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A quiet prayer sets the tone, then the truth rushes in. We sit with Concetta as she maps a childhood of tight control and big love, school years tangled by dyslexia and undiagnosed ADHD, and a relentless need to be seen that bloomed into bulimia and blackout drinking. No melodrama, just the kind of detail you only share when you’re done hiding: raisins in the lunchbox while everyone else had Ding Dongs, a first drunk that turned into a public spectacle, and the way shame can feel like destiny when approval seems tied to your body and behavior.

College offered freedom without guardrails. She gamed the system, outdrank everyone, and used her eating disorder to extend the party. An arrest exposed cracks her family tried to plaster over with treatment aimed at food, not booze. A fast-track marriage checked every box on paper—older attorney, big wedding, picture-perfect home—but left her starving inside. Motherhood brought a pause, then the restlessness roared back: secret affairs, a devastating choice, and the slow collapse of boundaries that once felt unbreakable.

Then came the track. A racehorse named after her. A triple that hit. A pick six that nearly did. Gambling lit up the same circuits as alcohol and bulimia—risk, reward, attention, control—without the mess, until the mess caught up. Concetta’s candor is the point: how control and shame can incubate addiction, how smart people make impossible choices, and how honesty can start to pry open a way out. We end on a cliffhanger—twenty-six arrests and four counties of probation—with part two on the way.

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