A Note From the Author
I had every intention of having this book finished by the five-year anniversary of my sobriety. 6/29/21
Clearly, It's not going to happen.
What you're holding (or looking at) is not the finished book. It's a preview.
A work in progress.
The beauty of owning my own publishing company is that I get to do things a little differently. Instead of waiting until every chapter is finished, I get to share part of the journey with you.
Inside you'll find the opening chapters of Chaos to Crown and a glimpse of where the story is headed.
The finished book is still coming. It deserves the same care, editing, and attention that I gave my previous work.
Until then, thank you for taking an early look at what's next.
Apparently, recovery taught me a lot of things.
Patience is still a work in progress.
— Teri Busse
Chapter 1
How Did We Get to This Before-and-After Picture?
The first time I put these two photographs side by side, I stared at them for a long time.
Not because I couldn’t believe they were both me.
I could.
There’s roughly seventy pounds and five years of recovery between those two images. I lived every bit of it.
What those pictures don’t show is everything that came before them, everything that happened between them, and the woman sitting here now in sweatpants and a T-shirt trying to figure out how to put her voice on paper.
People see the crown and assume this is a success story.
People see the rehab picture and think here comes rock bottom.
The truth is neither photograph tells the whole story.
There are stories about EMS, addiction, bad decisions, grief, widowhood, recovery, showing up the best I could as a mom, losing my son to murder, a pageant, becoming an author, still worse decisions to come, and a few miracles along the way. Of course some of those stories are in this book. They have to be. But if I told every detail of every story, we’d be here for 500 pages, and honestly, nobody’s got time for that.
If this book has a purpose, it’s not to explain how I won a crown.
It’s not even really about how I got sober.
It’s about how a woman who spent most of her life surviving eventually learned there might be more to life than just making it through the day.
So, if you’re looking for a perfectly organized timeline, this isn’t that book.
Life didn’t happen in neat chapters.
Neither did grief.
Neither did addiction.
Neither did healing.
What follows is simply my attempt to make sense of it all.
Chapter 2
Before Alcohol
Before we go any further, I want to make something clear.
If you're looking for someone to blame for the decisions I made later, you're going to be disappointed.
My parents aren't on that list.
I wasn't raised in a chaotic home.
I don't have some tragic childhood story that explains everything that came later.
In fact, I was a Gen X kid through and through.
My childhood was full of bikes, camping trips, scraped knees, family holidays, and enough freedom to give modern parents heart palpitations.
But before any of that, there was my entrance into the world.
After thirty-six hours of labor, I was born breech.
Ass first.
Depending on who you ask, that either explains absolutely nothing or everything.
Personally, I think it explains a lot.
Other than that dramatic entrance, there wasn't much excitement for a while.
Well, except for the time I drowned.
I was around five years old, and we were camping at Upsata Lake. Like most kids, I had been told to stay close to camp. Like most kids, I ignored that advice.
What I discovered was that mountain lakes don't always ease you into deeper water. Sometimes the bottom simply disappears.
One minute I was standing.
The next I wasn't.
Thankfully, somebody was paying attention.
I remember very little about being pulled from the water, but I do remember something strange.
A light.
Not angels.
Not heaven.
Not deceased relatives welcoming me to the other side.
Just a light.
The closest thing I can compare it to is one of those old televisions when you turned it off and the screen collapsed into a tiny dot before disappearing completely.
As a child, I never thought much about it.
As an adult with a medical background, I suspect it had more to do with a lack of oxygen to my optic nerve than a glimpse into the afterlife.
A little rescue breathing, maybe a couple pumps on the chest, and apparently, I was good to go.
No ambulance.
No emergency room.
No trauma counseling.
We finished the camping trip.
I probably got my butt spanked for wandering off, although I honestly don't remember. It just seems historically accurate.
Like I said, Gen X through and through.
The truth is, my childhood wasn't defined by near-drownings any more than it was defined by being born breech.
Even though I like to think "kiss my ass" is literally in my DNA.
It was defined by family.
My parents, Dennis and Devera, had known each other almost their entire lives. They grew up across the street from one another. My dad was six years older than my mom.
After returning home from Vietnam, he married her while she was still in high school, not because they needed a shotgun wedding, but because they were in love.
My mom graduated with her married name.
From the beginning, they taught me something that would stay with me for the rest of my life:
Being unconventional was perfectly okay.
Coming January 2027
What you've just read is only the beginning.
The chapters that follow tell the story of how a girl from Montana became a paramedic, a widow, a mother navigating unimaginable loss, a recovering alcoholic, an author, a pageant contestant, and somehow the same person through all of it.
The details are still being finalized.
The chapter titles, however, are already telling on me.
Coming in the Full Edition
Chapter 3: How Do You Become Addicted to Being Seen?
Chapter 4: Death Became Normal
Chapter 5: Becoming a Widow
Chapter 6: Grief Pours Gasoline
Chapter 7: The Bottom
Chapter 8: Rehab
Chapter 9: The Life Waiting Outside
Chapter 10: Surviving Rylee
Chapter 11: Four More Months
Chapter 12: Choosing Myself
Chapter 13: Normal Is Harder Than It Looks
Chapter 14: The Cost of Control
Chapter 15: The Widow, the Alcoholic, and the Queen Became the Same Woman