One Good Life: My Tips, My Wisdom, My Story - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jill Nystul is a blogger and founder of the website www.OneGoodThingbyJillee.com, which receives on average 4.6 million monthly page views. She is a 2013Parents magazine Blog Award winner, and her work has been featured on People.com, Oprah.com,The Huffington Post, ApartmentTherapy.com, BonAppetit.com, LifeHacker.com, TheKitchn.com, Money.msn.com, andTime Out for Women. Nystul lives and works in Heber City, Utah, with her husband, Dave, and their children.

Jill Nystul is a blogger and founder of the website www.OneGoodThingbyJillee.com, which receives on average 4.6 million monthly page views. She is a 2013 Parents magazine Blog Award winner, and her work has been featured on People.com, Oprah.com, The Huffington Post, ApartmentTherapy.com, BonAppetit.com, LifeHacker.com, TheKitchn.com, Money.msn.com, and Time Out for Women. Nystul lives and works in Heber City, Utah, with her husband, Dave, and their children.

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contents

prologue

My forty-sixth birthday seems like yesterday, and yet it also seems like a lifetime ago. The date was February 20, 2008. It was not merely a birthday. In fact, it was a rebirth. As birthdays go, forty-six is not one of those overwhelming milestones that make us cringe and dread the turning of a decade. But for me, that birthday was a most auspicious event: It was the day that I graduated from the Ark of Little Cottonwood, a residential treatment facility in Utah. It was close to home and also very far away. I had entered the Ark seventy-eight days before, on December 5.

How I came to the Ark is a long story. The short version is that about ten years before, when I was in my mid-thirties and married to a great guy, Dave, with whom I have four wonderful kids—Erik, Britta, Kell, and Sten—and seemingly had everything that anyone could have wanted, I was miserable. Amorphously, absolutely, and horribly miserable for no reason that I could really explain. All I knew was that I wanted more and needed more and that more was something indefinable and elusive. I felt like I needed to escape something but I didn’t know what. The utter confusion and feeling of being completely lost and not knowing why or how to fix it was too much to bear. So I turned to that ubiquitous social lubricant: alcohol.

I could give you a litany of reasons and excuses for why I drank. It’s true that I had a great deal of anxiety after each of my children was born. It wasn’t postpartum depression. It was postpartum anxiety, where I had a constant sense of impending doom and bouts of nearly paralyzing panic attacks. My doctor prescribed Prozac, and although it eased the panic attacks, it suppressed my libido, and that was like pouring fuel on a fire. The truth is, my marriage was on the rocks before I started drinking. Yes, the pun there is intentional, since levity often makes what was once painful for me seem less so as I look back. Ultimately, after twenty years of marriage, my husband and I separated for a year. With work, we reconciled and healed. Still, I remained anxious. I turned to food as a coping mechanism and suddenly I was dealing with weight gain. Ironically, I didn’t gain weight during my pregnancies, but after each one, I added on more postpartum weight. I was sleep-deprived. And I was conflicted: I loved being at home with my babies, and although I also wanted to go back to work, the thought of going back to work made me anxious. My second son, Kell, was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of two and a half. I have battled foot pain since I was sixteen, when I was diagnosed with a nonmalignant tumor on the bottom of my foot. It was successfully treated with radiation therapy, but wouldn’t you just know it, while everything else was happening and my life seemed as though it was spinning out of control, that wound site on the bottom of my foot reopened and refused to heal despite two skin grafts. Thirty dives in a hyperbaric chamber finally healed my foot. By this time, my “turning to alcohol” morphed into full-fledged abuse.

Despite all this, I make no excuses. I suppose that from the very first time I stood up in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and stated, “My name is Jill and I am an alcoholic,” I began the process of taking responsibility for myself and my actions. It was Step Four of the twelve-step program that instructed me to fearlessly take a moral inventory of myself. I remember the very first time that I took that palliative drink. So many things were building up inside and the demons were daring me as I drank with the sole and deliberate intention of numbing the pain. The remedy worked that day for the simple reason that when our senses are altered, we feel less pain. Sometimes we feel no pain at all. I was anesthetized. Let’s face it: When you’re passed out, you feel nothing. And so the sorrow would leave until I sobered up, and then the next time it crept up, I would reach for the bottle again. I became caught in the vicious cycle.

“Hiding in a bottle” and “drowning sorrows” are clichés because they are facts: Alcohol as a painkiller provides false and temporary sedation. So on and on I went, seeking solace in the bottle, until my family gathered together and staged an intervention. My husband and children found the help that I needed and couldn’t find for myself. I didn’t make it easy for them. It was like trying to corral a wild mare. But somewhere in my alcohol-addicted brain, I knew they were right and there was no other choice but to get help in a place that was safe and dry and could make me whole again.

I often think that if not for my family, I would either be dead or in jail. If not for my amazing family and the belief that I now hold so dear in a Higher Power, I have been given a second chance. Call the Higher Power what you will: I just feel there is something or someone out there or up there, along with my family and the angels who worked as counselors at the Ark, who helped me to save myself.

I share my story not because I am unique and crave the spotlight, but quite the opposite. I share because I know that there are many like me who are scything the same path I was. I want those people to know that they are not alone—whether they are addicts or love an addict. Addiction of any kind is not shameful. It is neither deliberate nor meant to harm. It is also conquerable. I never say that I “was” an addict. I emphatically state that my addiction remains in a current state. I must be vigilant. I must be aware that I could easily slip. My battle is one that I fight every day, and I do so one day at a time. At the end of each day, I take great joy as I emerge triumphant.

During my stay at the Ark, the counselors taught me many important things, not the least of which was the need to find my passion and pursue it. The notion of uncovering my passion was not just a suggestion; it was mandatory if I wanted to stay sober. As a former broadcast journalist, I knew that communication was my passion and—here’s where the irony comes in—I was able to communicate with everyone except myself. That’s when the bottle became the wrong kind of friend. With the help of the counselors at the Ark, my passion became a daily journal that morphed into a blog that became a public website. There were days when my passion was driven and other days when I thought my excitement as I recovered was all just smoke and mirrors. But I stuck with the intention, focused on the passion, and gave it a name reflecting the baby steps I needed to painstakingly march, often stumbling, in order to recover. Every day I wrote down “one good thing” in the hope that I would read my own words as gospel and have the will to overcome the demons. My passion, the blog, became www.onegoodthingbyjillee.com. And that passion got feedback, gratitude, and support as people, strangers, bolstered my courage and often told me their own and similar stories as well. When I realized that there were others just like me out there, with people who loved them and needed them to return to them whole, I wanted One Good Thing to become something for them to hold on to as well.

In time, I was not alone. As I healed, others healed along with me, and all of this brings me to where I am now: counting my blessings as I look ahead while I live each day gratefully with the promise of not only one good thing, but one good life.

With my siblings, 1967. Dori, the youngest, had not been born yet.

one

I grew up in a typical American family. Well, not that typical, because I have five siblings: two older brothers, Cole and Kevin; one older sister, Rebecca; and two younger sisters, JoAnn and Dori. I fall in the middle of the six. My...