Getting Sober in My 20s Showed Me There's No Shame in Addiction

Kenzie Green is a hairstylist. For PS's Radical Honesty issue, she discusses getting sober in her 20s. Read more radically honest stories here.

I started drinking when I was about 14 or 15, and looking back I don't think I ever drank normally from the very first time. I started blackout drinking very early on.

I think when people have never had experience with addiction themselves or through someone close to them, they have this picture that's in the movies of someone living in the streets or whatever it is. But I graduated from a private high school, I immediately went to college, and then I graduated college, and I always had a good job. They were the typical things I was supposed to be doing, which is also why I think I wasn't willing to admit to myself that I did have a problem, because I was checking off the boxes of what you're "supposed" to do.

Things really spiraled for me in about 2019 — I landed myself in another horrible relationship. It was an extremely abusive relationship. In November 2019, I ended up going to jail for a DUI and a drug charge. I ended up breaking up with that guy and moved back in with my parents at 25. I didn't have any money left; I had racked up thousands and thousands of dollars of credit card debt. I had a steady job, but I was spending all the money and I wasn't making much.

Fast-forward and I had quit my job at a salon to go to cosmetology school, and then the pandemic happened in March 2020. That's when the huge decline came for me, because I didn't have to go anywhere at all. I was just drinking. Everybody was doing it, or so I thought.

Then, on March 25, 2020, a group of friends and I decided to go bike riding. Everything was shut down at this point, but bars were selling drinks by the gallon if you picked them up and took them home, so we got our gallon of margarita. We ended up going to a birthday party, and that's the last thing I remember. I've been told that I came home, went into my parents' basement, and my mom could hear me making a bunch of noise, running into stuff and knocking stuff over. So she came in, and she's said that it was the scariest moment of her life, because she looked at me and my eyes were open but there was nobody there. She thought I was overdosing because I was so out of it, so she and my dad loaded me up and took me to the hospital. I woke up the next day in my mother's pajamas at 25 years old in my older brother's childhood bedroom. My parents decided that I had a choice to make: I could go to a rehab treatment, or I could pack my shit and hit the road. And I thought, "I'll go to the 30 days of rehab to make them happy, and then I'll come back and never overdo it ever again."

But within a few days of me being at rehab, I realized, "Oh, this isn't so bad, I'm having fun with all these people, I'm just like them." And then I thought, "Oh shit, I'm just like them, and we're all here for the same reason." From then on, I really did the work, working a program and doing the whole thing, and ever since then I've continued to do the thing. It's hard. It gets easier as you go, but you have to stay consistent with the work you do.

Especially early in sobriety, I posted a lot about getting sober, because it helped me to hold myself accountable. It was almost like I was in a competition with myself, because I was raised in a really small Southern town where people get married really young and have kids, and I never fit into the mold of that. I think people expected something like this to happen to me. So instead of letting people talk about, "Oh, she's been to jail, she's been to rehab," I talked about it. It made me feel better, and then in turn what I didn't expect was people reaching out to me and saying, "This is what I've been struggling with, if you have any advice."

In the very beginning, sharing about my journey was for my own benefit. What I wasn't expecting was other people reaching out to me because they didn't have anyone else they knew. I just think being open about it has been one of the biggest blessings that I didn't know was going to come from it all. I wasn't expecting when I got sober that I would not only have people advocate for me, but that I would be able to be an advocate for others. Just being honest with each other and not having shame — which, to be honest, I don't know why there's any shame attached to addiction — it really catapulted me to getting sober. I'm not embarrassed about it, because I have said it all, and I'll continue to say it all.

Jump back to the Radically Honest issue.

Lena Felton is the senior director of features and special content at POPSUGAR, where she oversees feature stories, special projects, and our identity content. Previously, she was an editor at The Washington Post, where she led a team covering issues of gender and identity.