But that would be a dangerous option for Shannon Urban. In addition to being an executive and a divorced mother of a 9-year-old daughter, she is also a recovering alcoholic.
The frustrations of home schooling her daughter while keeping up with her job as an associate dean in marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, and dealing with the pandemic have been stressful enough. But trying to do it all while staying sober has been a herculean task.
"Third grade math is too much for me. That was my crying this week," said Urban, who recently moved in with her fiancé.
Urban says her addiction stemmed from low self-esteem and a desire to mute the pain of always feeling like she was "a piece of trash."
Her drinking intensified in her late 20s when she became a mother, had a mortgage and took on more senior roles at a prior corporate job. "As more responsibilities creeped up in my life, my problem got bigger and bigger," she said.
Now that she's working from home full-time, Urban said recovery is harder because she has more time alone with her self-defeating thoughts as she tries to juggle all her roles in a new way.
"My brain says 'You're stupid and you can't do this,'" Urban said. "You need something to take the anxiety away. ... I don't have drinking as an outlet. I'm alone much more with those destructive thoughts than I normally am. I have to figure out how to work through them in a healthy way and during a pandemic."
Colleen Kearney, 44, is also an executive who is a recovering alcoholic. She is separated from her husband, and their 13-year-old daughter lives with her. She works as senior counsel for BrandEd Holdings, which provides academic programs for well-known companies. In March and April, she describes working at a breakneck pace from home as the leader of the company's Covid-19 task force, which had to make difficult personnel decisions and manage the transition to online learning for her clients' education courses.
She said she hadn't worked that hard since she was a "baby lawyer." Unlike earlier in her career, however, she did it sober. She attributes her drinking in part to family history. But her addiction ticked up about six years ago, she said, when she was unhappy at a former job and realized that her marriage wasn't going to work out.
In 2016, her then-boss mandated that she go to an intensive outpatient rehab program. She did, and stayed sober for a year. But then she thought, "If I can stay sober for a year, I don't have a drinking problem." She started drinking again in late 2017. "I did it privately because everyone knew I'd stopped and had had trouble at work," Kearney said.
Her daughter figured out that she was drinking again and she decided to go to rehab for a month. But that experience didn't take either. "I thought the 28 days would work their magic," said Kearney, who didn't attend recovery meetings afterward.
In October 2018, she chose to go to an in-patient program at Caron Treatment Centers, then did a year-long outpa
