Bridget Phetasy Thanks Joe for Holding Sober October

Happy Sober October. This is the first podcast ever where Marshall is in the room. Oh my gosh, I feel so honored. We are honored. This is a special one. He's just exhausted and I knew he wanted to just lie down next to me. My dog always comes through the YouTube show and we're always like, oh, she's going to knock over the lights in the middle, but you see her come in and out in the edits. Well, when Red Ben and I used to do the podcast back in the day, we stood in my office at my house and my kids were really little. So I'd hear like screaming and crying in the background, you know, she took my toy. Something like that, you know? So thanks for doing this. Thank you. How's Sober October going? It's great. I want to thank you for doing that. Why's that? Because it creates a community and it's super cool for people to just have that month of clarity. I just think it's really cool. I'm grateful. It's my sober birthday in October. So I knew it's like how many years? Six years. That's a lot. That's insane. It's you said weed is the hardest part. Yeah. Weed is. Are you sure you need to be sober from weed? Um, yeah, I've tried because here's the thing. Here's the kind of you really want to know what kind of addict I am. I will. I can do it for a while. I've tried. So I was in rehab when I was 19 for heroin. And I started using everything when I was 12, 13 years old. Well, not everything. But I mean, I started drinking and smoking weed. I mean, I grew up all over. I moved every year and a half. It's a long story. Um, my, my whole thing sounds like an improv and like I'm making it all up, but it was just chaotic upbringing, but I'm from the East coast. And then I graduated from high school, Minnesota. So to give you, we just moved a lot. I went to like 11 schools in 12 years. So I started drinking really young. I started smoking weed right around when my parents got divorced. And then I was pretty much a daily smoker from the day that I found weed. It was like, Really? Oh my God. I had like 14. I loved it. A release was an escape. Was it just a perturbance of normal consciousness? My, my upbringing was kind of chaotic. And honestly, I think that I owe weed a debt of gratitude because I don't know that I could have been fully present for what was going on in the house. Um, and, and, and not like killed myself or done something worse. It was just too much for like a small developing brain to handle. And we put enough of that nice, like fuzzy distance between me and the like chaos. That's good name for a band. Fuzzy distance. Fuzzy distance. I'm going to have, I'm going to start it. It's just going to be me alone crying out. God damn, I had no idea. It was, and so it was, it was good except then, um, I escalated after I was, uh, dragged and raped when I was 18. Oh Jesus. Sorry, not to get heavy. It's part of my story. It's horrible, but bad shit hat. Like one of the things that I've had to come to terms with is, you know, I don't blame myself for that happening, but I, I do have to take responsibility for the fact that when you're a woman or a girl and you're out getting blacked out and in this instance, you're around people who are bad, things happen that are not good. It's shit. It's, it's sucks. But you know, if I had daughters, I would be like, watch your fucking drinks and like, be careful and don't get, don't try not to black out cause you don't know what is going to go down. There are so many people that I know that have been drugged. Yeah. I know. I know the thing about that. That's so weird to me. Well, a, I don't, I try to make light of everything because I have to in order to survive and I'm from the East coast. It's just how I handle shit. Like my family's from Rhode Island. My dad's one, my dad's one of 10. It was a roast battle growing up. You know, like you either, if you were the sensitive one, they're like, Oh, you're going to cry about it. You couldn't survive. You had to just be like on, on top of it. That is Rhode Island, Boston, Connecticut. You can't. You're getting roasted and you either keep up or you're like, you're out. You're out. You're the loser in the family and you're drinking too, obviously. Oh, for sure. Heavily. So, um, he, I, I unfortunately was like, if you're going to do that, like use enough to make sure that I don't come to in the middle of it. Like don't be an amateur bro. Like cause I have memories of it and kind of came too. So it was like, I would have preferred just the nothingness of, you know, it being launched, like stuck in my subconscious. So what was the whole Cosby situation like for you then? When I wrote a whole thing about it, because I wrote this piece on medium, um, Bill Cosby raped me kind of because when I, because it's a little click, baby, um, because when all that stuff came out, I was like, oh really ladies, like you're going to come forward now. And I had to stop and like evaluate my own, my own cynicism and just response to that and writing is pretty much how I process everything. It always has been. And so I'm like, I'm just going to write about this and see what comes through. And essentially it was that internalized shame that I had, I had been holding onto was I was projecting it onto these women who were, cause if, if a bunch of girls from Minnesota came forward and said this sleazy dude, you know, drugged us and raped us back in the nineties. Yeah. I'm 40. I'm 40. So yeah, it was like the nineties. Um, I would come forward and, and support them and support of that. If it was the person who did it to me, I wouldn't be like, come on ladies. It's a little late for this now. But that was my kind of gut instinct. So I think that was, I like I said, I think it's internalized shame. I think I just, I, I had not forgiven, um, the girl in me, the, the young girl and me who, who blamed myself. I didn't tell anyone when it happened. I, I woke up and I'm lucky I'm not dead. I'm lucky I made it to get sober six years ago when I look at how my trajectory was. And so I ended up, um, like kind of coming to, and the weird thing about roofies is that you don't really remember. So I like, thank the guy for having it, you know, it was like, Oh, thanks for letting us crash in this place. I didn't even mean to crash at. And I think, um, and then things started coming back and one of my friends, I think something happened to her too. And, and, um, it's crazy. I'm telling this story just based on what happened last week. So, um, I just went, we went to like the Apple river, which was this place in Minnesota and just, I got blackout drunk for like the next five days. I couldn't, I couldn't handle it. I felt ashamed because I was drinking under age. I had, I was working in a restaurant. I had a lot of, um, older friends. We were downtown Minneapolis. I felt super cool. And my friend and I both have the exact last memory. And then I have memories of like crawling around on the floor and trying to find a phone, like just bad things. And, um, I always hesitate to tell them too, cause I know they're guys. They're like, yeah, tell me more. Just kidding. Um, do defensive mechanisms. And, um, yeah, so then I just went bananas. I started doing hard drugs that year. And you think you did that as a response to that? Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think I just was trying, I was already running from so much. There had already been my, and that was like a tipping point. Yeah. My, my stepdad was a little crazy. I don't really publicly talk about it all that often, but it was, um, like whatever, uh, like crazy stepdad, do you like, I think you can figure things out. Um, and it was really chaotic. And, and, uh, then that kind of escalated. Um, my drug use, I found hard drugs and like, then I tried, um, speed and math and I hated it because my brain already races. I don't need any help with that. That's rare though, that somebody doesn't like speed and math. Oh, I hated it. I hated it. Get on that stuff. No, no, no, I don't, I loved heroin. I didn't get lucky. Well, heroin is like that maternal like womb thing. I think it's also, um, I don't, I don't need stimulation for my brain. I need, I, I always wanted relief from this. Were you snorting it? What? Yeah. And smoking it. And did you ever get to the point of shooting it? It, it, it was right before I quit. So once, and then I was like, I'm going to die, essentially. Cause you realize like, I was 89 pounds in 19. I totally had like one of those Hallmark movie moments. I had been out here with a boyfriend and he had a movie and we were, um, just like, it was like a sit in Nancy movie. I was parent. I was doing so much blow. I had delusions of like, I was, he was in one and we were out here and it was just chaos and we were like, it was the shit that I did. How did you get in there? How did you get into comedy? Um, that was not for a while. Thank God. Um, I got dared to do that in 2010 basically. And so somebody dared me to do it. And the comedy stores where I popped my cherry and, um, it was on like one of those bringer shows and it was an absolute shit show. Like every fucking stereotype that you ever heard, people were doing blow in the green room and like everybody, it was like, Oh, you were in the belly room then. No, it was on the main stage, but it was one of those like, It was, it was when it was in like the years before the research. Oh, that's when I was gone. Yeah. You weren't around from 2007. Yeah. So you, you got there in the darkest days. Oh, it was fucking dark. Say the darkest days were like 2007 to like 2012. It was dark. And then my set went okay enough that I decided I wanted to like do it again. But that was many years after, after the like trajectory. So I long story short, I ended up in rehab, um, and 19. And I was there for seven months. I was in a halfway house. So you were arrested. No, I put myself in a halfway house, but it was like, How does that work? It's like, can you put yourself in jail? No, it's not jail. And how can you, how come you could put yourself in a halfway house? Because a halfway house is like that in between jail. It's not mandatory. So they let you put yourself, they're like, Hey, look, I'm fucked up. You mind if I just hang out here for a while? I couldn't go home because of my home stuff. And so I basically after two weeks, my insurance was up and they're like, okay, I'm free to go home. Like, I can't go. I'm going to do drugs in like two minutes. And so they let you stay. No, I took a bus and put myself on general assistance and Minnesota. The joke is it's Minnesota land of 10,000 treatment centers. It's like a great place to get sober. And so I put myself on basically welfare and then I found a place and I'll never forget, I called this place and the woman answered and she was like, I was like, hi, and I had had some guys try to do stuff to me. So I was looking for an all women's place. And this woman was like, you ever heard, I was like, hi, what's it like here? She's like, you ever heard of bootcamp? Sounds perfect. I needed that structure. I needed something. And so they, I basically, cause I was on welfare, they accepted me and it was like me and I was the only white girl. I was by far the youngest. It was, it was basically a lot of women just who the judge said, like, go to this program for three months and you won't go to jail. It was nuts. Dude, that's an education. Oh yeah. I mean, I realized what a privileged little spoiled brat I was. That's for sure. And then I never, but I also hide behind that. So I never wanted to share anything and they're like, it's all relative. Everyone has their problems. And I'm like, yeah, but these stories versus mine, they're not, I feel like I just had too much. So your stories, you couldn't even share. And then I started sharing them. They're like, damn, white people are fucked up. And that was when I learned it was really an early lesson and like all this intersectional bullshit, it was very early lesson for me that like, it doesn't matter. It does not matter what color your skin is. What, like when you're an addict or when you're at rock bottom or we're all humans just like fucked up trying to get out of our own way. And so that was, that was an interesting experience. And then I got in my car, moved to LA.