85 Pounds and Barefoot in the Keys Drinking Pop-Off Vodka — That’s What Incomprehensible Demoralization Looks Like – Jane L.
About This Speaker Tape
Jane shares her story at a Blue Chip Speakers meeting on Zoom, opening with gratitude for over 23 years of sobriety since September 24, 1996. She grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in New Jersey, the daughter of a collegiate track coach who nearly broke the four-minute mile. She had her first drink at 14 — rum at a Star Wars screening — and chased that feeling of being extraordinary for the next decade. College at Manhattan College in 1980s New York City blew the doors off. She rode the fast lane hard: clubs, cocaine, blackouts, and watching her academic dreams slide from biology to English lit as partying took the front seat.
She tried geographic cures — a semester in France, three years teaching English in Japan — but carried the party with her everywhere, always magnetizing fellow drinkers. Back in New York, she started dating a married coworker, crossed moral lines she never thought she would, and entered a shame-and-drinking cycle she couldn't break. A friend suggested Florida, and she ended up in the Keys, where she hit incomprehensible demoralization: homeless, 85 pounds, drinking bottom-shelf vodka out of the bottle, smoking what she used to snort.
The turning point was a catastrophic drunk-driving crash on a bridge road near the old Seven Mile Bridge. Her passenger Max was killed. Jane broke her neck at C1-C2 and spent eight months in hospitals learning to walk again. She pled guilty and received five years in prison plus ten years of probation. In prison she did her first fifth step with a Catholic priest and had a transformative moment when a second priest told her to stop dragging forgiven sins back from the sea of forgiveness. She learned to drop the ego, accept powerlessness, and build a genuine relationship with her higher power.
After release, Jane rebuilt from zero — housekeeping at a hotel, biking everywhere with a lifetime license revocation, no financial help from her tough-love Irish family. She earned a social work degree from Florida State, taught substance use disorders, and eventually became a full-time teaching professor at FSU's College of Social Work. She married James, a fellow AA member she first heard speak at a Florida state convention, and recently received a hardship driver's license. She closes by reading from the Big Book on daily reprieve and the proper use of the will.
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