Familiar Faces

Jolinda Grabianowski

AGE: Fabulous at 50! HOMETOWN:

Mankato

OCCUPATION:

Realtor at True Real Estate

CURRENT NETFLIX BINGE:

Community cheerleader

Sometimes, you come across someone who exudes the kind of community spirit you wish everyone had. Jolinda Grabianowski is one of those people.

When we asked her to participate in Familiar Faces, her modesty was as evident as her community spirit.

She’s been very busy lately: graduating college, being a part of the North Mankato Fun Days organizing team, selling homes as a Realtor — she’s got tons of energy and even more faith in her hometown.

MANKATO MAGAZINE: You had a big hand in organizing Fun Days this year. Tell us what it was like being a part of that team and pulling off a huge community event.

JOLINDA GRABIANOWSKI: I loved being part of such a big community event! We had a really great committee that worked together to coordinate all aspects of Fun Days and the parade. When I was first asked to be part of the committee, I thought I was signing up to help coordinate the parade. After the first meeting of the minds, I was given the privilege of co-chairing the parade, assisting with some of the planning logistics of the carnival and beer gardens, engaging with businesses, civic leaders, political figures and media requests. It was also super fun working in the beer gardens checking IDs and giving out wristbands.

MM: You’re also a board member for Business on Belgrade. Tell us a bit about that organization and what you enjoy about being a part of it.

JB: I had previously been involved with Blues on Belgrade as a volunteer. In 2018, I attended a Business on Belgrade Association board meeting and knew this was an organization I wanted to be part of.

The historical Business on Belgrade Association mission is to promote, enhance and preserve beautiful lower North Mankato. My personal goal is to continue the efforts in the growth and development of lower North Mankato and ensure that we have a safe, vibrant community where families live, work and play. Our organization hosts three large community events each year to include Blues on Belgrade, Bier on Belgrade and Bells on Belgrade. We also co-host Bunnies on Belgrade.

Business on Belgrade events attract a very diverse population from all age groups, residents of our community, and many people come from surrounding communities that attend the events and spend money at the local establishments.

MM: You’re a board member and volunteer for the Committee Against Domestic Abuse and Feeding Our Communities Partners. Can you tell us a little bit about why you got involved with those organizations?

JB: My passion for serving others and helping children with food insecurities is a result of being raised by a very strong woman. I was raised in a home where our basic essential needs were very challenging to meet at times. My mom did the best she knew how to in an effort to provide for our family. When I learned of Feeding Our Communities Partners, I immediately knew this was an organization that would benefit from my own experience and desire to help those who would benefit from my efforts. Today I am on the event planning committee for Beer, Brats and Bourbon and Climb to Feed Kids as well as helping with other tasks as life allows.

My goal of being a board member and advocate for the Committee Against Domestic Abuse stems from personal awareness of women close to me who have been victims of domestic abuse. Many times abuse creates a stigma, women isolate themselves and they do not seek help. My goal is to break that stigma and be a voice for those who are impacted by domestic abuse.

MM: Anyone who follows your social media knows you’re a proud hockey mom. Give us a peek into that world. Great place to hang out? Cut-throat bunch of Karens? What’s the scoop?

JB: Life has changed a lot over the past year since my youngest daughter, Ally, graduated from high school in 2021 and started college at MSUM. She was a varsity hockey player throughout her career at West. We had a lot of fun traveling and spending time with the other hockey families. This was such a large part of our lives with most nights and weekends being spent at various hockey rinks around Minnesota. We were a great group of families that did our best to encourage our daughters to play a fair and fun game.

MM: Why did you decide to become a Realtor, and how did you manage that career while also attending MSU and being a single mom?

JB: As many others experienced during the pandemic, life threw a curve ball at me and my hospice marketing position was eliminated. In the process of reviewing my strengths and also taking into consideration my experience selling my own homes in the past, I decided to pursue my real estate license. COVID impacted my home life in that my youngest daughter was also at home full time, which created a desire to try to be at home with her to navigate the pandemic together. This was great from my perspective because Ally and I got to spend so much time together, I reminded her every day how lucky she was as a teenager, being (stuck) at home with mom instead of at school with all her friends.

My success in real estate exceeded my expectations, which also created the need to balance my full-time class schedule as I was pursuing my BS degree from MSUM. I will admit, I was crushing some 16-18 hour days trying to be a supportive mom, giving my best to my clients and also trying to succeed in completing my educational goals. I achieved all of these to the best of my ability. I had respectable success in real estate, my daughter and I had plenty of time together, and I graduated on the dean’s list from MSUM with my BS degree in applied leadership this past May.

MM: Is there anything else you wanted to mention but we didn’t ask you about?

JB: I get asked frequently, now that I have graduated from college, what are my future career plans? My initial response is, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. My heartfelt response is, I believe we can only determine so much of our path in life, at some point, life happens and we navigate with those changes. I am blessed to have had success in real estate and appreciate all of my clients who have had faith in me. I will continue to embrace those opportunities. I will continue to do my best in all endeavors that allow me to utilize my talents, education and passions. Compiled by Robb Murray

Living that sober life

Not everyone needs a drink in their hand to have a good time

By Robb Murray

She was about 12 when she took her first drink.

Canadian Windsor. A tough one to throw back for a first-timer, but there she was, 12-year-old Shandy Weimert, in the company of a good friend, the two of them just wanting a taste of what it felt like to be an adult.

And it felt good. Warm, in fact. She remembers the feeling like it was yesterday. She remembers it because, for so many years after, she’d spend too much of her life chasing it, trying to get it back.

That first drink led Weimert down a road darker than you could possibly imagine. Inpatient treatment dark. Suicide attempt dark. Trading sex for drugs dark. Overdosing on meth and Jack Daniels dark. The kind of dark where, even after unveiling all of this, some details are still too shameful to share.

But that was years ago. That was before she figured out happiness isn’t found, as the cliche goes, at the bottom of a whisky bottle or at the end of a line of powdered cocaine.

Today Weimert is healthy, happy and so far away from those dark places that she can talk frankly about most of it. More importantly, she can talk about life after addiction, which isn’t easy in a culture that glorifies alcohol use. Weimert doesn’t advocate for a culture without alcohol, doesn’t shun people who partake. She agrees most can handle alcohol in moderation.

But for her, and many others, the journey became fraught because of her addictions. Moderation wasn’t an option.

In a culture where craft beer consumption and taproom social hours have become seemingly more common than ever, what becomes of those whose drug or alcohol use prohibits them from joining the rest of us? The answers may surprise you.

They’re doing just fine. Shandy Weimert is doing just fine. Justin Fasnacht — a well-known personality in Mankato’s music scene who nearly died from a blood clot a few years ago because of drinking — is healthier than he’s been in years. And Chris Shatek, a former Mankato radio deejay and problem drinker, is sober and helping others do the same.

There is plenty of life after

Rebel

There is nothing strange about a 12-year-old taking a sip of alcohol. It was the years of substance abuse that followed that made Weimert’s journey unusual.

She began with that Windsor, and just sort of kept going. She was raised in a Baptist household and says the strict nature of that upbringing may have set the stage for some rebelliousness. But she stops hard at laying any blame with her parents. If anything, she says, they tried many times to stop her from drinking and doing drugs. Addiction was the bigger problem. The responsibility for that, she says, lies with her.

By age 13, Weimert was in treatment and tried to take her own life.

“I didn’t know where I fit in with life.”

When she was 14, her parents enrolled her in another treatment program.

“I had to throw clothes in a bag as fast as I could because the car was running,” she recalls. “They were not messing around. My mom was worried for my life. My dad was detached from what I had done.”

It went like this for years. She’d get help, then relapse. Her parents would help, friends would help, she’d quit drinking and using drugs for a while only to relapse again and again.

“I can always see a pattern; it’s always about coping,” she says. “It’s like, ‘This hurts, and this will make me feel better.’ And then when you come down from it, it all hurts on top of the new stuff that you’ve added to it for the guilt and shame and all of the remorse. It’s a cycle that never stops.”

The day she hit rock bottom came 13 years ago this month. She’d gotten “wasted” and took her young son, Noah, and drove off in a drunken fury as her family watched. After that, she sought help from a friend from her past, a man named Aric True. True would later take his own life, but before he did that, he helped many people with their addiction struggles.

“He called me when I was at rock bottom and he said, ‘Call me back, you boob! Just call me right now,’” Weimert recalls.

“Aric True was an essential part for getting me back to my first meeting. He helped save my life. He really did. He was so dear to me. He was my life preserver for the first six months. I clung to that dude. He just was so solid. He helped so many people. I miss him all the time.”

Weimert finally got sober. In doing so she discovered there was a lot more to life than being under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

She got into yoga, started traveling and reconnected with her family. She raised a second child who required substantial medical interventions for several years, something she says she could never have done had she been using.

“I try to imagine how I would ever fit in drinking or smoking weed into my life. How would I do it? How would I go swimming with my daughter almost every day? How would I be able to afford kayaks and paddleboards? How would I be able to take awesome mini sample vacations? I do a ton of sample trips. I love them. … I do yoga every single night almost without fail for years. It stills my mind, flows my breathing, settles my heart.”

She also remains strategically social. By avoiding the latter stages of any gathering, she avoids encountering intoxicated people, the kind more likely to cajole an unwilling soul into having “just one.”

“I leave when things are still good. I don’t see the ugly side of the end of the night, the midnight hour when no good comes of it.”

She’s also nearly eliminated her presence on social media. The toxicity of it all bothered her, and the countless posts with people posing at pubs with full glasses of the stuff that ruined her life didn’t help.

Still, if anyone asks about her substance-free life, she remains an open book. She says people sometimes seek her out for advice about quitting a habit that has killed people.

“I talk about where my life is now,” she says. “Everything good in my life is because I’m sober. I would lose every single thing. I almost lost my marriage. I almost lost my home. I almost lost my career.”

Justin Fasnacht quit drinking in 2019 after a health emergency. Today he’s happier and healthier than ever.

Fuzzy Talks

In the summer of 2019, Justin Fasnacht went to the doctor for pain in his knee. He left with a grim diagnosis. He had a blood clot in his leg that, if not treated immediately, could kill him.

The cause? Excessive drinking.

Fasnacht was a regular at downtown pubs and taverns. Wherever there was music playing, Fasnacht was there, usually with a 16-ounce tall boy in his grip. On a normal night, he might finish six of those or more, along with a few whiskey shots.

Fasnacht’s presence at live music events was almost soothing; he was the kind of guy who let you know you were in the right place that night. If Fuzzy was there (as he’s known among friends), you knew you’d picked the right venue.

That was then.

These days, you won’t find Fuzzy at any venues. Because he knows if he drinks anymore, the progress he’s made in reclaiming his health could be lost. Or worse.

In a Free Press Media podcast recorded in September of 2019, he confessed that if he hadn’t changed his ways, he could have drunk himself to death.

“I had to go through six months of being on blood thinners to clear up that blood clot,” he says. “And during that time, I absolutely could not drink because my blood was too thin.”

His doctor told him that, once the blood clot clears up, he could go back to having an occasional beer. But Fuzzy says he knew himself too well to think an “occasional” beer was possible.

“I just turned to her and told her, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’ And she’s like ‘Why not?’ And I said, Well, if I have one, I have to have another one. Then I’ll have to have another one after that, and I won’t stop drinking until 3 in the morning,’” Fuzzy says. “And she just kind of turns to me and says, ‘Well, if you can’t have just one, you probably should stop.’”

So that’s what he did. Fuzzy, a man who’d been drinking upwards 100 ounces of beer nightly quit cold turkey.

“I told myself I should just label myself an alcoholic and not drink anymore. Calling myself an alcoholic would make it easier because then I would have an excuse for myself to quit.”

Around the time he quit, he got some advice from the father of a friend of his who was also struggling with alcoholism and quitting. He’d told Fuzzy to think of drinking in terms of this mantra: One is too many, and 1,000 is never enough. Meaning: One drink is all it takes to start you down the road to addiction.

Fuzzy’s journey hasn’t been easy. One of the things that made him happiest, he says, is socializing with his friends. Not long after he got sober, COVID shut the world down. When it did, his doctor warned him that the virus, because of his condition, could be fatal for him.

This took a solitary existence and turned it into a lonely one. But in a way, it helped.

“COVID was a little bit of a blessing in disguise because it helped me not have to worry about missing things at the bars or missing anything because I couldn’t be out because of COVID.”

But when things started opening up again and the usual suspects were heading back out to live music venues, Fuzzy wasn’t among them. And that was hard for him. Still is, in some ways.

He doesn’t begrudge anyone going out for drinks and a good time. But he misses the people and wishes he still had those connections in his life.

Overall, though, he’s happy with where he is, especially his health.

“I miss everybody and I miss going to shows, but I don’t miss being drunk. I don’t miss the alcohol life,” he says.

“Now when I wake up, I’m just happy. I’m not hungover. I’ll wake up at 7 or 8 just automatically without even putting on an alarm. Before I wouldn’t wake up until like 2 in the afternoon. No matter how early I went to bed or how late I stayed up. I was sleeping my days away.”

Getting sober also brought him closer to his family. He recalls that in his drinking days any gathering with his family would have him counting the minutes until he could head to a bar and start drinking.

Things are different now.

“I am just really thankful to the universe that I’m able to start hanging out with my mom and dad again and be happy and not be crabby all the time,” he says.

“I’ve been three years sober of alcohol. And then I made a pact with myself that I would quit cigarettes a year later. So now I’m two years sober of all nicotine. And then a year after that I decided to get off of Facebook. They provide a bad, anxiety-driven atmosphere for a lot of people. And I don’t want to be part of that.

“And so becoming sober has allowed me to really become more in touch with who I am and what I believe in and knowing that I can stick up for my values and stick up for other people and not have to worry about any backlash.”

He reflects on how lucky he was when his health took a hit.

“Getting the blood clot was absolutely the best thing the universe could provide me at the time,” he says. “It was scary to possibly lose my life or lose my leg. But it absolutely woke me up to the dangers that I was putting myself in.”

A helping hand

“I worked in the radio business for 22 years,” says former Mankato deejay Chris Shatek. “Throughout my radio career I started drinking heavier and heavier, and I actually suffered from alcohol use disorder for the better part of 15 years. I was what you would call a functioning drinker. I don’t really like the term alcoholic. It’s got a very negative sort of connotation that goes with it, but I was a problem drinker. I was drinking way more than I should have been, and it was making me miserable.”

Shatek is 39 now. And he’d be the first to tell you his life now — alcohol free — is better than ever.

In June, Shatek hit the one-year mark for his sobriety. He left the radio business and decided he wanted to make a living helping people get rid of the one thing that kept him from being happy and healthy: drinking.

“I decided to go into the world of helping people become alcohol free. It’s kind of my business now as I help people change their relationship with alcohol and take charge of their life. So that was a little over a year ago that I made that decision having not had a drop of alcohol since June 20 of last year. It’s been the best year of my life. I’ve gotten my business up and running now, and I’m helping other people do the same.”

Looking back on his life, Shatek says it took him years to fully realize the impact alcohol use was having on him.

“It was affecting pretty much every area of my life.”

And once he quit, he noticed positive changes immediately. “When I was drinking on a regular basis, I’d wake up feeling hungover and the mental fog was so bad. I never felt clear headed. And now I feel like my brain is sharper than it has been since high school. It’s firing on all cylinders.”

Eliminating alcohol, Shatek says, allowed him the chance to take charge. When he was drinking daily, he says he felt like life was “happening to” him.

“I make my life happen the way that I want it to. I’m much more present for my daughter and for my wife.”

Shatek says he began to bristle at the thought of how he looks to his young daughter.

“She was getting to the point where she was like, ‘Dad, we’re out of beer. Can we go to the beer store?’” he says. “She was drawing pictures of me sitting on the couch with a drink in my hand. And that stung. I didn’t want my daughter to grow up having her father not be there and be a drinker.”

These days, story time at the Shatek household is different, too. When mom and dad were drinking, they’d rush through stories in order to get their daughter to bed so they could get to the alcohol.

Now, it’s different. Better.

“Now we laugh, we play, we read character voices,” he says. “We really enjoy our time with our daughter rather than just focusing on ‘All right, when can we drink?’ So there’s no doubt about it that it’s made us better parents.”

Shatek calls himself a sober life coach. He offers one-on-one coaching to people like him, functioning drinkers who want to cut back on their consumption or eliminate it altogether. He says he doesn’t work with people who wake up and drink all day long because that’s not the kind of drinker he was.

Instead he works with people whose drinking issues may not necessarily be visible to the outside world, but whose health is not great, whose income takes a hit every night at the pub, or whose relationships are suffering in subtle, or not so subtle, ways.

Sometimes he helps people without even knowing.

“I’ve had many people — old friends or acquaintances, even strangers — message me and say, ‘I’ve been following you for a while and really relate to what you’re saying. You’ve inspired me to cut back or quit drinking.’

“And that’s been the best part of all this. When people say they’re seeing my content on social media and it’s making a difference? That kind of makes it all worthwhile.” MM

Chris Shatek (left) quit drinking about a year ago and today helps people do the same. He’s shown here with is daughter and wife.

By Pat Christman

It won’t be long before area crops will be ready for harvest. There’s a lot of growing to be done before that can happen. Green fields of soybeans and tall, tassled stalks of corn have to produce their bounty. That’s going to take a lot of sun, some rain and a little bit of time. MM