a lot of tension in the house. My mom had just not long before given birth to twins, fraternal twins, actually, twin boys. So new babies in the house, three girls, young people still in their mid-twenties probably. So very young parents, lots of kids, dad working two jobs, all of that sort of thing. So I guess I was the eldest and I was very much acutely aware of some of the changes that were going on in the household.

    For me as a child, I was trying to be good, make sure that I didn’t create any more ruffles or ripples or issues within what was already seeming to me being things looking like they were falling apart a little bit. And the thought of our family falling apart was just a hideous thing for me to comprehend at that age. I guess from that point on, I started to develop a bit of a hyper-vigilant anxiety around being aware, watching, trying to monitor situations, trying to, I guess, offset any tension that I could. My parents were starting to argue very, very frequently. My dad was getting slightly violent. He was drinking a lot. My mom never drank at all. I’ve never seen her drink, but he was starting to drink quite a bit, and I would literally wait by the window and if he came home at the normal time, I could breathe and let my shoulders relax a little bit. As the time ticked past that moment of expecting him back home and it got later and later, the whole house would start to wind up with tension.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because I guess he was drinking?

    Annie McDonnell:

    He was drinking or you could expect that there was going to be an argument of some sort. You’ve got a young mom who’s been with five kids all day, trying to manage them. And I don’t remember her being a great cook, but she’s always troubled with cooking dinner. Do you know what I mean? The husband’s not home. And at the same time, he’s also a young man probably wanting to go for a drink with friends after work or do normal things. So it’s not unexpected there was going to be clashes, but I think as children you really don’t understand, and the fact that your parents are trying to shield you from arguments when you can hear the arguments.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Annie McDonnell:

    You know what I mean? It’s like, oh my gosh. So fast-forward a couple of years, I’m hitting into high school, I guess I look back now and I was pretty reserved, but in my mind I’m totally creative and active. I’m playing a lot of sport, I’m pretty good at basketball. I’m doing all the things, but I’m also very anxious. Anxious about everything. Anxious about getting less than a 100% on a grade, anxious about looking a certain way. When I think back about it, little Annie was probably sitting there just desperately holding so much inside of herself, whereas we didn’t talk about anything. This is back in the ’70s. You’re just very contained. Even at school, you’re not being taught anything. There’s nothing like mindfulness. There’s nothing about how to relax your nervous system. We’re not talking to therapists or anything like that. You’ve got to work it out for yourself and just soldier on, I guess. But we had a good family. It was just that I could see the starting of unraveling happening from a pretty early age.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And when you think back to what was going on with your parents, once you got sober, did you have a perspective change through the eyes of what it feels like to be caught in that whirlwind and what it might have felt like for them at that time?

    Annie McDonnell:

    It changed my whole life, honestly. I think very much later in life, it took me quite a while working with number of coaches and doing my own deep work. But you realize that your parents are just human beings at the end of the day, they’re doing the best that they can. My mom was 18 when she got married. She had me at 19. She had my sister 11 months later, then another girl, and then followed by twins by mid-twenties. Back then, they didn’t have two cars. My dad had a car, he went to work. He held all of the bank accounts. She didn’t have a bank account. She was pretty isolated in a lot of ways. And he’s a young man who’s trying to build a life for his family, working a couple of jobs, but still wanting to explore the things that he wanted to explore. And I talk to them both now. They’re in their mid-seventies or early mid-seventies. I talked to my dad not that long ago and I’m like, “Dad, what were you guys thinking?” He’s like, “That’s just how it was.”

    We lived a very small, very contained life. The thought of even traveling… Australia’s quite remote like that. It’s not like you’re in Europe or something. You’re just traveling amongst countries or whatever. You really didn’t do a lot of traveling at all back in the ’60s and ’70s. So they were doing the best that they can. And also if you look back on their parents as well and their parents before that, generationally people are just bringing to the table what they have, the capacity that they have.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What ended up happening between your parents?

    Annie McDonnell:

    So this is where things really turned for us as a family. I think that it was tense for a number of years, and I think things were bad between my parents and as I found out a lot later, my dad was having an affair and my mom didn’t know who to talk to, so she felt ashamed. She felt very alone, very isolated. And her mother, whilst they had a reasonable relationship, her mother was very much of the old school, “You’re married. You just deal with it. Don’t complain, just be a good wife.” She found solace with somebody who was respected in our community. And I, as a very observant young teenager, 13 or so, could see that there was something really not right. I could sense that this person portrayed themselves to be a caring support person, but I could absolutely sense that there was another agenda going on.

    And as it turned out, my mom became pregnant to this person and she had to leave our house and she needed somebody to go with her to help her. I was so angry, Ashley. I had seen this, so this has been bubbling for a year or so, and I was like, “F you, look what you’re doing to us as a family. Look, you’re doing this and you’re evil and you are this and you’re that and you’re despicable.” And so I was an angry, angry teenager and in so much pain. I look back now, I’m like, “I’m in so much pain, heartbroken, really.” And so I was absolutely not going, my next sister down was like, “I’m not going.” So she took my 10-year-old sister with her and from that moment on the family unit was just a fragment of what it was.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did you find out that your mother was pregnant by another person?

    Annie McDonnell:

    Well, I knew, I was watching and I could see the changes in her physically. And I could see also when you’ve got that high level, the intuition was there. I didn’t know it was intuition at the time, but the intuition, it’s observation, it’s being aware and therefore noticing more. And her anxiety was pretty high. She’s operating on a very high scale of anxiety. And I’m observing in the background, getting angrier and angrier and the anger’s obviously covering up a lot of deep feelings. And eventually I was waiting for her, Ashley, I’m like, “So when is she finally going to do the big reveal to me?”

    And then eventually one day she said, “Come here, I want to talk to you.” And I was like, “Oh, here we go, here we go.” And she took me into my bedroom and we sat on the bed and I gave her no brace. I was like, blank face. “You’re on your own. I’m not supporting you here.” And she told me, and in that moment it was real. She said the words, it was real and there was no going back. And I look back now and I can feel my heart shattering because she was my person. She was the one that I wanted to please. I was a real busy kid. I wanted to get her approval. I wanted her around. I wanted her at my basketball games. I wanted her to be my person. And then she had to leave and I didn’t have a mom anymore. It felt like I didn’t have a mom anymore. I had a mom. I say this desperately without wanting to hurt her now because I know what pain she was going through, that it felt at the time that she had abandoned our family.

    She had betrayed us in the worst possible way. I was so ashamed. I was so ashamed of what was happening in my family. Nobody I knew had… That age everything is one-dimensional. It all seems like it is. Of course behind closed doors, there’s all sorts of things happening, but none of my friends had divorced parents. I went to a Catholic girls school. It was very straighty 180. The world I lived in was just very clinical like that, and this felt so left of that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Out of control.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah, out of control. So she left and she took my baby sister and that was that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did your dad react, and obviously not well, but I don’t think anyone would react well right away to that. But on a more macro level, was he able to show up for you the kids after this happened at all?

    Annie McDonnell:

    No, no. This is my memory, of course, it’s always a little bit distorted, but he was still working quite a bit. He was absent from the house a lot. I was the angry teenager who was giving everyone the middle finger, but still not deviating very left or right of my good girl persona. But my younger sister, who’s 11 months younger than me, she stepped in and she took on the role of carer and she made the boys’ lunches. She did the washing. She was the one who picked up that role. And my mom says now, “I was there every day. And I’m like, “It doesn’t feel like you were there every day.” I don’t know, maybe again, distorted memories, but it didn’t feel like that. And dad, I just remember us being a lot alone, our whole life just changed.

    And then I would go and visit my mom’s new place and she was doing it tough. There’s no doubt about it, she was doing it tough. But she had made a new little home for herself. And of course I have to say she had the baby and that’s the most beautiful thing because I had a little baby sister and that was the blessing out of everything. So I got a little baby sister, but my little baby sister and my other sister didn’t live with us, they lived in this new little home that my mom was making for her new little family.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. A lot of feelings, not a lot of coping skills, and so then you find alcohol.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah, not straight away, to be honest. I was playing pretty high level sport at that stage. So I’d made the state team. I was going off to the Australian championships, so I was training a lot. I was playing at a pretty high level. I think I was managing. But what was happening internally was there was a twisting going on of compressing the anxiety, compressing the deep abandonment and betrayal feelings. There was a churning and a formulating of almost a volcano inside of me. While outwardly I’m like, “Yeah, I’m playing basketball at a pretty high level and getting good grades and I’m doing this, that, and the other.” There was cracks everywhere though. When I got my period for the first time, my mom wasn’t there and I had to go to the chemist. I’m like, “I don’t know what to buy. I don’t know how to do this.”

    And I’m crouching down, trying to read packets, and then the shop lady came over and she accused me of shoplifting. She made me open my bag in the shop and she was making a scene, and oh my God, I can almost feel the rush of heat right now. The complete embarrassment and shame and oh my God, “I wouldn’t even dream, if you knew me, you would know I would not be stealing.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Annie McDonnell:

    I’m not your girl, but I don’t know what I’m doing. My mom’s not here and I have no idea. So I used toilet paper for quite a while. I just didn’t know what to buy. I didn’t want to talk to my mom. There was a lot going on in the background, trying to hold it together and manage it on my own and do all the things. And then I guess from about the age of 16 or so, we started going out. We started going out to parties and things and I would drink, but not a lot. But immediately I was like, “Oh, this is interesting. This is a bit of relief.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    A bit of relief.

    Annie McDonnell:

    A bit of relief for a moment. So over the next couple of years, it just started to escalate and I was in love, that was it, that was it, it was my thing. And it was my relief but, almost from the very start, it was also the outlet that everything came gushing out. So towards the end of the night, I’m always the one fooling my eyes out, and having deep and meaningfuls with my friend in the corner, and then the next day waking up going, “Oh my God.” We didn’t have mobile phones.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. You just had to sit with it.

    Annie McDonnell:

    [inaudible 00:19:01]. But you had to sit with it. And that feeling in the pit of your stomach, “What did I say? Who did I say it to? When can I call them? When can I start to ask the questions to see how bad was it?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    A lot of people associate alcoholism or struggles with alcohol with these crazy bottoms, and I probably don’t help that stereotype because I tell a lot of those stories. But I think it’s really important to highlight the fact that you are having signs of a struggle with drinking just by feeling shame and embarrassment the next day and wondering what you said. And that cycle, just that cycle on its own is enough to indicate a problem drinking. And it doesn’t mean you have to have been arrested and have all these consequences, but these emotional consequences you’re describing, they’re real and they take a toll and they are compounding. And I really hear that in your story.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah, it’s so true. And it was worth it, it was worth it to keep drinking to have that, even though it was starting to at a very early age, impact me in those ways. But I also didn’t have an off button from a very early age. So I was not the person who was ever going to stop that one or two. I was always the one who was going to keep drinking. And that was very easy to disguise in my twenties and thirties because I was with like-minded people. But I didn’t stop. I did not stop.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So you, my friend, did the classy version of the classic move, and I love it because I had never thought about it until I was reading about your story, which was you dated the dealer. You went to work for-

    Annie McDonnell:

    I love that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You dated the dealer. You went to work for the wine industry, it’s brilliant. You’re an alcoholic.

    Annie McDonnell:

    I know, right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. You dated the dealer, where, “I have to do this. I mean, you know what?” You get the free wine. “I have to try…” You made it a whole thing and you get to hide. And it’s genius, it’s absolutely… I used to joke about wanting to be the tester of some alcohol, and that joke never landed very well, but your entrance into the wine and you didn’t just go into the wine business, you studied it, you academically involved alcohol. I just love everything about this. Tell me everything.

    Annie McDonnell:

    I love that you describe it like that. I know, right? I mean, high achiever in every way.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, that’s great. Well done.

    Annie McDonnell:

    And also, I do like the twist of going to university to add that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Make it official. You need a doctorate in wine, duh. Why didn’t I think of that? “I’m a doctor of alcohol, it can’t be a problem.”

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah. Therefore, that is going to be my story forever. Yeah, look, I do constantly crack myself up. I like to amuse myself. And sometimes if I do think back, I’m like, “Geez, you really were so earnest about it.” At the same time, I can see how ridiculous and how genius it was at the same time, because I traveled overseas in my early twenties. I did the backpacking with my girlfriend, and I came back, I was like, too cool for school. I’ve been to Europe, “Hey everyone, I’ve been to Europe. I’m really the thing.” And then I was also like, “What the hell am I going to do with my life?”

    I’ve done a degree. I’d already done my university degree. And I was like, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do now.” I’ve come back from this European trip. I’m now at the point in my twenties where it’s time to get serious. You can’t F around anymore. So I was like, “What am I going to do?” And I had studied viticulture at university as part of the semester, and I was like, “Viticulture.” That’s grapes. [inaudible 00:22:56]. “That sounds super interesting, because I love the outdoors. I love plants. I love wine.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, the outdoors.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Justification.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God, grapes are grown outdoors. This is a [inaudible 00:23:11].

    Annie McDonnell:

    And they’re fruit.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, fruit, agriculture. Yes.

    Annie McDonnell:

    But you had to actually go to Ag college. And I was like, “Yeah, no, I can’t move to the country. I’ve already been to university.” But you could study wine marketing at university by distant education. So I could do that virtually, and then just go across to the university for onsite several times a year. “Cool, I’ll do that. That is perfect for me.” So yeah, there was only three of us doing this particular course in that year from Melbourne. And the university was in Adelaide, which is west of Melbourne in South Australia. And so we would trek across to our offsite several times a year. And it was just so much fun, obviously, so much fun with people who are genuinely outgoing, gregarious, very social. I could ignore that part of me, that very, very sad, lonely girl who had been betrayed. I was like, “I’ve got this big life now and I can ignore all the rest. Everything’s great.”

    So then fast-forward a few years, I ended up with a job working for a wine distribution company, and we distributed about a hundred or so different brands. And I worked with restaurants. And it was the early ’90s. So people are still having long lunches, they’re spending money. Restaurants are really great, it’s all booming. The wine industry is going ballistic. Yeah, it’s not a commodity, we’re really talking about distinguishing grapes from one variety to the other, where really, it was a beautiful time. And I look back now and I’m like, there’s a lot of people in that industry that don’t have drinking problems and a lot that do obviously. But the ones that don’t, some of these people are super sincere about the knowledge that they’ve built up around grapes and wine, and wine and food matching. And it’s just a very lovely thing. I just happened to have a problem and I was able to conceal it very well in that environment, very, very well. It was fun until it wasn’t.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It was fun until it wasn’t. That’s the perfect phrase because I think so many people experience that. And I like to try to highlight the period of time where it’s starting to go from it was fun and it’s starting to crack, the cracks and it was fun. Because I think a lot of people live at that point for longer than they have to. What did that look like in this case?

    Annie McDonnell:

    So I’m in my thirties at this point, and I’ve fallen in love, deeply in love with actually a colleague. And in fact, if we look back now, there are a lot of relationships that came from that organization. So I’d fallen deeply in love with somebody and it was a magical time. I had never felt like that. We moved in together. I was promoted at work. Things were really, really good. And then the owner of the company, he just kept dropping hints. We were based in Victoria. New South Wales, another state of Australia.

    “New South Wales is not doing so well. The culture’s really bad up there. They’re not making any money. Profitability’s declining. The staff aren’t happy,” blah, blah. Just dropping hints left, right and center. And I’m like, “I don’t want to hear any of this.” And my partner was like, “This is our golden opportunity. Let’s put our hands up and let’s go to Sydney.” I was very resistant, but I’m still deep down, so attached to my family, so attached to my friends and my environment, I’ve been promoted. And anyway, it came to pass that I kind of felt backed into a corner to say yes to all of this.

    And from the moment that we moved to Sydney to take on this role, and it was only one role that was part of the problem. The owner, I mean, in an ideal situation, if we weren’t together, he would’ve moved my partner up to Sydney and had me running the state down here. But we were a couple. So he couldn’t not send one without the other. And really there was only one job. So that was one of the problems from the very beginning. How do we as partners jobshare essentially when we’re trying to run a sales team and run a state.

    And probably about three months after we arrived, I had my first panic attack. I had had a panic attack about 10 years earlier, but this was something next level and it was so unexpected. And it happened in a boardroom, in the middle of a meeting, and I was so shocked. I excused myself from that meeting, took myself into the bathroom, locked myself in the toilet, and I was just looking at my arms going, “What is going on here? My arms are like jelly. They don’t belong to me. My heart, the sweat, the ringing in my ears.” It was just, honestly, I did not know what was happening to me. I couldn’t breathe properly. So I had to calm myself in there. Of course, go back into that state of, “You’ve got to look after yourself. You’ve got to go through it.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Soldier up.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah, soldier up. And I don’t know how long that took to gain control of myself, but I gained control of myself. Went back in, but I was totally thrown from that moment. I was like, what the hell was that? And I think that hypervigilance started to creep back in again at that moment, the not knowing whether something like that would happen. I’m obviously still drinking a lot at this stage. It hasn’t changed from what I was drinking before, but now it’s got this extra element in it. Now there’s a panic attack, and now my anxiety is starting to amp up a little bit because I’m wondering if that’s going to happen again, and it did. It happened again and it happened in a similar type of circumstance. This time we’re in the boardroom and we’re having a tasting because that’s what you do, right?

    You’re tasting wine. It could be 9:00 o’clock in the morning, honestly. And someone passed the bottle to me to fill my glass. And Ashley, I couldn’t pick up the bottle properly. I was like, “I cannot pour a little bit of wine into this glass because I can’t pick up the bottle.” So I, “Oh, sorry, everyone not feeling very well. I’ll just go and to excuse myself, leave the room.” I’m in the bathroom again. “What is going on?” So that just started a whole new phase of life. It was pretty hideous. They were random. And what happens with panic and anxiety is you start to associate certain situations with that being a trigger. And the anticipation that that is coming up is enough to start the looping of those thoughts through your mind that heightens that anxiety, that almost guarantees that the prophecy will come true.

    “Yes, you will go into that room and yes, when you go to pick up a bottle to pour into your glass, yes, your arms will be dead and you won’t be able to pick it up.” That is a truth that you cannot deny. And that’s what was happening. And so I was drinking to try and… Because if I had a few drinks, that would temporarily calm down the anxiety and I would be, I’m like, “Okay, I’m cool. I’m on this. I’m okay.” So I’m starting to now enter a very dangerous cycle of feeding one problem with the other problem and piling it top on top on top. And then at the same time suppressing all of the fear and growing terror around, oh my God, because this is a very social industry. I have to go and host lunches. I have to be out with customers. I am part of groups within the industry. It’s constant. So yeah, it’s really starting to affect me. I’m probably around about late thirties, early forties here at this time. So things are going downhill.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And if I had asked you if you had a drinking problem, what would you have said?

    Annie McDonnell:

    I 100% knew I had a drink drinking problem and had known that for a long, long time because I was super observant as well. I knew that people didn’t drink like I drank. I knew that [inaudible 00:31:26], I was sneaking around at this stage. I was starting to sneak alcohol. But had somebody asked me, I would’ve shriveled up and died. If someone said to me, “Do you think you have a drinking problem?” I would be like, “No. What do you mean? What are you saying? What have you seen? What have I let you see?” So that thought that somebody might know everything that I was madly doing to try and hide my problem would’ve just been, I would’ve just completely lost my shit if someone have confronted me with it. And I also was shocked that people weren’t noticing. “I’m falling to pieces here, people.” I got this inner turmoil going on and I’m obviously carrying it off an academy award-winning actress, because no one’s noticing.

    And of course nobody knows that I’m secretly drinking either. So they’re like, “You don’t drink that much.” I’m like, “Yeah, no, I don’t really,” in front of you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Annie McDonnell:

    And then I had this one panic attack that I thought I was having a heart attack. My heart was beating so badly. I went into my partner’s office and I said, “I think I’m… You need to take me to a doctor now.” And he took one look at me and he was like, “Oh, shit.” Whisked me down to the doctor. And they put all sorts of things on me, and they’re like, “The blood pressure is ridiculous. You are way too young to have a heart attack. What is going on here?” And I got sent to a neurologist and I came out to my doctor. I did tell my doctor and she sent me to an alcohol counselor who had literally no idea.

    I did not help her, but she had no idea. So I was trying to, in my own way, I think, show that I was starting to lose control. I couldn’t keep it together, but nothing came of that. Even my partner, He’s like, “I knew about your anxiety. I thought you were just anxious. I didn’t know how bad the drinking was.” And I didn’t want, I knew his background. His mother had been an alcoholic and I knew that had he had a real inkling of what was going on that would potentially be destructive for our relationship. I wasn’t prepared to give up the drinking. I wasn’t prepared to give up the relationship. So I would put up with and try and manage what was happening.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Would it be accurate to say that some of the thoughts going on for you when the thought of considering giving up alcohol, went through was, “I’m going to lose my job. I’m going to lose my life. I’m going to lose my partner if I stop drinking.”

    Annie McDonnell:

    I couldn’t think about not drinking. I actually, hand on heart, did not think that that was an option. That was not an option. The only thoughts that were spinning through my head was, “How am I going to manage this? How am I going to manage the next bit? How am I going to manage…” So for me, I never imagined that someone like me could give up. I just assumed that there was no hope for me in that regard, that I would just have to manage the situation as I had always managed situations on my own until I couldn’t. I just tried. I just didn’t think it was possible, Ashley, to give it up. I’d spent 20 years almost in that industry by then. It was my entire network, it was my career, it was my friendship groups, it was my partner. I just couldn’t imagine that that was an option.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What was the moment where you started to imagine that as an option? What brought you to that?

    Annie McDonnell:

    In retrospect, looking back, you just cannot imagine it being okay on the other side. You just can’t imagine it. So as bad as it is, as bad as it is, that is-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    [inaudible 00:35:16].

    Annie McDonnell:

    … got to be better. Yeah. That’s just how you think.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It has to be.

    Annie McDonnell:

    It has to be. So I think what had happened back in 2012 was a new CEO had come into the business, and by this stage, the wine industry had changed dramatically. It was very much in some ways a lot of the nicety and fun had disappeared. It was more of a box-moving, revenue generating kind of business. It had lost a little bit of the feels. And this new CEO had come in and said, “Oh geez, we have two senior people kind of running the business up in New South Wales. We really only need one.” And then it was put to us, did one of us want to take a redundancy? And my husband, he’s not my husband now, but back then my partner, he was like, “I think this is a really great opportunity and I think you should take a redundancy.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    For people who don’t know what a redundancy is.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Essentially, you’re being fired, but you are accepting that situation and they’re giving you a really decent payout, like a handshake on the way through. It’s not fired as in, “We think you’ve done a-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    More like laid off.

    Annie McDonnell:

    Yeah, it’s kind of laid off. Anyway, I interpreted that as a personal attack. I’d given this company 15 years. So outwardly I’m like, “Fine, I’ll do it.” But inwardly, I’m again, in disbelief. I’ve gone through so much. I’ve moved my life. I’ve been managing this horrible, horrible situation for years now. And in a second you’re basically saying, “We don’t need you or want you.” That’s how I’m interpreting it. And so I take that redundancy, but that just gives me days to drink. And then my husband decides he’s fed up too. So a couple of months later he resigns. And our dog who was 18 passed away. Well, he was old, but he passed away. And my partner said to me, “Listen, why don’t we reassess? We’ll take next year off. We’ll go traveling around Australia and we’ll come back and we’ll look at new careers. We’ll take the year off a year of retirement early. Let’s just get a tent. We’ll just go and see.” And I was like, “Fuck.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s what I’m thinking.

    Annie McDonnell:

    “Yay.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, yeah, that’s like when my husband points at a van and says, “We could go travel. All of us could top in.” I was like, “I would rather, no.”

    Annie McDonnell:

    That part was okay for me. But it was more about he has no idea the degree of work that goes into maintaining what needs to be maintained, the appearance. Now I’m going to have to do it from a tent, in remote areas. It’s just going to be next level. So we took off and it was the best and worst of years, I can say that. But once we came back from that year off, it was a very quick downhill from there. That was the end of 2013. We got back in, I think late November. I was completely a mess by this stage. My husband actually thinks I’m sort of going a little bit psychotic, but it’s just catching up. But by this stage, I’m online, I’m searching the blogs for silver bloggers. I’m like doing all the tests. I’m listening to podcasts, I’m doing whatever.

    I’m really realizing I’m coming to a [inaudible 00:38:37] here. Somewhere down the line, somewhere soon, something’s going to happen to take me to that point. And because I cannot see a way forward, I can’t see a way back. I can’t, just don’t know how to handle this on my own anymore. So by that stage, and then of course, we’re coming up to my nine-year soberversary now. So April 14, in 2014 was the day that the line in the sand was drawn forever.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What did that look like?

    Annie McDonnell:

    The week before was, it feels so much longer than a week. It feels like an entire, a movie of my life. My husband, partner at the time had left. By the way, I did not want to get married because I was like, and I did not want to have children. I was so scared that I was going to mess up somebody else’s life.

    I knew how messed up I was inside. So I’m like consciously making that decision. We come back from this trip. He’s almost immediately found a passion in finance. He’s like a numbers guy. He probably should have been doing it all along. So he has to go interstate to do the qualification for this new career. So I’m at home on my own this particular week, and as soon as he leaves, I’m right into action. So I’m free for the next few days. I have to go and get my supplies. I have to just tick all the boxes, blah, blah. And I am basically on a bender for those few days. And he came back on the Thursday afternoon. I’m in bed and I’m just super hungover. I’ve been drinking, sleeping, drinking, sleeping, drinking. And I tell him I’m sick. And all through that weekend I’m sick, but I’m not.

    I’m sick, but I’m really quickly sick. And then on the Monday I’m just almost like metaphorically brawling by my fingernails. I’m so exhausted, so depleted, nutritionally. I have not slept properly. I’m just a shell. I don’t recognize who this person is. I can’t feel anymore at this point. I’m so constantly overcome by anxiety and panic and drinking and it’s just this horrible cycle and I can’t do it anymore. And so I’m sitting there, I’m like pondering, “What do I do? Come on, what do I do?” My partner’s cooking soup and I’m in the corner and he says, “Come and have your lunch.” And I come over and I cannot pick up the spoon, can’t pick up a spoon to feed myself in my own house. Monday afternoon, just with my partner. I have nothing, nothing. And the prospect is that really, I’m going to die.

    I am going fucking going to die because I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t do it anymore. So he’s looking at me like, “I don’t know what to do to help you.” And he doesn’t obviously know what to do to help me because he doesn’t know. I’m just so supremely good at this disguise. I’ve worn it for so long. He’s not in a position to understand the depths of where I am. I’m sitting back in a chair and I’m looking outside and I’m like, “I give up. I give up. Can’t do it anymore. I just give up.” And in that moment, I put down the burden that I was carrying and that was it.

    That was literally it. I felt in that moment of total despair, I could see the destruction, the disintegrated, in the fire where the little pieces of paper sort of fly up and they’re gone. I could see the incineration of this life that was, the cinders of the paper was just disappearing into the universe and I was disappearing. I had disappeared and there was something inside of me that moment that was, I could only say is a moment of God for me. Because it really spoke to me in a way that was like, “No, no, no. Put it down. Surrender.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You found a blogger in Paris who spoke to you. Tell me about that experience.

    Annie McDonnell:

    On the Thursday that my partner came home, that morning I had found, and her name is Bell, tired of thinking about drinking, be a bit of a plug there for her because she saved my life in many ways. She had a 100-day challenge and I had had to apply for it. So this is part of her, the way that she works. And I was like, “I have to apply to give up alcohol for 100 days? I can’t fathom.” So I had pressed apply on that Thursday morning and she had come back, it might have been on the Sunday or something, that there was a place available for me. So after that moment on the Monday, I emailed back and I said, “I’m in.” And from, I’m like, “Okay, day one.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You get sober and you’re able to find a new career in an area of tech that you were unfamiliar with before and you start a career with Amazon. How surprised were you when you were able to do that, to find that opportunity?

    Annie McDonnell:

    Oh, I still laugh. I mean, I laugh and I tell the story to lots of people because it just seems so absurd that A, going from the wine industry to tech and then not just tech, but you are working for Amazon Web Services who are this global sort of giant, I’ve never worked for a global organization before. I’m in my early fifties. I’m learning a whole new set of rules I never knew existed. And also this brand new thing called tech and cloud technology. And it just makes me laugh because when I’m running the show in the wine industry for this organization and basically I would call IT 25 times a day and they would come and they’d go, “Just turn it on and off,” Annie.

    So not that it’s completely similar, but that was my level of interest in tech back then. And it’s just the most incredible feeling to learn and to recognize the value you can bring to an organization that is not typical of where your original roots might have been. So it’s been an absolute wild ride and I couldn’t even, if someone had given me a million dollars and said, “Guess where you’re going to be in 10 years,” a year before I stopped drinking, sorry, no way. It’s too outlandish. It’s off the scale outlandish, the fact that I would be giving up drinking, but also working in cloud technology at a senior level, like working with people across Australia and New Zealand and amazing, amazing people, but I can’t remember who said it, but somebody who said, “We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in 10.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Love that. I haven’t heard that.

    Annie McDonnell:

    I think it was Bill Gates, I think it was Bill Gates. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it was Bill Gates. But when I look back, I’m like, “It hasn’t even been 10 years since I gave up drinking.” And I mean, nine years is incredible, but when I think about what has happened in that 10 years and what I think about, “Oh, I have to do this now or I’m…” Or, “I haven’t done that thing that I always wanted to do.” I’m like, “Dude, in 10 years you could have achieved 20 times what you think you haven’t achieved already.” So I think it’s really around that perspective change as well that’s been quite incredible.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You did something really, really cool that I talk about a lot trying to get more people to do, which is that on LinkedIn you came out about your recovery, about your sobriety on your 3000th day and from a leadership at Amazon position you shared in a corporate environment, “I am sober at this. I am celebrating this. I’m proud of this.” When we disclose this information, a lot of people think they’re going to be demonized for it. And what actually tends to happen?

    Annie McDonnell:

    It’s the complete opposite, again, perspective what we think people might think. And then that authenticity of really sharing from your heart with no agenda there other than to hopefully be of service to somebody out there who might still be suffering or in that desperate situation of trying to maintain an appearance that is going to unravel at some point. So I would say dozens of people reach out to me, several from my own organization who basically shared that they were struggling. One person had said to me that they were going to have to change jobs because they couldn’t travel anymore. Their drinking was too out of control. There was a couple of young girls who actually reached out and said that they could see that their drinking was starting to get a little bit worrisome for them. I think the, overwhelmingly, was such a positive reaction from my colleagues, from people I didn’t know.

    I’ve never been shy, by the way. From the moment I decided I couldn’t do the drinking thing anymore and I was going to do the sober thing, I’ve never been shy and sharing my story to the fullest, and hopefully in a way that can help. You can go on and have an amazing life beyond booze. But also to start to normalize that this is something that there are many, many, people who are struggling with. You might not be drinking secretly. You might not be drinking every day even, but to some degree you may be worried about your drinking.

    You may realize that it’s become a bit of a crutch. And I guess I’m very passionate about just saying it’s okay to want to acknowledge that you have an issue or not an issue. Just you want to acknowledge that drinking is not something you want to engage in. That’s okay. It’s okay. I love your podcast. I love it so much. I love that we have more and more people in this world linking arms and saying, “You know what? We’re only human and this stuff’s fucking addictive.” We are human beings trying to live and work with human emotions and circumstances and events and things that are in our control and things that are out of our control.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, that brings us to Powerfully Sober. Last year you started Powerfully Sober. Tell me about that.

    Annie McDonnell:

    So just around that time where I wrote the LinkedIn post on my 3000th day, which was I think in July last year. So in-between everything that had happened in this, how I was saying we underestimate what we can do in 10 years. So I had gone through a lot of different things. I’d gone back to school. I had studied coaching. I had studied nutrition. I had done some consulting work. I had got married, got married on my 50th. We did a whole heap of different things and I actually was coaching for a few years and then I started, I pivoted into this tech space and that’s been going incredibly well. And then last year I had been feeling a little bit of a tap on my shoulder. There was something that I needed for my growth and I was feeling about how I could be of service and I made this post and I was like, “You know what? There is something so powerful about being sober.”

    I guess the power… It struck me then the power of actually taking responsibility for developing the best, most extraordinary life possible. Empowering yourself to be the catalyst to create that, that is, it gave me shivers. And I’m just Googling. “Is there such a thing as powerfully sober? And no, there’s not.” And I’m like, “Well, now there is. I don’t know yet what it looks like,” because I just planted a seed. And this is the other exciting thing, Ashley, is you don’t need to know the thing. You can just have an idea. And one of my favorite sayings is let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pool of what you truly love. It will not lead you astray and you can plant that seed and then just see what happens. So what happened after that was… Because even when I was coaching earlier, I wasn’t really focused in on sobriety at all.

    I was coaching different modalities and a few other different things, but this was visceral. It was like, this is the thing. And so I just started thinking, what does that mean for me and what am I doing? How am I being in this world that can bring to life something that I can feel starting to grow inside of me? It’s really, it’s literally growing. And that’s how it’s evolving. It’s still evolving, but it’s just giving me so much joy. In a world of tech where I can be doing the, put yourself into a corporate environment, and then I can pull myself out of it at any time. I can center myself, I can ground myself. And then outside of work, I can have my passion, which is Powerfully Sober, which actually feeds me and gives me energy to come back into corporate life and be a better person in that life as well.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I love it. I love it. Where can people find you, Annie, if they are interested in hearing more and checking out Powerfully Sober?

    Annie McDonnell:

    My website is www.powerfullysober.com and people can potentially work with me two ways. There’s a more tactical way of working with me called The Power Hour+. At the moment, it’s like this open-ended time that we can spend together to look at how to navigate early sobriety. And then I have a four-month program, which is probably my passion baby called The Sacred Walk. And that’s everything that we’ve just been talking about. It’s about seeing it. It’s about feeling it. It’s about loving it. That’s something I think really is for people who are motivated to move beyond the kind of one dimensional, “I’m sober and I’m just going to grind my way through it,” to, “I am fully here and I’m fully wanting to get to know the juice. I want to peel back that onion. I really want to have a look and maybe step on top of that mountain and see the new perspective of my life.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Perfect. Thank you so, so much for being here.

    Annie McDonnell:

    It is such a joy and such an honor to talk with you. I love what you’re doing and I’m so grateful for what you do as well. And I wish you every success, and joy and anything possible in this world for you. Honestly, I just love what you do.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Thank you, Annie. I feel the same way about you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

    Well, I just love her and think that we should bring her here and make her our best friend.

    Scott:

    I second that wholeheartedly, completely. She’s someone who within seconds, I’m like, “Yeah, you’re my people.” The way she talks, her energy, her whole thing. I’m like, “I could listen to you talk just for hours.” I root for her. Immediately, you’re like, “God, I’m just so glad.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, I do know. And she’s a great example of someone who’s incredibly compelling and doesn’t need to have the shock and awe. She didn’t need to be arrested or have all the things happen or go wrong, or the big salacious stuff that some of us have that-

    Scott:

    Who?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I don’t know, but I’ve heard that that’s a thing. She’s very compelling and doesn’t need those things to make her story compelling, which frankly says more about her story, that she doesn’t need those things. And I felt alcoholism in that because alcoholism is trying to survive. It does a very good job. It goes into the wine industry. It does these… She’s going to manage. She’s going to manage and just the falling apart and then the panic attacks. And I made a note to bring up, and she does cover this, that alcohol at a certain rate causes panic attacks. And so you drink it to ease, a lot of people drink it and it eases anxiety. You feel calm, but there’s what’s called the rebound effect, which basically makes you more anxious than you would have been after the fact. And that cycle continues until you require alcohol to ease the anxiety. But unbeknownst to you, alcohol is also magnifying your anxiety tenfold.

    Scott:

    Yeah. I mean, there was something that I felt like so visceral about these panic attacks just taking over her hands. I literally was equating it with her grip on things.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, I love that.

    Scott:

    Losing her grip on reality, losing her grip on her life, and then seemingly this really basic skill that would be important in the wine industry would be able to pick up a bottle of wine and pour a glass. Isn’t that so strange that-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But she’s losing her grip.

    Scott:

    Losing her grip.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Grip on the bottle. Yeah. I also thought that she balanced the story of, “My mom did this,” with, “They were doing the best they could at the time. Here were the circumstances. I have a new understanding.” But also saying, “But this is what I felt.” And I think it’s a really hard thing to do once you’ve done a lot of work, to tell the story the way you experienced it, when you have new information about what it feels like to be that age, what it feels like to deal with all those things. And you don’t feel good about saying this stuff about your parents or whomever the story involves, but that’s what you experienced at the time. And sometimes people will just refuse to tell the story at all because they don’t want to bring shame to whoever that person is, or other people will just not mention the fact that it turned out that the parents had cancer and couldn’t be there or whatever.

    And I think she did a really good job of giving us both the, “They were really young.” They were 24, the dad was 24. “He had six kids. He was trying to live a life and pull it together. And Mom, she was out looking for support. And this is what happened.” And I love how she mentioned, “And she abandoned us. She left. She took my sister.” In my head, took my sister, they’ve moved to the other side of Australia and she never sees her again. But she clarifies for us. “I was abandoned by my mother. She took my sister.” And she clarifies, “I went to her house. She said she was there every day, but I don’t remember any of that. And so my experience was this, but I want to add in this other information.” I thought she handled that really well.

    Scott:

    Can I also just go on record? I just wanted it out there publicly that I just like Australian people a lot, just generally speaking I do, so I know I’m the only one and we don’t all find them very charming.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The only one.

    Scott:

    I’m fine putting my stamp on that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I have met very few Australians that I did not like above average amounts.

    Scott:

    Yes, agreed.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s the strangest way to say that. [inaudible 00:57:41]-

    Scott:

    “I like you above average amount.” Ooh.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You want to tell the listeners? Hold on.

    Scott:

    We’ve got a little Martha Washington vibes happening from Ashley. It’s sort of a golden Martha Washington.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    For my ladies out there. You remember when we were in the pool as kids and we would take our hair and dip it into the water and then flip it over and do the Martha Washington. That’s what I’m doing right now.

    Scott:

    It looks really good. I feel like you need a broach though. That’s part of the problem that I’m seeing is that we do need to work a broach into kind of every episode if that’s going to be your look.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. Yeah.

    Scott:

    Well, I really enjoyed Annie. I found her to just be incredibly compelling. If you want to work with Annie, which I would encourage people to do so. If you got a taste in this just little sample size, she’s a wise person who has done a lot of work and continues to do a lot of work and is really truly inspiring to all kinds of people. So I would encourage you to check out Powerfully Sober and see how you all might fit together. Ashley, anything you want to leave the people with today?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There are lots of ways to get sober, and this was a perfect example of a non-12-step traditional route. Just remember that whatever you call your struggle, whether that’s alcoholism overdrinking, heavy drinking, “I just want to stop. I want to try to stop. I want to do a challenge.” Whatever it looks like, it’s all good. Yours doesn’t need to look the way everybody else’s looks, and all you have to do is make one step, make one change in the right direction, and see how it goes. So I’m rooting for you. I know Scott’s rooting for you, and we’ll see you next time.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a diverse and supportive recovery community offering weekly over 70 online peer support meetings, useful recovery information and entertaining content. Whether you’re newly sober, have many years in recovery or you’re recovering from something other than drugs and alcohol, we have space for you. Visit www.lionrock.life today and enter promo code COURAGE for one month of unlimited peer support meetings free. Find the joy in recovery at Lionrock.life.

    Scott Drochelman

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