I love Mexico. I love her people, her warmth, the way the air smells the second you step off the plane. It’s like something between salt and flowers and something I’ve never been able to name. I love the food, the colors, the ease that lives in the bones of that place. I love that she is nothing like the Midwest I grew up in, and nothing like the red carpet life I spent two decades navigating. Mexico has held some of the best moments of my life. I have returned again and again and again because something there feels like freedom.
However, this is not a story about Mexico. This is a story about escape.
It’s about being so starved for rest (and sometimes love) that I confused numbing with healing, disappearing with rejuvenating. It’s about what I was really running from underneath the sunscreen and the salt air — myself, mostly. The relentless performance of holding it all together.
If you’ve ever needed to leave your own life for a few days just to survive it, you already know exactly what I mean. This is for you.
Not the hangover. Not even the occasional embarrassment, exactly. The quieter thing. The thing that would find me on the plane ride home, my nervous system still revved from days of drinking around the clock, body humming with the residue of it all while my mind slowly began to reconstruct what I was returning to. Real life. Responsibilities. Detox. Re-entry.
Nobody really talks about that transition. It’s jarring in a way that’s both physical and emotional — knowing you have to get some order back to your days while simultaneously reckoning with whatever the trip had revealed. The lapses in judgment that showed themselves in the daylight. The text to an ex I shouldn’t have sent. The name I couldn’t quite remember belonging to a face I vaguely could.
My nervous system was still at the party. The rest of me was already home.
I was a woman with a high-pressure television career, two sons, a life that demanded I be “on” in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. The glossy A-list events, the stilettos, the designer labels, the camera always somewhere nearby. Mexico was the antidote to all of it. Barefoot and sun-warm and blissfully informal in a way I was starving for — and I couldn’t always name that hunger all those years, but that’s exactly what it was. A starvation for ease.
Alcohol didn’t escalate over those twenty years. It didn’t get darker or more extreme. It was simply always there. The most used accessory on every trip, except I never had to pack it because it was waiting for me upon arrival. Or on the flight there. Or, honestly, at the airport bar before departure. It went with the territory the same way the ocean did. It was just part of Mexico.
(That’s actually more insidious than an escalation story, I think. It wasn’t a spiral. It was ambient.)
I want to be careful here because it wasn’t all like that. I traveled to Mexico many times with girlfriends and we made memories I genuinely treasure. We were wild and free and alive in the way that women get to be when they leave their daily selves at home for a few days. And once, on one of those trips, I met a really great guy. A beautiful soul. Much younger than me (I’ll just throw that in there for my hardcore, longtime followers - ha!). We bonded over tequila the way you do when the stars and the humidity and the right song are all working together. The connection lasted well beyond the vacation. I met his family. I traveled to where he lived. It was a sweet and erotic little chapter, the kind you tuck away and smile at years later.
But there were other trips. The ones I’ve written about before — missing my son’s baseball game on a livestream as I slept at the pool, the phone in my hand full of texts I shouldn’t have sent. Exchanging horrific jabs with an ex while I was somewhere beautiful and in too much pain to enjoy it. Those trips stand out differently in my memory.
Especially the ones after my first divorce, when I was a woman trying to feel chosen again. I would go out to the bars and this is hard for any woman to admit - it was about being noticed, being flattered, having some man look at me like I was worth something. Why? Because I wasn’t giving that to myself. My standards weren’t where they should have been because my self-worth wasn’t where it should have been. I was trying to fill the void with someone else’s admiration instead of my own. That feels like a lifetime ago. Because it was.
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the pretty beach photos: there is a very specific and unspoken social contract in places like Cabo. A collective agreement that functions the way Vegas does — no clocks, no rules, it’s five o’clock somewhere, so we wake up and start the party early and nobody has to think about the night before or what’s coming next. You just reset. You pour another drink and you’re back to good vibes. The shame from last night? It dissolves in the morning margarita. It’s almost built into the architecture of the experience.
And when everyone around you is doing it, it stops feeling like a choice at all. It just feels like Tuesday at the swim-up bar.
That’s what made it so easy to stay in it. And so hard to see clearly while I was.
I want to be careful here because I think there’s a sanitized version of sobriety. The one where you wake up one day and never think about a drink again. That’s not the one I’m living. Ten months in now, the pull isn’t massive. There’s no moment at the swim-up bar where I’m fighting some enormous, unbearable wave. (And I know I’m lucky in that sense.) It’s subtler than that.
What I notice is the absence of the buzz. Things used to elevate and escalate — the pendulum would swing, the afternoon would get louder and warmer and more thrilling. Now, instead, my engine just kind of hums along nice and evenly. And I’m still adapting to that. Learning to find the exuberation elsewhere. But I want to be honest that I notice its absence, because pretending I don’t would be its own kind of lie.
Because here’s what I’ve come to understand: missing the escape is not the same as missing the drink.
What I miss, if I’m being completely honest, is the trapdoor. The permission to stop being me for a few hours. To leave Catt Sadler. The one who is climbing, building, evolving, doing the work. To leave her at the door and just... not be her for a while. Even in a beautiful life, even in a life I am genuinely proud of, sometimes she just needs a damn break from being her. The exhaustion of becoming is real. And for twenty years, alcohol was how I took that break.
Sobriety didn’t remove that need. It just took away my old way of meeting it. And I’m still learning new ones. Healthier ones.
I just returned from this trip. I walked on that beach at sunset. I ordered my NA drinks. I watched the cocktail menu get passed around the table and I felt my engine hum and I thought: I am genuinely not her anymore.
She’s not a goal anymore. She’s not aspirational. She’s actually here! She’s showing up in the spiritual quality of the mornings, in the way the sand feels under her feet and the palm trees feel overhead. The ocean feels like something I’m finally actually inside of rather than blurring at the edges. I feel more alive than I have in decades.
This higher version of myself I’ve been dedicated to one day meeting? She’s arrived.
She feels free. She feels good in her bones. She feels wise in a way that’s different from smart — it’s a knowing that lives deeper. She understands now, in her cells, that everything she ever went looking for outside herself was already inside her. That she is not alone. That her mind is forever expanding and her vision is limitless.
That the patterns and habits and neural pathways that once made her small are not permanent. That through neuroplasticity, through practice, through choosing herself again and again and again, she can actually rewire the life she moves through.
It is possible. I am here to testify to this for you.
We have the key now. We actually have the key!
Five years ago, ten years ago, I would have thought that was too lofty a thing to say out loud. I don’t believe that anymore. My only job now is to build on this, brick by brick, and trust that the universe is assembling my life for its highest good — and then use this evolution as medicine. Not just for myself. For anyone who needs it.
If you’re working on becoming free of alcohol, coming home to yourself, and finally ‘resting’ from it all - that’s exactly what I walk you through in The How.
With love from the ranch,
Catt
Thank you for sharing! I’m only two weeks in and can see some glimmers of hope but it’s still really hard. Its nice to hear others journeys that are further along than my own.
Hello Catt, I don’t often comment on people’s posts however I’m newly sober too. A book that really helped me understand why I drank and really helped me stop was Alan Carr, Give up drinking the easy way. It really works, not sure if you may have heard about it? Thanks for the inspo for changing my life and choosing it free from alcohol.