Redemption is never realized in single breath or a single action, it is a process of self-correction, self-doubt, brutal realizations and sometimes regression, too. However, it does begin with a decision; one that is consistently pointed towards fixing something that you have broken. Sometimes though, you find yourself wondering if you are still the same person who began the journey and the only thing that has really changed is your age and the number of years that have gone by.
Author’s Note: Given the amount of time which has gone by and considering how impaired I was during the era in which I’m about to describe, it is highly likely there will be some logical inconsistencies and situations misremembered. I am drawing from memory to the best of my ability, trying to paint the most accurate picture possible. I have made many attempts to tell my story, but I have not told it in full. I wanted to share my history of addiction in its entirety. I plan to drop this as a longform, ongoing series.
The Aftermath
In the months following the events of my blog “Swallowing Spirits & Spitting Out Demons”, I suffered from a depression and a downward spiral. I could not adequately pick myself up from the humiliating incident of getting piss drunk and insulting my mother, which had a domino effect of personal consequences associated with it. I was twenty-one years old and I was living with my parents at the time. I don’t remember much else other than being so embarrassed that I could not bring myself to tell my counselor Gary anything about it. Though, I imagine my parents may have filled in the gaps for me during a few private one-on-one sessions. Retrospectively from this point forward and for the months that followed, my alcoholism seemed to progress as I would start purchasing various types of liquor including scotch, beer, wine, whiskey and Bacardi.
I’d make bizarre concoctions like orange juice, soda, vegetable juice and energy drinks mixed with Vodka and Heineken and call it “Death Beer”. I’d drink to the point of feeling tipsy but due to having acid reflux, I could not stomach the odd combination of drinks and would vomit, only to repeat the process over again so that I could try to stay drunk. I would sneak bottles of spirits to the downstairs bar area in my parent’s basement, hiding them in cabinets to avoid any accusations of “having a problem” or God forbid being called an “Alcoholic”. I was never confronted about my routine as I’m sure they already knew. Although they’ve always been direct with me and never brought it up, so perhaps not. I never thought of myself as even being capable of having an issue with alcohol. In my mind, that was impossible and even if I did have “a problem”, what motivation was there to solve it? My bedroom was down in the basement, so I always had a bottle or a flask by my side. The basement matched how I felt inside; cold, quiet, empty but also cluttered with demons that I could not run away from.
My image of self was poor, all I saw was an ugly face staring back at me in the mirror, which hung from the door to the furnace room down in the basement. I kept dreaming of better days but there were none that I could see, present or future. I thought that I was hiding from my parents but I realize now I was only hiding from myself and the person that I was slowly becoming. The version of me whom I did not want to see materialize, yet still managing to become more real by the day. I was a fat, dirty, old slob of a young man with poor hygiene. I never took showers, brushed my teeth or kept up on any of my basic hygiene. My alcohol intake worsened this combined with the fact that I smoked a significant number of cigarettes each day. At least two packs. I thought this was what manhood was supposed to be. What it was supposed to look like. Something inside of me felt odd about that idea and nearly challenged it, but never enough to cause serious introspection and reassess my priorities in life. I imagined that I was like my grandfather and took a sort of morbid pride in that. As my depression worsened, I began to justify drinks at local bars after work to avoid arousing suspicion back home.
It soon became standard practice for me to hit the bar at BJ’s (a favorite restaurant of mine) after work to dull the pain of what I had lost, hoping that I might drown my sorrows and shame. Maybe quietly cry to myself as I listened to my favorite music on my ipod, not wanting the servers to notice the tears. I realize now how much of a predisposition I had towards alcoholism and more broadly addiction to substances. On the same week as my twenty-first birthday, I recall showing up to massage therapy school classes I was taking at the time, after I had been drinking earlier in the day. This resulted in my father taking me in to apologize directly to the instructor after I told him this, which bought much embarrassment and shame. I felt like a little child, being grabbed by the hand and jerked to the principle’s office in middle school! Looking back, that should’ve been the first warning sign that I had a problem, but the ignorance of youth and desire for intoxication overrode my better judgment.
At some point in January of 2015, I decided to drop the massage therapy classes. I did not have the willpower to follow anything through or the desire to put forth any kind of effort towards becoming something. Nor did I particularly like school or learning. I did everything half-assed and spent no time studying or learning about the fundamentals of the human body so that I could pass tests or quizzes. I wanted the participation trophy of being able to say that I was going places and finally doing something with my life, without accomplishing anything or taking the necessary steps to finish anything that I started. In otherwords, I wanted the outward appearance of having a bright future rather than putting in the work to actually make school a worthwhile endeavor, which might ensure said future.
Fortunately, I had the good sense to drop out of the class rather than to continue dragging this egotistical fantasy on, wasting more of my parent’s resources just to maintain a false image of progress. Though, it was done more out of embarrassment and laziness than sound judgment. With nothing else really going for me but work at the Marriott, I would spend my time either driving around town aimlessly after I finished putting in my hours or just spend more time drinking. Soon I was driving around town just to find something interesting to see or do, wasting boatloads of gasoline just cruising around and exploring. At my parent’s expense of course.
In the following month through a chance encounter with a mutual childhood friend, I was introduced to dope, which set off a whole new pattern of behavior and marked a significant pivotal point for me in my journey. Now I was no longer just drinking, but was experimenting with substances with varying degrees of legality. Quietly sneaking bottles of spirits into my parent’s basement turned into hiding drug paraphernalia in DVD and Blu-Ray boxes, in my shoes, underneath my bed and sometimes underneath the basement staircase. I would become deeply paranoid about hiding and protecting my new habit; preventing it from discovery, so I conspired to find as many different hiding places as I could that would be least likely to get searched. However, I could not settle on any place, as I suspected that no matter the lengths that I might go to coverup my using, it would inevitably be found out. I often went to work each morning, wondering if today would be the day when I would get caught and confronted about my new habit.
To escalate the risk and illustrate my carelessness further, I had a younger brother who was seven years younger than me that lived in the same house. He was a minor at the time, around fourteen and so hiding syringes and substances in the home also put him at risk. Further elevating the severity of the circumstances and raising the stakes even higher. At this time it no longer seemed to matter to me if I had “a purpose” or “a future”, I was having such a good time partying and chemically altering my mood and mind that I couldn’t imagine living in any other way. I didn’t care who I put at risk, what I put into my body or how I survived, as long as I could keep going without getting caught by my parents or the authorities.
I would find myself in cheap hotel rooms with shady people I didn’t know well, I collaborated with new friends, acquaintances and strangers alike to orchestrate transactions that would allow us to continue indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle for the hours ahead. Sometimes long stretches of time went by where we were waiting in Walmart parking lots for a connect to show up with the drugs. Ethical and legal boundaries were often crossed to fund the habit, as we would get our hands dirty on a daily basis, just to feel alive again. Becoming a nuisance and a drain to our families who were either still hoping we would change or were already sick of us taking advantage of them and were ready to be free of us, entirely. Barely holding onto us by a thread or in some cases, not at all.
Just as many circumstances in life do, this period of my journey would eventually come to a brief end in the form of an ultimatum from my parents. The nights of sneaking out of the house to go meet with friends, the drugs in the house and in my car, all of it would come to light. Not in some dramatic, over-the-top, cinematic fashion, but on a single day when I was confronted and told that I had one of two choices; either go to rehab and seek help for my problem or be locked out of the house and face homeless. It turns out they had known for awhile what I was up to and had been trying to figure out what to do about it. Feeling cornered and not seeing many alternatives, I agreed to go to rehab in Orange County, California. I wasn’t stupid, I knew I wouldn’t survive “out in the wild” with those criminal junkies who lied to, betrayed and even stole from each other.
