She was in her early 30s when a stranger's intervention forced Jessica to confront her addiction. Recovery required Jessica to revisit early traumas, and contend with deeply ingrained ideas about achievement and self-worth. Now, the founder of @NuevaYorka is sharing her story in her highly anticipated memoir First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream.
Follow Jessica on Instagram @jessicahoppeauthor and @NuevaYorka. Find her new book here.
Alicia Menendez : Jessica Hoppe wants to see more stories of addiction recovery, and she's beginning by adding hers to the canon. Her new, powerful memoir, First in the Family, traces her own addiction, inherited trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be the first. Jessica's memoir and this conversation include a lot of sensitive topics, including an experience of sexual assault. Listen if and when you are ready.
Jessica, congratulations.
Jessica Hoppe : Thank you so much.
Menendez: In First in the Family, you tell the story in vignettes and it is purposely disorienting, as you say, that is often the experience of addiction itself, and you're mixing cultural criticism and your storytelling. For the purposes of our conversation, I'd like to walk through your story and then talk about what it is you learned at the other side of it. So where do you pinpoint, Jessica, the beginning of your addiction?
Hoppe: Wow. Looking back, I can pinpoint so many moments, because I don't qualify my sobriety by the time of abstinence. I qualify my sobriety by my level of awareness, consciousness, coherence is a word that I love, that John [inaudible 00:01:51] used often. And I don't really think of substances as drugs and alcohol, which alcohol, by the way, is a drug. So from here forward, when I say drugs, please know I'm talking about alcohol as well. I think that the pain that I discuss in the book, the pain that causes that separation from ourselves, and I know that when I was little, I was a really, really just excited child, I was really alive. I was just so curious about everything. I had a real just passion for things, and I truly came into the world that way.
And so I think that the seeds of it were planted very early because of the conditions that my family were trying to operate within and how that was causing us to behave with one another, how to see one another. Or not see, and then the narration about who we were, to come up in the 80s and the 90s, I was in New Jersey in this very small town, and it was predominantly white, and the way I was forced to navigate that from the very beginning. I remember once a friend told me, it really stuck with me as we were talking about how we would raise our children in the future, and she was just like, "I don't want my kid growing up like you, not knowing who they are."
I always knew who I was and my family were very proud. And like I write in the book, Spanish was the language... My father is a Spanish speaker exclusively. I knew who the hell I was. It was just a matter of was it safe to be that. I really believe that the seeds of my coping mechanism were planted very, very early. And then there are some major pivotal trauma points that really lead to when alcohol came into the picture and when drugs came into the picture, they truly got beneath that and just forced that delta, that gap between my body, my soul and my body, my consciousness, my body, my mind, and my heart.
Menendez: One of the trauma points that you referenced, and I'm going to let this live on the page, is what is a brutal sexual assault in your teens, and that is coupled by living in a community where nobody believes you, but when you finally come forward and share the story, and I wonder how you square both violations.
Hoppe: I so disassociated from that moment in order to survive. Literally the moment it happened, it was on a weekend, the people around me, the girls who were my friends, they were just whispers and rumors, they just kept saying, "I'm so disappointed in you. I'm so disappointed in you." And it gives me chills to this day that so many people participated in hiding the truth that it was so easily hid that this was something that teachers, administrators, adults, parents, were involved in, and just playing into this idea that I was a big whore. I was a child, I was a teenage child, I was so, so, so alone and very, very scared. The only way to survive that moment was to bury my head. I changed everything about the way I dressed, about the way I moved through school.
I wore big hoodies and I put up and I just became concave. And the kicker was I grew up in a really, really strict household. My mom was just driving anyone away from our doorstep. So it was painfully ironic that that happened and obviously extremely painful for my mother in particular, for my parents. They did not know, and my family did not. Nobody knew until much later. I kept circling the people around the town that I was associated with, and I started asking questions. And then the truth of it all really came together very quickly. And there were other people who experienced the same and were fed the same lies about themselves in order to cover up the truth of it. It's just this is how these things work, because there was already a feeling about who I was, because I'm not racialized as white, and that happened from pre-kindergarten. So when you start to experience some pain because of that, some people are very courageous and they push forward, and some people become over time more silenced. And that was me.
Menendez: And then what was it that you felt alcohol offered you in that space?
Hoppe: It wasn't until college I was just a ridiculous drunk, but I was in college and it looked like everybody else. It didn't really tip the scale. It was annoying to some people and it was fun to others. And then I think it was worrisome from my sister. I was at the university as my sister. The moment I would start [inaudible 00:07:42], I wanted everyone around me drinking as much or more because that's the way you can normalize it for yourself. And then I was blacking out so quickly, I was just blacking out so, so fast. Later I developed a tolerance. Moving to Boston was going to be a complete do-over for me. I was going to start from scratch, I wasn't going to be around these horrible rumors, whatever it was I did in my past, I was going to forgive myself, because at this point I was telling myself that what they said about me was true because they obviously invented a disgusting rumor about me in order to cover up what had happened, and so that was just going to be left behind completely. I was going to start fresh.
So I really did feel like I was watching myself run at full speed and completely disembodied. I was in a lot of pain and I was trying my best. I was dealing with some neurodivergency from an early age that was never addressed because of my parents' fears about how I would be labeled or pigeonholed, and I just didn't have any language or comprehension for it. So I would be really focused and great in the beginning, then would lose my way, and I would just turn to partying and working really hard, I would pack my school schedule into three days and have two jobs on the weekends and on my days off of schoolwork, and I just focused on what I felt I could achieve. And so in my book, I do talk about the regret of that time as being nothing like what I imagined a college experience would be, but it was the best I could manage.
Menendez: I want to fast-forward to the intervention that someone has with you around your drinking, and it is particularly notable because it doesn't come from a family member, it doesn't come from a friend, it doesn't come from your own therapist. It comes from a stranger. What is it that happens that finally breaks through to you?
Hoppe: Things escalated in my life and I was drinking more and more, and there was an incident at my home where now all of a sudden there's an eviction letter and I had no idea what was going on, and it was just the straw. It was just that last brain cell that I had left. Any kind of tether to my sanity was just... I went out with my friend, and I woke up in my bed the next morning. I had all of my belongings except my phone, and I had all my clothes on from the waist up, I have no idea what happened to me, how I got home or anything like that. Those moments started happening and they were terrifying, and they were very embarrassing, it was very shameful sort of stop that, stop what you're doing.
So I had the feeling, the terrible sinking feeling that something very serious happened to me. I didn't know what, because my memory's completely gone. This is how a blackout works. So I woke up and weeks later when I was retracing my steps, I was looking at the receipts at the Ubers, and I was trying to put this together, and I had been developing this platform, [inaudible 00:11:09], that was about how fabulous my life was. And I received this DM, this woman just said, "Hi, I'm the woman who helped you. Do you remember me?" And I was like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" And she was like, "Well, if you want more clarity on what happened to you, I'm happy to speak to you." And I said, "Yes, of course. Of course I want to know what happened to me." And we spoke, we texted back and forth, and she spoke to me and she told me what happened.
When she was telling me the story, it was so insane. I was just like, "That cannot..." But I knew immediately, I was like, "Oh my God, yeah." I could feel it all in my body, but it's wild because you don't have the memory for yourself. And so it's just like this particular humiliation that I think addicts and alcoholics experience, that your agency is really stripped from you, and then all the rhetoric around being an addict is very shameful, is about immoral failure. But essentially, she saw me on the West Side Highway, she was sitting on the steps of the museum, she was on the Whitney steps, and she was watching me, and I tumbled out of this taxi and I'm really trying to cross with traffic going back and forth like a zombie and I am very clearly going to get hit, and she saved my life. And so I felt so indebted to her.
Menendez: She didn't just save your life by getting you into a car and send you home. She saved your life by reframing the questions that everyone else had been asking with a finger pointed to you.
Hoppe: Absolutely.
Menendez: And asked it in a way that actually allowed you to hear it.
Hoppe: Yeah. She first told me that her mother had been in recovery for 30 some odd years, and if I had any questions about anything, I could always come to her. And I was like, "Okay." And she was like, "I just want you to have a better clarity of what's happening. Do you know what's happening to you?" I was just like, "Do I know what's happening?" Just as you say, no one had ever approached me that way about what alcohol was actually, what mechanism it was operating. And I remember hearing clear as day, whether she said it or I heard, it was like, "Do you want to die?" And I was just like, "No." And I remember I said it out loud like, "No." And she explained what addiction was from her perspective and from her understanding as someone's daughter. And that absolutely changed my life.
And then I took that story and I carried that on further and further, deeper and deeper into my recovery, understand how it was possible, this sexual assault, how was this possible to do, and to get away with and lie to me and lie to everyone for so long, why was that so easily excusable and never addressed, and then how is it possible that I continue to be within the system that's narrated by white, that's built on capitalism, in this legacy of oppression, and constantly blaming myself, my family, others, and never drawing attention to the root of the problem, which are these structures and which are these systems of white supremacy, which felt like for such a long time in my upbringing at least just something that was an excuse, racism was an excuse for your failures.
It wasn't a true thing. It wasn't a real thing even though I grew up with my father enduring that every single day of his life at his job, even within my family reading this book, my parents, my sisters have all come to me and been like... I've just had to reassess how I was looking at our upbringing, our childhood, and what happened in that town, and what happened to our house and all the things, because those were shameful secrets that we would just hide under the rug. And the shame of all of those incidents were holding us back, were holding me back, but my platform has nothing to do with actually substances. And this is not a call for abstinence. It's really about understanding your relationship with yourself so that you can understand your relationship to substances, whatever that may be for you, and understand your relationship in the world.
Menendez: Part of the reason I think First in the Family touched a nerve for me is because, like any family, there's a history of addiction in my family, and I have a cousin who recently passed from his addiction. His kidneys failed.
Hoppe: Oh my God, me too.
Menendez: And the night that he died, I'd raced to be in the hospital with him, because I was closer than his sister. And my cousin, his mother happens to be Colombian, we stood in the room together and he said to me, "The thing is it could have been you, or it could have been me, but we were addicted to work instead." That the obsession with achievement, which, again, those are not paths diverged, those, as you write so beautifully, are paths entangled. But I thought it was so interesting that he framed achievement and success in this pursuit of the American dream, especially for my cousin as an immigrant, being two sides of the same coin.
Hoppe: Oh my gosh. Well, the beautiful thing, first of all, thank you so much for sharing that with me, my cousin said something similar to me.
Menendez: Yes, because your story exists in tandem with a cousin who dies and is not able to articulate what it is that you are able to articulate that saves your life.
Hoppe: Yeah, I feel the guilt of that so much all the time. I do feel like why him, not me? I struggle with that, because everyone has told me since the beginning of this process like, "You need to find success for yourself. You need to find success for yourself." And I really have not been able to. That's really what I want. I don't want you to think about my story or my cousin, I don't think that my cousin failed because he died. I think he was incredibly courageous to be himself and say, "I'm trying to live and I don't know how to live in this world in so much pain, and I need this. I don't want to need this." But what's the solution? And I don't think we have provided that solution for people, I don't think we've honestly addressed where their pain is coming from, particularly for people who come from the legacy of colonialism, genocide, enslavement, racism, on and on and on.
So that wound remains, we've never addressed it, and we're all going to respond in different ways. And as I say in my family, this is something really serious. That's why I wanted to put it side by side with what my sister struggled with. One of my sisters has MS, one of my sisters struggled with infertility. My mother and my family basically all have a history of aneurysm, epilepsy, high blood pressure, diabetes, all of these things relate to our trauma. You cannot separate them. And so I wanted to bring a big bad addiction into that conversation and put them shoulder-to-shoulder so we can really understand what we're working with, because to be isolated that way and to be accused of participating in your demise is very painful.
But I really want this book to be a start of a conversation. I think that's all it can do. Can we all understand that we're suffering from this, this need to achieve things and to qualify our humanity through our achievements, I think the first step in understanding that is what Claire said to me on the fucking West Side Highway, which is, "Do you know what's happening to you? Do you get where these ideas came from? Okay, are those ideas your ideas? Those stories, do you believe those stories? Is that your truth?"
Menendez: Jessica, congratulations and thank you so much.
Hoppe: Thank you. Thank you so much for this conversation. It means the world to me.
Menendez: Thanks for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua and me, Alicia Menendez. Virginia Lora is our producer, Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer, Tren Lightburn mixed this episode. We love hearing from you. Email us at hola@latinatolatina.com, slide into our DMs on Instagram or on Threads and TikTok @latinatolatina. Check out our merchandise at latinatolatina.com/shop, and remember to subscribe or follow us on RadioPublic, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Goodpods, wherever you're listening right now. Every time you share this podcast, every time you leave a review, you help us to grow as a community.
CITATION:
Menendez, Alicia, host. “Why Jessica Hoppe Believes We Need More Stories of Addiction Recovery” Latina to Latina, LWC Studios, September 16, 2024. LatinaToLatina.com.