My Experience in Recovery: Happiness is a Choice
Well, it’s been almost two years since I decided I could no longer live my life the way I was as a functioning derelict. If you haven’t read my story you’re more than welcome to read it here as it kind of sets the table for what you’re about to read. There’s a part two that can be found here and that goes into more depth about the final days of my previous life. This is going to be part three of this series and in my opinion, it’s the most important. Recovery is a long and painful road, but the rewards are honestly immeasurable and being able to take back your life is priceless. My goal in writing these three blogs has been to help those who are struggling, let them know that they’re not alone, and to really help you not make the same mistakes that I made along the way. My recovery story is full of mistakes, missteps and resetting expectations and hopefully it will help you in the long run! This is my experience which can and will at times differ vastly from others, but these are the things that I have learned through out my experience with sobriety and recovery.
Relapse: It’s More Probable Than Possible
If you’re deciding to get sober/clean whether its from alcohol, drugs, porn, sex, or even food you’re going to tell yourself “I just need to get this under control, then I’ll be able to do x/y/z again in moderation.” Early in recovery the opportunity to use again is actually a pretty big motivator for a lot of people. If this helps you in your quest then use it, but understand that one of four things is going to happen:
You’re going to relapse and realize that you can’t do the whole moderation thing. For most addicts, there is no moderation it’s all in or all out. We’ve got one speed and that’s 100 mph.
You’ll relapse and never come out of it essentially signing your death certificate right then and there.
You’ll relapse and that relapse will be the catalyst for your continued sobriety.
You’re going to realize that your drug of choice never added any value to your life and your desire to use will slowly but surely go away as if it was never even there, without relapsing.
In my experience, and the people I’ve met within the sober and recovering communities these are the four things that will inevitably happen and there isn’t much deviation from the probabilities. 85% of people in recovery will relapse within the first year of their new found sobriety and thinking that you’ve got it under control before you do will lead you down this road. It’s sad to see people unable or even unwilling to make a permanent change, but the stats show most people who begin their journey in sobriety and into recovery won’t make it out on the backend sober at all. I’m hoping that hearing my story will help at least someone who’s stumbling through their recovery to stay the course and make it out alive at the end of it all.
Deciding to Make a Change
Before embarking on any journey there is almost always a decision to do so. Now sometimes this decision is forced on an individual, and sometimes in a rare moment of clarity and sobriety an individual can make the decision that something needs to change. For me, the decision was kind of two-fold. On one hand, I was miserable and knew I needed to make a change. I had wanted to get sober for what seemed like decades. I can remember sitting in the parking lot of my apartment complex multiple times belligerently drunk listening to music after a night out with some friends or a date, and bawling my eyes out because of how miserable I was. It’s kind of weird to sit back and think about it all now, but I would actively seek out misery when I was drunk a lot of the time. There were certain songs that I would listen to that would almost allow me to feel something in the moment. I used booze for so long trying to run away from having to feel anything, but when I was alone and drunk I would actively seek out things to make me feel something, anything, even if it was misery. When I’d get back after a random weeknight of drinking with my buddies I would sit in the car for a solid 30 minutes when I got home just thinking about how miserable I was. The soundtrack of choice typically involved songs about recovery, drug addiction, losing friends to suicide, etc. All pretty dark things I had dealt with throughout my early and mid 30’s. There was one song in particular that I would throw on by a band called Volumes and the song was called Coming Clean. The song opens up like this:
There’s nothing that I can’t control. I’m living like an animal. Can’t even feel the love no more. And I don’t even think I have a soul. Always feeling like a black hole. Lit one up and then I always end up being afloat. Got me fucked up waking up in Baltimore. Heart and soul swallowed whole, always feeling low.
Am I living a lie, I can’t even trust myself. Look into my eyes, can’t you see that I need help?
The song goes on from there, but this line always got me:
I’ve gotta make up my mind before I lose myself. Inside I’m falling behind, scared to say I need help. Coming clean, I’ve been high for too long. Finally I’ve found the strength to hold on.
I can’t even remember the amount of times I sat in my car listening to these words. The band had a frontman who was a recovering heroine addict and this song was a representation of his transition into “sobriety” and recovery. I put it in quotes because he’s still a raging alcoholic and smokes a ridiculous amount of weed, but he no longer was using heroine. We’ll talk more about this later though as this type of sobriety, in my opinion, doesn’t work for most people anybody. But I would listen to this song, sometimes on repeat 8-10 times, crying because I wanted to be sober and didn’t want to be such a drunk anymore. Nobody likes an emotional drunk, so I typically waited until I was alone before getting all emotional.
I said my getting sober was two-fold earlier, the other part of me getting sober was necessity. Part want, part need and I think it works that way for a lot of people. I had blown through just shy of $10,000 on booze alone between May and August of 2020. My savings was gone, the severance I got from my previous employer was gone, and I blew through every dime I made during the pandemic. I was broke, hadn’t been able to even find a place to open my gym yet, I was unemployed and getting by on odd jobs. I was legit living the life of a homeless addict who just so happened to somehow have a place to sleep every night. Working to make money to literally dump it into booze the second I was done for the day. Hell I’d start drinking at 9am some days. I would schedule clients at 7am so I would have my whole day to drink. And all that finally came to a head when the summer ended and I was seeing all the kids I worked with heading off to other states for their seasons. What the hell was I going to do? I hadn’t really thought about it in my drunken stupor but that time was here, and I had to figure it out and the decision was made to get sober. If you’ve read my other two articles about my sobriety, then you also know that a failed suicide attempt was part of this equation but I’d prefer not to get into all of that again and you can read about it here. Initially my decision was to ease myself into sobriety, but after starting with “I’ll just have 6 tonight, and slowly have less until it’s none” turned into 18 beers the first night, I figured that wasn’t the best route to go down and had to quit cold turkey.
Withdrawals and Early Recovery
Now my story is only going to be dealing with alcohol withdrawals since that’s my personal experience. The timeline of the emotional side effects of early recovery are pretty much universal though whether it’s heroine, alcohol or even sugar (for some people). We’re all chasing those dopamine hits we get from our drug of choice, and we’re all running away from something and when we can no longer cope through using, we all go through the a lot of the same things.
Day 1
Really not that bad as I woke up with alcohol still in my system. Started drinking at about 8pm the night before and had 18 beers so the alcohol wouldn’t be completely through my system until about 2 in the afternoon or so. I thought to myself “damn, maybe I wasn’t that addicted to the booze?” and chalked it up as a win. No real symptoms to speak of other than the anxiety of knowing that I wasn’t going to be drinking that evening, but that night I started feeling a little bit off. I wasn’t able to fall asleep until probably around 4am (first time falling asleep without booze in about 14 years outside of a handful of times), and didn’t stay asleep long as I woke up at about 7am because I had to throw up. This was the beginning of my physical withdrawals.
Day 2
As stated above I had a nice little wake up call around 7am and that nausea lasted pretty much the whole day. Between being hunched over the toilet and sitting on it there was little reprieve from my 15 year tab having to be physically paid. A rough side effect of the nausea was my lack of wanting to eat or drink anything, so dehydration set in about middle of the day. I would randomly throw cramps just reaching for my phone or the TV remote and when I would try to stretch myself out of it the antagonist muscle (the muscle with the opposite action of the cramping muscle) would throw a cramp. Finally managed to hold down some water and drank some electrolytes as well, but when the cramping stopped and I could lay down in peace, I realized that my resting heart rate was in the neighborhood of 155 bpm give or take. And that was me just laying down in bed, not while I was cramping. Had another night of no sleep and crazy emotions before finally being able to fall asleep around 5am again, and woke up to the most anxiety I’ve ever felt, at 6am. I was in a legitimate panic for no reason when I woke up which set the table for the rest of the day.
Day 3
I was finally feeling slightly better physically, although my entire body was sore like I had done a total body lift the day before. Like a first lift back in a long time that I wasn’t ready for kind of lift. This day was the beginning of the emotional/mental effects of the withdrawals for myself. Maybe I was dealing with them the day before as well, but was preoccupied with the physical side of it all. I was somebody who lived with a relatively high level of anxiety pretty regularly already, but this was another level of it. While I was drinking, I could at least calm that anxiety with booze at the end of the day and I was dreading not being able to do that. This was when I started my walks. The first day when I would get anxious or crave a beer I’d put on a podcast or a playlist that I made with my “sober songs” go for a walk. This day I walked almost 20 miles, which probably tells you how anxious I was. I also made it into the gym for an incredibly short time (about 25 minutes), but I made it in. Warmed up, squatted and left. Everything just made me anxious and I couldn’t stay on task for very long so everything I did that day was short lived. I’d start something and shift to starting something else. I went for a few more walks by the end of the day, made dinner and fell asleep again around 4am, and woke up at 7am with crippling anxiety.
Day 4
At this point over the past 3 days I had slept for a grand total of 7 hours. I literally dreaded the night, because I knew I would have to lay there with my thoughts before I fell asleep, if I could even fall asleep. I had run from having to do this for so long, and I couldn’t bear to have to deal with it right now when I felt like my life was in shambles. When it would start to get dark outside, I’d have to fight panic panic attacks knowing that I would eventually have to lay down, without booze and I didn’t know how to do that anymore. I would lay down to sleep with the window open in August because when I would close my blinds I’d freak out for some reason, it was not a great place to be. I felt so closed off from the world that the act of closing the blinds would throw me into panic. So I figured I would completely wear myself out throughout the day so I would be exhausted when I laid down and would be able to fall asleep. I went for a 5 mile walk when I woke up, then ate breakfast and went to the gym for two hours. I hit every movement I could think of, and lots of reps. My workload was probably 100,000 lbs that day. When I got home I immediately went for an hour long walk, came home and got anxious so it was right back outside to go for another walk. I went back outside to walk probably 10 times that day, and every time I got back home I’d feel anxious and go back out for another walk, all of this was in the rain by the way. By the time I was done it had gotten dark outside so I made the executive decision to cook dinner and lay down. Fell asleep promptly at 4am and didn’t wake up at 8am! A small win.
The next week or so
Physical symptoms were completely gone at this point, but I couldn’t shake my anxiety, which was leading to terrible self talk and worst case scenarios in my brain. I told myself I was a failure, my gym would never get off the ground, nobody would want to be with a broke/fat/unemployed strength and conditioning coach who resembled neither strength nor any level of conditioning. In my brain, I had already lost the battle of life. I continued to try to tie up my days with walking, going to the gym, and driving around trying to find a place that I could open up my gym.
A lot of people think the physical withdrawals are the worst part of recovery, they’re absolutely beyond any shadow of a doubt the easiest part. At first, I thought that was the hardest part as well, but it would be another 5 months before I realized how much work I had left to do.
All in all, I made it through the physical worst of it all. I slept a grand total of about 16 hours the first week, lost almost 15 pounds, and walked over 80 miles.
Early Recovery
So now I’m sober. I thought I was supposed to be happy, but I just couldn’t find a way to find any level of happiness throughout the day. I was literally just trying to get through the day, however I could. Whatever I could do to make time pass by faster, I did it. There was no enjoyment, there was no fulfillment. I felt like every single day was a pity party and me telling myself how awful I was and how this was just life now. There was no joy, and the one thing that really brought “joy” to my life, I had just eliminated. I had nothing to look forward to. This wasn’t anything new though, I had been involved in a horrible string of bad self talk all throughout my time drinking as well, honestly for the majority of my life. The only real difference at this point was that I no longer had a coping mechanism to deal with any of it. In getting sober, all I had done was taken away the only coping mechanism that I knew, I just hadn’t realized it yet. And that’s a recipe for disaster.
At this point I should probably mention that a big part of my wanting to get sober was to try to make a relationship work. Right before I got sober, a long term relationship that I was in ended pretty abruptly. It was a really big part of my motivation to get sober initially. I was clinging to anything that felt normal, anything that could help me not feel like such a piece of shit and that relationship was something I felt like I needed to have in my life to do those things. I spent the next month trying to prove my worthiness to this woman by staying sober. Her father had actually passed away from complications associated with alcoholism, so this was something that was important to her. I won’t go into the details of it all, but we were terrible for each other. We brought out the worst in each other in a lot of ways, and throughout my recovery we really grew apart. The majority of our relationship had been spent day drinking on the weekends and I’m not sure that there was a single night during the week that we spent time together where I wasn’t absolutely hammered. She lived about 5 minutes away from me, and on my way to her place I’d grab a road beer. To say that a lot of our relationship was built on drinking would be an understatement. My quitting drinking, while necessary for us to work, was a double edged sword in the sense that we didn’t really have things we did together that didn’t involve alcohol so it was like we were starting from scratch. But like I said, we brought the worst out of each other and we were very much like oil and vinegar. We communicated incredibly poorly and I think it showed in our interactions. But I just couldn’t let the relationship go, even though I think we both knew it was destined to fail long term.
If you spend enough of your time trying to show someone your worth, only to hear you’re not good enough over and over and over again, it’s going to damage you emotionally at least a little bit. Like things that were out of my control (my height for example), how we met (the story wasn’t good enough to tell people and have them be “wowed”), the fact that I was a relatively emotional guy at times, etc. I spent the next 5 months trying to prove my worthiness to this individual, not really working on the things that I needed to in order to truly be happy (to be completely honest I didn’t really know that I needed to work on those things). It wasn’t her fault either, we were both flying completely blind and just trying to make it work. Me trying to make this relationship work was like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. It momentarily stopped the bleeding but it completely stopped me from doing the work necessary to get better. It superficially made me “happy” but it was only covering up the dark hole that I felt like on the inside. At the time, I didn’t understand this and just thought “if I can make this relationship then I’ll finally be happy”. I was constantly looking for some level of outside validation in an effort to be happy, and that’s absolutely not how that works. There’s no thing or person who can make you happy if you’re truly a miserable person inside, but I didn’t understand that at the time. I CRINGE when I hear “happiness is on the inside” or “money can’t buy happiness” but it’s true. While money can make life EASIER, it won’t make you happy if you’re broken on the inside. I think the reason I always cringed when hearing this is because no one really ever explained it in a way I could understand. Hearing “only you can make yourself happy” is such a warped way to say “there’s no outside validation that can create happiness if you’re unhappy with yourself.” But at the end of the day it’s absolutely true, you control your happiness and more importantly (this was a hard lesson to learn) you control the way you respond to situations that are less than ideal. This whole “if they hadn’t done x I wouldn’t have done y” is such a cop out. You control your happiness and you control the way you respond to life when it doesn’t go your way. It would be another 5 months before I realized this. If you take one thing away from this story, please learn to take responsibility for the situations you put yourself in and the way you react to certain things that don’t go your way. You’ll be infinitely happier if you do. You know how easy it is to take your shortcomings and put them on other people? You know how incredibly hard it is to take what’s going wrong in your life and put it on yourself? To look in the mirror and realize that you need to make a change and follow through with it? It’s hard, but it’ll help you grow as a person and be better for the people around you.
*Side note here, if you have friends that validate you at every turn, find new friends. The most important people in my life are the ones who will tell me that I’m being stupid, or doing something wrong. Sure it’s great to be validated when you’re completely wrong about something but it’s not going to help you solve your problems. Do yourself a favor and get yourself a few friends that’ll tell you like it is.
Relapse: All the Cool Kids are Doing it!
This is going to be news to every single person in my life: I relapsed 3 months into my recovery. I’ve never told anyone about this; not my parents, not my closest friends, not the girl I was dating at the time, not even the woman that I’m going to marry hopefully in the near future. I swore up and down that I wouldn’t relapse, I wasn’t going to be a statistic, there was no way it would happen. Not to me. Nope, no sir. The shame of being depressed, and even thinking about drinking again kept me from letting anyone know how I was truly feeling inside. I felt like an absolute failure, all I could think about was getting “better” so that I could drink again. And at the time, I didn’t even know what “better” was. I legitimately told myself all I had to do was get through this season in life and I could drink again, and THEN I would be happy. It’s weird the way your addict brain can work at times.
Now it’s December and I’m in this miserable relationship with someone who legitimately makes me feel worse about myself on a daily basis (some of it her fault, a lot of it my fault), I’m making myself feel useless and like there’s no path to redemption for myself, I still haven’t signed a lease to open my gym or even found a suitable spot yet, I’m just trying to get through the days, there’s no end to all of this in sight. I turned to the one coping mechanism that I knew: booze.
It was December 26th and the girl I was dating at the time was out of town with her family in Colorado for Christmas so I was left to my own devices. The world junior championship was on and I was watching Austria face off against the good guys. I had bought a bottle of Pink Whitney Vodka about a week earlier thinking I would eventually be able to drink again, and I thought I can just have a few and I’ll be ok. Well, that few drinks turned into the entire bottle pretty damn quick. While I enjoyed it in the moment, it scared the shit out of me in the worst possible ways. My anxiety levels increased over night, and it felt like I was back to square one. Over the next month I would drink from time to time to try to get rid of that feeling, alone by myself because I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone. I started checking out, not hanging around friends, making excuses to not see my girlfriend, and avoiding having to see the people I cared about. If I let the girl I was dating know she’d for sure break up with me, and if I told any of my friends I’d feel like a failure or they’d think “yup, that’s the Connor we know” and just go on with their lives. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt alone, like not by yourself alone but ALONE ALONE, and not because of anything anyone around you was doing, but because you were in such a hole that you pushed everyone away from you. It’s not a fun place to be, and it’s not a place I’d ever wish on my worst enemy. But that’s where I was, just living in it. Again. I was even suicidal again, for no real reason outside of thinking that I was a total and utter failure for not even being able to stay sober much less move the needle on my business.
Fast forward to the last week of January and I’m signing a lease to open my gym! I kept telling myself when you sign that lease it’ll be real and you’ll be happy. That was a thing I tended to do a lot of the time. “If only x/y/z would happen then I’d be happy!” But then it would happen, and I wasn’t happy.
“If this relationship would work, THEN I would be happy”
“If I made more money, THEN I would be happy”
“If I could sign that lease, THEN I would be happy”
“If I looked a little bit better, THEN I would be happy”
The truth is, none of that ever made me happy. I would accomplish one thing and feel nothing, then I would convince myself that the next thing would make me happy. And it never did. I signed that lease, and I felt nothing. To be honest it was probably somewhat of a setback at the time, because I realized that it wasn’t something that was going to ease this horrible feeling I walked around with. I went home after signing the lease and cried my eyes out. Was there anything that was going to make me happy? Was I ever not going to feel this way? What was wrong with me? I didn’t feel like there was anything to celebrate, and I couldn’t figure out why I felt that way. I couldn’t even get myself to get the ball rolling on the demo and buildout of this gym that had been the one thing that I thought could make me happy.
When an addict feels hopeless, what does he do? He falls into old habits. I had done NONE of the work I needed to to truly RECOVER yet, so I started drinking a little bit more regularly that week. Well, all of this came to a head after I had helped move my girlfriend at the time into her new house and got into an argument over one of her friends (who had been in her ear about breaking up with me since we started dating, you know the type). The next day she broke up with me via text after two years together, after she had a conversation with said friend. I was legitimately broken. The inconsolable kind of broken. After trying like hell to prove my worthiness it didn’t work out, and in all honesty I probably would have left me too. She didn’t know that I had started drinking a bit again yet, but I’m sure she had her suspicions. It’s got to be hard watching someone you care about be so down ALL THE TIME, never really finding any level of happiness. I’m sure it dragged her down as well. I had no idea what the hell I was going to do, or where to turn. This was the second time in 6 months this particular relationship had ended and I was fairly certain that this was it for us. I was a mess. I went out and bought a bottle of vodka after bringing her things that were at my apartment because I figured what the hell, what’s the point anymore. When I got home, I went for a walk. I was borderline hyperventilating and crying while going on this walk, which again was in the rain just like when I was going through my early recovery. I came back about 10 minutes later and stared at the bottle of vodka for what felt like an hour. I literally walked laps around my kitchen trying to fight off the anxiety I was feeling about the future and to be honest a drink sounded great in the moment. Contemplating what the hell I was going to do, and all I really wanted to do was take a drink but I think I knew if I did, that was probably going to be the end of me.
While I was sitting there I got a text from a friend out of the blue just asking how I was doing. And for the first time I told someone that I wasn’t ok. You know when a relationship ends and it’s not your choice and you don’t want to let anyone know because they’re gonna pick sides and you don’t want that to happen on the off chance everything works out? Well that was always me and I had refused to let anyone in my entire life when things like this happened, but I finally decided to let someone in. Him and I weren’t crazy close at the time, but I think I was just finally to a point where I realize that I truly NEEDED someone to talk to. I guess I had finally learned that pushing everyone away never really worked out in my favor. He told me we were going out to dinner that night and we made plans to meet up around 7. Now I was sitting there staring at this bottle of vodka, fighting like hell in my own brain about drinking it. I was in full self destruct mode, and I easily would have let that defeat me in the moment. Hell most of my life that’s what I did, that was my MO. I was the king of self destruction. But I decided to get up and go for a walk again and while I was on my walk an old episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast was playing with a guy by the name of Chris Bell on as the guest. If you don’t know who Chris Bell is I implore you to go search out his story, it’s pretty incredible. He’s a documentarian who’s responsible for the following movies:
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
Trophy Kids
Prescription Thugs
A Leaf of Faith
He’s a former powerlifter and also a recovering addict who lost his brother to opiate addiction and suicide. I’ve met him in passing a few times and he’s an absolutely wonderful dude who comes from a family much like mine. Super wholesome people. Listening to his story and how he overcame addiction was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. I walked for the entirety of the episode and got home and decided to dump the bottle of vodka. That text from a buddy and that episode of that podcast saved my life. I don’t think I’ve ever told him how important that text was on that day at that exact time, but if you’re reading this thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you Jeff.
A few days later I finally reached out to my parents and talked to them. I went down a rabbit hole of how my life was going to spiral completely out of control and to be honest I don’t think they knew how to handle it but they were there for me. I’d imagine it was like seeing someone who was manic but in reverse, just super negative but rambling on and on. They listened and I even told them I thought it was time for me to go on some kind of medication, because I literally didn’t know what to do anymore and where to even go from there. They let me vent, and when I finished I went home to get some sleep still not really knowing what the hell to do. I can’t imagine watching your kid go through something like this and feeling completely ill-equipped to deal with it, but still putting on a brave face and being in their corner. I’m thankful that I have the support system that I have, I don’t know that I would still be here otherwise. So now, I was going to continue down the path of sobriety, but I was still wandering not really knowing what to do or what path to take. So I just started walking.
Doing the Work
Now I’ve gotten back on track but I’m completely lost. I don’t really know why, but I decided to go to the bookstore by my place and look around. I think maybe I thought I could find something to get into that would take my mind off of everything. Plus I needed a new down regulation routing at the end of the day and thought reading could be a good part of all of that. I ended up going over to the self help section and thought I may be able to find something that could help, because why not? I went to grab a book (for the life of me I cannot remember which one it was) and when I grabbed it another book fell on the floor. That book that fell was called When Panic Attacks. I didn’t really think that anxiety was my biggest problem at the time, to be honest I didn’t even realize that what I was dealing with was anxiety, but I opened it up and looked at the names of the chapters to see if maybe it was a book that could help. The book spoke to me in a way that I wasn’t really prepared for so I decided to bring it home. It was the best $19 I’ve ever spent in my entire life. Reading this book helped me understand that much of my depression was caused by my anxiety. I always thought they were polar opposites but they really feed into each other in a way I didn’t really understand at the time.
This book introduced me to cognitive behavioral therapy and showed me all the ways that I was letting anxiety rule, and ruin, my life. My anxiety was the reason I became so depressed, and I used booze to cope with the feelings of anxiety and depression. Then the booze amplified the anxiety when I wasn’t using until I used again. And we all know alcohol is a depressant, so that all played into the equation as well. It was an incredibly vicious cycle that I couldn’t seem to shake. This book helped give me the tools I needed to start to take a step back and fix what needed fixing so I could truly start to work towards actual, palpable happiness and sobriety that could stick. The best part of this book was the author’s contempt towards medications, which was something that I absolutely did not want to take unless it was completely necessary. In hindsight I’m really glad I never went down the medication route, with all the new information and studies coming out about SSRI’s I’m beyond thankful that I didn’t turn to medication and was able to make the changes to my thought process that would lead to being happy with myself. I don’t look down on anyone who chose medication at all, for some people it’s the right choice but for me it wasn’t. I was done medicating myself whether it was self medication via booze or actual medication prescribed by a doctor.
It was SIX MONTHS of being sober before I realized that the issue wasn’t booze, it was my inability to cope with my crippling anxiety. The booze was more of a symptom than it was the cause. It’s crazy to me to think about, but I somehow got through the early part of my recovery without really understanding what I was doing. I just knew I had to stop drinking, and that was that. It lead me to relapse, and my relapse is what eventually saved my life. I now had ways to work through things and cope. I went to the beach OFTEN (at least 5 times a week first thing in the morning) just to get outside in the sun, I went for walks sometimes three or four times a day, I went to the gym every single day, and I started the carnivore diet to try to at least take control of some part of my life and eliminate the fact that sugar can also play into losing mental clarity. I changed everything about the way I was living life. I learned to work through problems and not jump straight to worst case scenario, and to take a step back and look at the entirety of the situation before losing myself. I read more books about negative self talk and how to change it. I spent time in meditation at least a few times per week to embrace my thoughts instead of running from them. I learned to suffer and to talk myself through and out of said suffering instead of running from it.
It’s really crazy to think about, but being sober was the smallest part of all of this. Don’t get me wrong, it was necessary because it amplified everything that was wrong, but it was only a small fraction of what I needed to do to get to a better place for myself and to be a better friend/partner/family member for those around me. When I first got sober I did all kinds of research into addiction and into sobriety and felt like I was prepared for all of the physical aspects but completely neglected the emotional aspects of it all. But nothing prepared me for the fact that I was completely ill-equipped to be a functioning member of society. Part of me thought that I would be ok to drink again in moderation one day when I first got sober. This was a time when I would have never been ok to pick up a drink again. Oddly enough now that I’ve grown as a person and I could probably have a drink or two if I wanted to, I no longer feel the desire to. It’s funny how those things work.
Every Day is Work, Forever
Now I’m not someone who thinks addiction is some kind of disease, it’s a choice. It’s a choice made under duress but it’s a choice none the less. I get into debates with people all of the time who swear up and down that it’s a disease, but oddly enough the majority of those who are sober/in recovery that I know swear up and down that it’s a choice. We all just finally decided to make the better choice. I know my story probably comes across like I’ve conquered a lot to a degree. I’ve got my own growing business, a gorgeous future wife and a dog on the way, a great family and some of the best friends on the planet but every day is still a challenge. It’s not a challenge not to drink anymore, I’m well beyond that thought process. But it’s a challenge to continue to grow and not fall into old bad habits of negative self talk and worst case scenario thinking. It’s a challenge to try to be the best possible version of myself on a daily basis, and it’s a challenge to work through bad things that happen in life. I don’t have it all figured out by any stretch of the imagination, but I am infinitely better off than I was two years ago.
Too many people are unwilling to do the work associated with achieving real happiness. Relationship not perfect? There’s plenty of fish in the sea. You struggling to cope with being alone? Drink or smoke those feelings away. Job not going the way you want it to? Go ahead and bitch and complain but don’t make any moves to change your situation. Not where you want to be financially? Complain about how the system is rigged against you. We’re so full of excuses today, and we struggle to create the life that we want to because it’s too much work. I don’t know if its social media, or the media in general but we’re all walking around with a victim complex and it’s killing us as a society. It is a literal cancer in today’s culture. The oppression olympics is on, and it’s a race to the bottom.
Happiness takes WORK. It doesn’t just happen, and no kind of outside validation can make you happy. We hop on social media and post the best parts of our lives not realizing that that’s also what everyone is doing, so we envy those around us. When’s the last time you saw someone post a photo of them sitting on the couch eating a $2 frozen pizza watching Office reruns all by themselves 10 beers deep on a Tuesday night? We don’t put that kind of thing out there for the world to see because well, why would we? But we think everyone else’s lives are what they’re portraying on social media, and it’s crippling us. We’re not posting the mundane nonsense in our lives (well I guess some of us do), we post the perfectly edited photo of the only 5 minutes of a 5 day vacation where everything went perfectly. We don’t post ourselves crying after being let go from a position we poured our lives into, but we’ll 100% post the fact that we accepted a new position at a new place later on. We don’t post the break ups (some do, but that’s a different story), but we definitely make the “in a relationship” status’ public for everyone to see. I promise you, not everyone’s lives are perfect all of the time, so stop envying those around you and start working to make the life you dream of a reality.
Happiness takes WORK. I’m typing it again because this is the most important lesson I’ve ever learned, and you need to learn it too! Hopping from relationship to relationship or job to job in an effort to find happiness is an exercise in futility. Don’t get me wrong, some relationships and work environments are toxic and you’re better off leaving them, I’ve lived both of these scenarios. But don’t fool yourself into believing the nonsense we tell ourselves. THERE IS NOT OUTSIDE VALIDATION THAT CAN MAKE YOU HAPPY for more than a few minutes. Sure, we can come up with something pithy to say on social media and garner a bunch of likes and/or follows, but that’s short lived and you’ll continue to chase that feeling, sometimes at all costs. None of that is even real. Hell my last relationship was with someone who lived for social media validation and craved it, so I get it. But it will not, I repeat WILL NOT, make you happy.
I’m “Sober”!
I had a client who was in NA years ago. Something they preach at NA is “your version of sober” which usually means staying away from narcotics, but other things can be fair game in the right setting. Now I will say that someone choosing to use THC to help them sleep is completely different from someone using heroine just to get through the day, BUT if you haven’t done the work that took me 6 months to figure out needed to be done you haven’t solved the underlying problem yet. Had I picked up any mind altering habits when I was first getting sober, I would have NEVER gotten to the bottom of what needed to be done. My experience taught me that it wasn’t the booze that was the issue. It could have been anything from drugs to food to shopping to porn or even sex for me, anything to cover up the gaping hole in my emotions would have done the trick. Whatever was gonna give me the dopamine rush that life just wasn’t giving me would have worked in the moment. Stopping your drug of choice and immediately shifting to something else to help you escape your life isn’t fixing the problem. You quit heroine but picked up a drinking or smoking habit? Congratulations you’ve done nothing to fix the underlying issues. You’re going to continue to stumble through life until you put the work in to fix the problems that you’re trying to escape from.
You remember earlier in this write up when I mentioned the front man of the band Volumes? Yup he quit heroine which is a BIG DEAL. That is absolutely something to be celebrated. It’s not easy to give up something as physically and emotionally addicting as opiates are. BUT, he didn’t even give himself a month before trying to deaden his emotions with other chemicals, mainly alcohol and THC. I saw them in concert and he was bragging about being sober and cheersed the crowd with a Bud Light then took a hit from his joint. He did none of the work associated with changing the underlying problems, and it caused him to relapse again and again, so he was eventually kicked out of the band that he and his brother started. A week after he was kicked out of the band he lost his brother to a fentanyl overdose/possible suicide. He slid off the tracks and the dude’s never been the same. He lacks the coping skills necessary to deal with life when it doesn’t go well, you can probably start the timer on how long he has left before he exits this life and enters the next.
Using other things to escape life is not sobriety. It’s exchanging one escape for another. This was the part of sobriety that jumped up and bit me directly in the ass when I wasn’t paying attention. While step one is getting sober, step two which is often neglected by recovering drug users/alcoholics, is even more important if you want to have long term success. I’ve got friends who, after the pandemic, decided to get sober as well because a lot of us really fell off the rails in 2020, but immediately went out and got their medical cards here in Florida. Congrats I guess? While alcohol, in my opinion, is vastly more dangerous than THC will ever be, it’s still momentarily changing the way your brain operates. Chemically induced happiness will delay your necessity to go out there and create any REAL happiness. You know, the kind that can’t be bought or borrowed with drugs/sex/porn/shopping/etc.
The most important part of deciding to get sober is the decision to CHANGE THE WAY YOU FUNCTION. Escaping your feelings and responsibilities via another chemical still leads to the same end point however delayed it may be. I know I’ve probably typed this 1000 times in this very thread already, but stop looking for outside validation for your happiness because you’ll never ever ever slay that dragon.
Maintaining My Sobriety
I’ve never been one for AA or meetings. I was in and out of AA when I first graduated college in the early 2010’s and honestly with the stories I heard there all it did was make me think that I really didn’t have that big of a problem. Plus, the whole being powerless over alcohol thing just didn’t speak to me in any meaningful way. The meetings are so incredibly sterile, and they just made me feel worse about myself to be honest. I’m a firm believer in community being a HUGE part of someone’s journey in recovery, but working the steps just didn’t really do it for me. Maybe it was because I wasn’t ready to change yet, or maybe the process just wasn’t for me but all I know is that AA wasn’t going to part of my journey into sobriety and recovery. Everyone’s different and AA or NA may be the right choice for you. If you’re making the decision to get sober use EVERYTHING at your disposal. Find out what works and what doesn’t. We’re all different.
As I’m writing this I am 696 days sober. Although I relapsed, as addicts we try to take the wins when and where we can and starting from scratch doesn’t take away the progress made up until that point. Since my relapse ended it’s been 546 days. To say that life has changed since then would be the understatement of the century. I often get asked how I maintain my sobriety and to be honest that part isn’t that big of a challenge. The worst part of being an alcoholic or drug addict is escaping hard things and then waking up to have the same problems the next day when you wake up from your drunken stupor and on top of that, you feel like trash because you’re ate up or hung over. You’re buying happiness at the expense of tomorrow, because no matter how far I ran with the booze I always was brought back to reality when I’d inevitably have to wake up the next day. Sure it was a nice escape, but it was always short lived and I paid for it every single day when I’d be hungover and going through minor withdrawals every single morning. No part of me misses that.
I no longer make decisions based on if I’m going to be able to drink. There were times where I’d not go out to eat somewhere because they didn’t serve my drink of choice (it was always Miller Lite), or I’d not want to go to the beach because the beach was “dry” and I couldn’t drink while I was there. I missed out on SO MUCH that life has to offer because I chose alcohol over experiences. I even didn’t want to go skydiving because I couldn’t do it drunk, something I finally did after I got sober. I can remember not wanting to spend time with family because it was going to cut into my drinking time. I damn near forgot what it was like to be outside on a beautiful day because it was more “fun” to sit there and drink by myself on the couch. This has been so unbelievably freeing not just for me but for the people around me. Sure, I’m not the guy down to go out on a Tuesday night (or honestly even a Friday or Saturday night now) and get hammered, but I’m the guy who shows up where I need to be when I need to be there. I’m no longer absent from the most important people in my life and I get to create memories that are still there the next morning.
I’m no longer wasting my life and I’m no longer half in with anyone or anything. When I was drinking people didn’t get all of me because I was consistently just trying to get through the day until I could drink again. Friends, girlfriends, family, clients, everyone got such a small piece of me because I was so preoccupied with when I was going to get my next “fix”. I do not miss that part of me, and I’m sure the people around me can attest to the person I’ve become and would rather me not slip back into misery. I don’t fly off the handle anymore, I’m not such an angry person looking to blame the world around me. Sobriety gives you so many things, but I think the most important thing it can give anyone is the chance to take responsibility for your life. Both shortcomings and good things, they’re yours to own now.
I’ve taken my health back. I’m no longer a ticking time bomb with the liver of a 100 year old. I no longer have liver pains after a weekend that got out of control. I don’t have to worry if the itching on the right side of my torso is my liver failing anymore. I don’t wake up an anxious mess every single morning. I’m not spending the day nursing a hangover and instead get to tackle the day head on. I don’t have to make apologies for things said or done when I was drunk anymore. I don’t wake up with the anxiety associated with “how much money did I spend last night?” or “what stupid thing did I say/do last night?” I’m not packing on the pounds from booze and the food I would eat when I was drunk anymore so I’m not out of breath from walking up the stairs anymore. Physically, I’m healing.
I’m no longer using relationships to create some level of happiness before getting bored and moving onto the next one to try to fill some void in my life. I’m no longer an asshole. I’m present, and I’m involved.
THAT’s how I maintain my sobriety. That’s all I need. When I think of all the good that has happened in my life over the past two years, thinking of drinking again scares me to death. I’ve even had dreams where I drank and woke up on the verge of tears. If you’ve been in the worst possible places with addiction and made it out on the back end of it all, that’s usually all that you’ll need. In the past two years I’ve been tested in ways I never could imagine, in ways that I’m not super open about even with the people most close to me. But one thing that never even crossed my mind was picking up another drink. I want no part of it all. My desire to be happy outweighs my desire to run. That’s how I maintain my sobriety.
Hopefully This Helps Someone, Anyone
I’m super open about my sobriety, but this is honestly the first time that I’ve been open about my journey through recovery. You can be sober and not recovered, and I was there for a good while when I first stopped drinking. I’m hoping that my failures can be a lesson for anyone going through this and if nothing else maybe be a beacon of hope for someone who’s in the depths of addiction that there is absolutely something on the other side of it all. Something so completely amazing and better.
If you’re someone who loves an addict please understand that they love you too. I’m sure it very rarely feels that way, but they do. They just currently love their drug of choice more because it’s what quiets all the demons. There’s next to nothing that you can do to help them change if they’re not ready to yet. If you’re currently enabling an addict, please stop. I know it’s really hard to tell someone you love no especially when you can see the kind of pain that they’re in, and when you do finally say no they’re going to call you names and try to manipulate you into giving them what they want. They’re going to be hurtful, they’re going to try to make your life harder until you give in but stand firm. Remove yourself from their life if necessary. There’s nothing you can do for an addict in the moment outside of listening and being there for them when they decide to come around or hit rock bottom. Berating them won’t work, punishing them won’t work, but loving them can. And the best way to love an addict is to tell them “no.” When they finally do decide they want to change if you’re going to be around you have to be ALL IN. No bringing up what they used to do to you, how they used to act, etc. Once they’re sober and well into recovery those conversations can and should take place, but not a minute before. Early recovery is triage, there’s one focus and to deviate from that won’t help. Their sobriety is NOT your responsibility but if you decide you’re in it, then you’re in it. They need stability and community more than anything else if they’re going to make it.
If you’re struggling with your recovery or addiction feel free to reach out to me via the contact page on this site. No judgements, just help and an ear to listen. I’ll do anything in my power to help you if you REALLY want to change. Thank you for reading this, this will more than likely be the last blog post about my sobriety and recovery but I truly believe that this is an important topic. Depression, addiction, and anxiety are a plague on our society right now, and the more voices the better!
Some things that I’ve learned along the way
Sobriety =/= Recovery
Happiness is a choice
Happiness is WORK
Running from your problems doesn’t mean they go away
There’s more happiness found in hard work than there ever will be at the bottom of a beer bottle, the end of a needle or the bottom of a prescription drug bottle
WE ALL NEED HELP sometimes
You’re a lot stronger than you think
Get yourself put in your position with your back against the wall at least once in life. You’ll be surprised at the ways you can respond when you absolutely have to
The people who stand in your corner when you’re unwilling/unable to stand for yourself are worth their weight in gold. Hold onto them with all your might
