After Sobriety, Broken Heart, Woman Finds Calling

Learn more about Everblume, Sonia’s substack and podcast “Sisters In Sobriety.” You can take the ACE quiz here and find out more about Adverse Child Experiences.

TRANSCRIPT

One Path

Sonia Kahlon was raised by Indian immigrants who came to the United States in the 1960s. Like so many first generation Americans, Sonia and her brother felt pressure to achieve their parent’s vision of success.

Really the only requirement of academic and it was to get like the best grades ever get into the best school become a doctor, dentist, or pharmacist and those that was the only those were the only goals and the only professions.

Their parents were strict.

We didn't have much kind of freedom…So, we'd be jealous of kids who got to wear makeup. We weren't allowed to date. I mean, forget curfew. We weren't even allowed to go do anything.

Sonia will never forget the day her older brother came home and announced he was switching to an anthropology major.

The whole house blew up. Like it literally was like, it was like cinders left in the house…I mean it was scorched earth. He like left home never to return. We didn't see him for years. It was just incredibly dramatic.

This rigid life with big expectations took a toll on Sonia.

 It really gave me just the most severe anxiety. And so I sort of lived with that from as long as I can remember. And I didn't even have a word for it until much much much later.

This is a story about how Sonia learned to deal with that anxiety. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Escaping Anxiety

At a young age Sonia Kahlon discovered ways to deal with her stress.

I started smoking when I was around 13 and so that was, it felt amazing. And I think it worked really well for a few years and then the first time I drank I was like, this is better than smoking because it had a more, like more of an effect on my mind and so more of a calming effect than just sort of like the nicotine which, you know, has a different type of calming effect. But when I found alcohol it was like…This is silver bullet for everything. 8 It was such for me like an interior experience, just this like lightness sort of in my brain and so that sort of like cloudy, surreal feeling.

At 15 Sonia found her dad kept a lot of hard alcohol in the house. He and her uncles would spend many nights drinking until drunk.

My dad always had friends over that drank very, very heavily, only hard liquor. … 8:35 my parents really were not interested in looking for signs of any sort of substance use, they were truly focused on academics…But as long as you're doing good in school, we're not gonna mess with that streak.

Sonia graduated early from high school and started college young at the University of Toronto Trinity College, a sophisticated school where students were expected to attend formal events.

I was so out of my depth. I didn't know what fork to use. I didn't know what sherry was or port and we had sherry reception with the dean before dinner and port reception after dinner and I was just completely out of my depth. And so I think that that's when alcohol really started to fill in the gaps socially for me. 

At her age it was the norm to drink, especially in Canada where the drinking age was 18.

I was just like swept up in the drinking, thinking everybody's doing that, but not realizing that my behavior was probably a little more risky and I was drinking always like a little bit more or I was a little bit more drunk than everyone else. And it's a hard thing to gauge when you're that age and especially when you're self -conscious and insecure. So I was just drinking till I wasn't self -conscious and insecure. 

Four nights a week starting Wednesday Sonia was partying to the point of black out.

I didn't realize how many risks I was taking with my life. It seemed so normal back then to pass out in the ladies' room, come home, fall asleep with your clothes on, and not remember what happened the night before you know, drink to the point where you don't, you're vomiting and you can't get up the next day. And so I just somehow slowly started incorporating those consequences as normal.

She had trouble making real friends with people she felt she could be her authentic self.

And so once in a while, I would meet another weirdo and that would be my best friend. I wasn't really vulnerable around many people. And so, yeah, it must have been in some sense a learned behavior.

Come senior year Sonia had skated through school barely passing her classes. But she still knew she had to follow her parents expectations. She didn’t feel she had any other choice.

I had drank my way to not great grades. And so I took the lowest option, which was pharmacy.

Sonia started pharmacy school in Boston but it soon became apparent she did not want to be a pharmacist. So she applied to dental school and got in. 

And from the first day or two, it was pretty obvious that I wouldn't be able to drink through this one. And I remember like the first day you go down and you meet your cadaver that you're gonna have for the next semester…we have a little ceremony and you say hello to your cadaver. And it's such an overwhelming experience and knowing that we were gonna have to do these dissections… so I still drank on the weekends...And then once my board exams and once I had gotten in, I knew it was sort of a done deal that I would get into my residency, I started drinking really heavily from almost that day on. we would have like exam cycles, at the end of exam cycles, I would just get wasted, just obliterated...And then when the final kind of cycle happened, I just kept on drinking.

Dental school is where she met Jeremy.

He was just a very confident, kind of suave guy, a lot of gel in his hair. And so I do remember thinking, where's this guy coming from? I'm freaking out. I don't know where to get a textbook. I don't know where to get my student ID. 

At first they were friends, then study partners. By their third year they started dating.

He was more of a weed smoker and he had really convinced me that it was almost like medicinal. That if he wasn't gonna smoke weed that he would have to find other ways to calm his anxiety and his racing brain.

From The Outside Her Life Sparkled

The two wound up going onto school to become orthodontists in Pennsylvania. Sonia graduated in 2008. She and Jeremy got married the following year.

My life from 2009 to 2022, looked amazing. We were super, super successful, successful beyond my wildest imagination. We eventually started working together and started a practice. We bought our first home, which was like my dream home in Philly. We had a townhouse and we were able to renovate it and we got a dog. And we went on vacations and then we bought a second home for the weekends …. And then we sold the practice and it was like, and now we don't have to work anymore and we're gonna get another house in New York. And so from the outside, it seemed really good. 

But she continued to drink night after night. They were hitting milestones faster than they could’ve ever imagined, so she didn’t think she had a problem.

I knew I couldn't go a day without drinking, but I think I convinced myself I'm not drinking at work, during work. I'm just like everybody else. I'm coming home and opening a bottle of wine when I get home while I'm making dinner. And in that bottle of wine, I would drink the whole bottle of wine. And then over time, I would maybe open a second bottle if I was feeling really into it. And so...I knew I would wake up after with a bad hangover a few times a week and say, I'm not going to drink tonight, but I would inevitably drink. And so that cycle repeated itself maybe a thousand times, thousands of times until I really said, I have to do something about it. And it was always like a, well, when this happens, I'll do it, right? Like when I have less stress, I'll do it. When I hire a new orthodontist and I'm not working as much I'll do it.

Her brother was an alcoholic and Sonia always saw him as her gauge. 

He had sort of always been like the yardstick that I measured my drinking by and I was by no means as bad as he was. And so that kept me from really making a change for a while. And then, you know, at some point I realized there's no difference between me and him. And he had gotten sober and I looked at his life and I thought this guy's life looks better than mine. Like, he had a new baby and a new wife that I really liked and he was really close with my parents and he had a cute new house and did fun things on the weekend and I thought, ‘something is wrong with me, something is wrong.’

Sonia’s brother challenged her to go a day without drinking. She thought if he could do it, so could she.

I made it one day about maybe five or six times and I felt good about it. I said, ‘okay, I can do one day. I can do one day.’ And then, yeah, probably like the sixth or seventh time I said, ‘okay, I'm gonna do this day and I'm gonna do another one.’

In the back of her mind she knew there were certain things missing from her life, like close friendships and hobbies outside of work. It wasn’t until years later that she would realize she was self medicating untreated anxiety and depression in isolation. 

Originally I didn't think of it as any sort of mental health issue, right? I thought it was just that this is my way of relaxing and I need to just stop doing it and I'm gonna start exercising. There's this idea of emotional sobriety and that didn't even register with me that that was something that I needed to work on. I thought what was just important is that I stopped drinking. And then, you know, after two weeks I was really still white knuckling it and like this is hard. Like this is really, I'm crawling out of my skin and people are asking me to go out and I don't know what to do. And so that was probably the first inkling that there was more to sobriety. I mentioned it to my brother. I said, ‘hey, I haven't drank in two weeks and I think I need to go to AA.’ 

But Alcoholics Anonymous didn’t feel anonymous enough in her medical profession.

Every time I'd say, ‘hey, there's an AA meeting at like 12th and Pine in Philly,’ and he was like, ‘we have friends that live at 12th and Pine. But we have patients at Spruce and Broad Street.’ And so you can't go to that meeting. And I thought, huh. And it kind of put that idea in my head that if people started to see me like that, it would be a liability almost to my career. 

So she listened to self help podcasts, read books about women who had gotten sober, and relied on her brother’s support. For four years that’s how she stayed sober. 

Then they moved to New York so Jeremy could get his MBA at Columbia. It was around that time that her brother, her main support, fell off the wagon. So she went around New York trying out AA meetings. When the pandemic hit, she went to meetings online, sometimes two a day.

She reached out to her family and got close with her nieces, relationships that had been on hold until she got sober. And she did some soul searching and discovered being an orthodontist maybe hadn’t been her true calling.

You really dig deep into who you really are. And yeah, I think that something that maybe was obvious to other people was it wasn't really my passion. 

She decided she wanted to help people so started teaching entrepreneurship in prisons.

I had this sort of addiction history, which is so common in the prison system. And I thought, I think I have something that will actually help people on a very specific level that wouldn't help in other charitable organizations. The more I worked in the prisons and I and the more I kind of tested out meetings, I thought this is the space I sort of want to be in. This feels right. 

ACE Score

It is one of the most rewarding things I think I've ever done. I think that connecting, especially when I go to the women's prison, connecting with the women is incredible, right? And what's interesting is how similar, so there's something we call the ACE score, the Adverse Childhood Experiences. And one of the first times I went to prison, we were talking about resume building and things like that, we did our ACE scores. And my ACE score is similar to all these women. And the ACE score is a predictor of chronic illness. It's a predictor of ending up as part of the criminal justice system….And there is zero difference between me and them, except that in some cases, I didn't get in a car and drive.

The test measures how traumatic experiences (that cause toxic stress) may affect a person’s health or social outcome. Your score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood. According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the rougher your childhood, the higher your score is likely to be and the higher your risk for later problems.

That was pretty profound, I think, for me to see how similar we were and how many similar experiences we had had growing up and how I was just a little tiny turn of the dial away from being where they were. 

Sonia began to write about her sobriety and publish online. She took a photography course and created images.

…but still hiding right like behind this wall, like not really, you know, saying directly like who I was But I think I was also in a sense pushed trying to see the boundaries with my ex -husband where like, where is he going to push back and say, you can't do this, you can't do this, this is embarrassing. And he wasn't pushing back much. And I kept writing.

When she asked Jeremy to proofread her personal essays, she hoped he might better understand her. 

I would give him my writing to edit and he would just edit the grammar. And he wouldn't say anything. No, about me just ripping my heart open and bleeding all over this paper. No, he would not comment. And he would just say, he'd be like, all right, it's in the Google Drive commenting at all about the content.and I would be like, I can't wait, right? And I would go in and he would just be like, you have poor use of semicolons. … he didn't have respect for anything that didn't make money, right? Like this was sort of, he's a business guy and if it doesn't make money, it doesn't have a purpose. 

The Breakup

Jeremy had stopped smoking weed. But without the practice or a thriving business venture, he was struggling. He’d become obsessed with crypto currency and startups. In Sonia’s mind life was good. She was sober and found meaning in her volunteer work, her writing, and her relationships.

I actually was very clear that I didn't want to do another startup. And so I think he felt at a point that he lost his wingman. 40 It seemed like he just couldn't find his footing without the business. That his identity had been really wrapped up in this business. 

Things came to a head the day crypto crashed.

He sort of had a meltdown. My family was visiting in New York and he had a meltdown in front of all of us…like a panic attack … ‘I just hate my life. What have I done?... I just lost all this money. And so, you know, we talked about it a lot. Like it's time to kind of move on from crypto and it's okay. 

They’d had this intense discussion but when they went to bed,  Sonia thought things were fine.

The next morning he woke up and he was just like, ‘so I think it's you. I think you're happy with too little.  And you're happy with making art for no reason, and writing.’ He said, ‘I'm not sure I can be happy with you. Like this whole existential crisis I'm having about my life might be about you.’ And I couldn't believe it. And I said, ‘okay, so do you want some space?’ And he was like, ‘yeah, I'm gonna go and consult for these friends who had a dental practice in Philly and see how I feel.’ You know, and I said, ‘I think it'll be great. I think you'll feel much better. I think you'll feel like you're doing something more tangible. Like crypto is not, you know, a tangible thing…’ 

And so he packed a bag and he left and… This is the first day in 18 years we haven't communicated… he just started slowly cutting off communication. And finally, I said, ‘hey, do you want to come by the house and we can go for a walk? And he said, ‘no.’ I said, ‘do you know what you want to do?’ And he was like, ‘no, I don't know.’ And so that was the last time we ever spoke.  And so that was it and I texted him and he never responded. I just I texted him actually like ‘love you I will always love you. I don't know what to do if you don't communicate with me. I just have to let you go,’ and no response. And then I did find out he was cheating with the lady with the dental practice in Philly.

Sonia had been sober for five years. 

I thought, why am I staying sober? I can stay sober if he's coming back. Because then I have a life to stay sober for But if he's not, then all bets are off. I have nothing to live for. We never had kids. And I don’t have the business, and I'm questioning my sobriety, and so I don't have that. And yeah, and so I struggled so much in ways I couldn't have even imagined after five years, I've been working on my sobriety for five years. I could not believe that I was so wholly unprepared for this type of like emotional catastrophe. When my brother relapsed it was hard but it didn't compromise my sobriety. But this was on a level I just could not imagine. It was like, for me, it was like a bomb went off.

LAUREL:  And so what was that year like for you?

SONIA: Oh, it was crazy, it was horrendous. It was nothing I had ever even thought I would go through. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I cried all the time, I didn't have any answers, I had no explanation. Weird things were happening. He didn't tell anyone, he disappeared essentially, so I had to tell all of our friends. I had to tell his friends. He would tell people, ‘oh yeah, yeah, we're living together in Bucks County.’ And they would call and be like, ‘do you guys want to go to dinner? Jeremy said that, you know, you guys are up in Bucks County.’ I said, ‘what?’ He sort of left me holding the bag, which every time I had to open it was extremely painful…I had to tell his family… it was gut wrenching. 

Finding Gratitude

All the while Sonia stayed sober. At the same time Sonia’s sister-in-law was reeling from her own marriage falling apart.

I remember saying to my sister -in -law, like, when does this get better? … And she's like, you know, it gets better when it gets better. It was so nice to have someone who had gone through that, even if it was with my brother. It was like, at least, yeah, that lived experience.

She threw herself into her volunteer work, hanging out with her nieces, and AA. But she longed for something more. 

That Christmas her sister-in-law who had two teenage daughters invited Sonia to dinner with friends and family. 

They have a table that goes across the entire house. That's how many people are at this Christmas. She didn't tell me that at Christmas we're going to go through everyone and say, like, ‘what was your, you know, what was the best moment of the year?’ And so they start going around and I'm sitting with my nieces and I was like, ‘you got to pass on this. I mean, we all know what happened, right? Like we had to do not let them ask me.’ And somehow when it like came to me, I was like, ‘I have something to say…’ My niece I went to get her hair done with her in May for her prom. It felt good. And then I went to her graduation in June. And so then when we finally moved my niece into her dorm… just looking back and like putting our bed together and putting the sheets on and it was amazing. And so yeah, just spending time with them in a way that I knew wouldn't have been possible when I was married … I didn't go and do things by myself that often…it was like I could finally breathe, I remember. And I drove home from Montreal back to Pennsylvania and I was like, ‘okay, I'm gonna be okay.’ 

Starting EverBlume

Sonia had been through the 12 step program and been to countless meetings. Each time she went either in person or online she left feeling incomplete.

It's not exactly connection, it's kind of like storytelling, like hearing stories. It's almost like listening to a podcast, you're not interacting. And I think there came a point where I wanted to interact …I could not physically, I was not physically, emotionally, everything, could not repeat the story over and over and over in the way that I still needed connection that I thought there's gotta be a way I don't have to do this. There's gotta be a way where someone can, you know, like we can follow each other essentially. We can know each other's lives and talk about our sobriety and talk about why it's hard.

She looked for something like this but couldn’t find it.

And believe me, the last thing I wanted to do was start a business in 2022. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Let me start making like a little pitch deck type thing. Like, what would it look like? I really didn't put any pressure on myself. And then when I had something, I thought, I think I have something. The idea that we can be matched into groups where we're together for as long as we want to be. And it's women and you have something in common. In my case, I have things in common with women that are like empty nesting too, right? Or women going through any type of breakup.

She and her sister-in-law Kathleen Killen whom we featured in a previous 2 Lives episode started the podcast Sisters In Sobriety. 

PODCAST INTRO: Welcome to Sisters In Sobriety…

Today Sonia lives in Pennsylvania and has started teaching in prisons there. She facilitates EverBlume meetings and has found the meaningful connection with other women like her that she was so desperately seeking. 

SONIA: I still struggle, and I think that's helpful too. And so when I, yeah, when I say it's my meeting, I have really bad days still. And so, and I have to go to cocktail parties still…And it's still hard…Yeah, it's nice to be at a point where I can be open about what's going on with me. I haven't been able to do that in a really long time.

LAUREL: Yeah. And you mentioned the cocktail party. You also mentioned a reunion coming up with a group of people who you used to drink really heavily with. So what's it like to anticipate that?

SONIA: I'm freaking out! I am freaking out! I have my 25th year college reunion.  I don't wanna be reminded. I had like a nickname because of my drinking antics. I don't want people to call me by that. So there are things like that where it's like, I know that I'm remembered for. I don't want to be known for the worst thing I've ever done. These people don't know me sober. They don't know I'm not a totally different person but there's so many things that are different about me. They're gonna expect one kind of person and another kind of person shows up. And so yeah, that is why I started EverBlume. Being able to help people with you know, the two toughest things I've ever been through, which are getting sober and getting divorced, is amazing. It feels amazing.  

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.