3/27/24: Ten years, 24 hours at a time
March 27, 2014 resembled many days before it. It resembled many days after it, too, except for one thing:
It was the last day I drank.
I'd like to tell you that decision was a careful one, but I'd be lying. It was a snap decision. I was miserable, fighting with my former partner, unhappy with the way my life was going, and I figured, why not? So I stopped drinking.
Here's the thing: don't do that.
I don't mean "stop drinking". By all means, if drinking alcohol (or using any other controlled substance, for that matter!) causes you problems, then you should definitely stop.
What I mean is, you should not do what I did, which was make a snap decision to stop doing A Thing™ (in my case, drinking), and then think that doing That Thing™ will solve the underlying problems that led you to doing That Thing™. (emphasis really added because I don't want anyone to misunderstand what I am saying here).
Not drinking anymore was a thing that I had to do, if my life was going to change for the better, but it was not a magical solution.
Here is my story.
Ten years ago, my life was a mess. Partly, that's because I'm human and humans are inherently messy creatures. But it was also messy because I kept fucking around, and then finding out, and alcohol (and other substances) were a key part of that.
Now, let's be clear: I say "other substances", but while I certainly experimented with other things, my drug of choice was good ol' alcohol. Pot didn't do a whole lot for me, other than make me sort of hungry (but not really), and extremely sleepy; as a child of the '80s, I was never particularly interested in cocaine, and the few times I tried it, it made me into the worst caricature of an asshole bro.
But alcohol? Hell, yes. Specifically: beer.
I was never much into hard liquor. Not to say I didn't enjoy it; I liked bourbons and whisk(e)ys just fine, and I definitely liked rum. But growing up in Ohio, beer was simply accessible in ways that other liquor was not. So: beer, it was.
I don't remember the first time I tasted beer. I do know that the grownups in my life gave me little sips here and there, but nothing aside from that. Drinking wasn't stigmatized in my family. My dad didn't drink, courtesy of his background as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and my mom rarely did. Neither made a thing of being teetotal.
I do, however, remember the first time I drank.
I was a junior in high school, making my first visits to colleges. I was in Wooster, up north in Ohio, and the student hosting me took me to a party. The details aren't important; the feeling is. I was an awkward, introverted kid, trying desperately to fit in somewhere. I was too smart, too nerdy to be a "popular" kid; I wasn't nerdy enough about the "right" things to be a "nerd" or "dork". I played sports, but not particularly well, and I lived too far away, in a ramshackle house on a lonely farm, to make any real friends.
My first beer was a Pabst Blue Ribbon, drafted into a red Solo cup from a keg. I liked the taste; but I loved the way it made me feel: warm, confident, suffused with a golden certainty that everyone around me was my friend, and every step I took was certain, and everything I'd do was golden.
I drank on other college trips: to Tulane, and Holy Cross, Kenyon and Cincinnati, and places in between. Never at home, obviously. My family was skilled at hiding things, and lying to ourselves and each other, and changing our masks as the occasion demanded.
It was at Ohio University that drinking went from being problematic to being a problem. The "joke" I ruefully tell people about my first college experience is that when I went to college, I majored in getting drunk and getting high. Which, to be clear, is accurate enough.
The reality, though, is that I was profoundly lonesome, and desperately chasing love and acceptance. Drinking made that easier, if only fleetingly, and so: I drank. In Athens, Ohio, that was spectacularly easy to do. Back then, Ohio University had a reputation as a top-tier "party" school, and it lived up to it.
At first, I drank on weekends, and really only at parties. But soon, that became every weekend, and by the beginning of spring quarter my freshman year, the "weekends" bled into Thursdays and Fridays.
My sophomore year was even worse: I drank every day, and by the time school let out in June of 1997, I was drinking starting at breakfast. There's a reason I call Budweiser a "breakfast" beer; it's because I used to have cereal, and chase it down with a Bud.
I'd also flunked out of college.
Technically, I was on probation, but who was I kidding? I was in no shape to go to school. I was "working" as a bouncer at one of the bars on Court Street (though I think Nick, the owner, was just taking pity on me, and kept me employed to keep an eye on me), and I spent most days and nights there. I'd had to vacate my dorm room for the summer. I somehow cadged a key to a vacant rental unit, and I squatted there most of the summer.
At some point at the beginning of August, Nick called my mom. I recall that I'd dyed my long-ish, even then thinning hair a clownish shade of red. I was barely getting by; Nick had seen enough. My mom came, bundled me into her car, and took me back to the farm.
That wasn't "rock-bottom", though. That point wouldn't come for another 15 months or so, after I'd tried to kill myself, and had to be revived by my ninth-grade English teacher, who was a volunteer paramedic in the town I grew up. After returning from the hospital, my mom essentially kicked me out by demanding I join the military.
She was done, even if I wasn't.
The thing about the Army is that it's the easiest job you'll ever have.
You get told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. You get told where to go, when to go, and how to go there. You get told what to wear, when to wear it, and how to wear it. You even get told what not to do, when not to do it, and how to not do it.
For someone like me, with no discernible life skills, the Army was a godsend. For the life of me, I could never figure out the guys who would get popped on Article 15s (non-judicial punishment for minor infractions). The Army was so easy, even if the things we were trained to do weren't.
The Army was also where I figured out how to drink problematically, and not have it be a problem.
Basic training, followed by Advanced Individual Training (AIT) basically dried me out. I was assigned to Fort Sill, located in Lawton, Oklahoma. Have you ever been there?
There's not a whole lot. Basically, just the fort, and a town that utterly depends on it. As a boot camp recruit, I didn't have much time or freedom at all. But I did pick up a certain sense of discipline; combined with a certain native stubbornness, it proved enough to keep me out of trouble.
My first couple of years in the Army, I was too busy and terrified to do much partying. It wasn't until I landed in Korea, in 2002, that I figured out what exactly I could get away with. I figured out that I could drink massive amounts on the weekends-if not every weekend, then certainly a fair few-and that I could still perform well as a soldier, if not spectacularly.
My roommate Chad (yes, seriously!) was training for Special Forces Assessment, and while I idly thought about joining him, in reality I didn't have that kind of single-minded commitment. But I was happy enough to train with him, and Chad was happy enough to drink with me, and together we spent an excellent year in Korea, though I don't remember much of it. By the time I returned to Colorado, I was in the best shape of my life, and had become a championship functional alcoholic.
I wasn't in Colorado very long at all; we left for Iraq within the month, 21 years ago.
I spent a year there. Somehow, I didn't drink. There were some opportunities, here and there, but I was never in a position to take advantage of them, and besides, we weren't supposed to.
We got on the plane back to Fort Carson, Colorado in March 2004, twenty years ago last week. I was one of the last batch of soldiers from my brigade to leave; I remember listening to "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac as the plane ascended deep into the Kuwaiti night sky.
When we landed, there was no one there to greet me. Friends, family, children were there, but no one I loved or knew. I grabbed my bags, and went to my barracks room. I had no civilian clothes, so I headed to the post exchange, bought some, showered, and changed.
Along with the clothes, I bought some beer: Coors, this being Colorado. I drank it, all twelve cans, serving as apostles of deliverance from solitude and grief.
I left my barracks; stood under the Colorado sky, gazing upwards drunkenly, wondering why I lived when others didn't.
We were free on a 96 hour pass, and I'm certain I spent a solid majority of those hours drinking, or wondering where and what I could drink. The 96 hours having passed, I was thrown back into my military routine.
At times, I would talk with the woman who'd briefly become my wife. I'd met A online, and then we'd started writing, and talking, and visiting each other. I'd gone to Korea, but we'd stayed in touch, and then I went off to war.
We'd gotten caught up in the romance of the moment, since I am a born romantic. At some point, we began talking seriously about moving in together, should I survive the war. I did; she was off finishing school in the East when I returned. She graduated, and returned to Colorado Springs.
Now what?
We got married. I kept drinking. We were singularly unsuited to be with each other. We fought constantly; married life was not what she had imagined it to be, and neither of us were the people we'd imagined the other to be.
This wasn't our fault. I'd come back from a stupid war that we shouldn't have fought to begin with, I was recovering from wounds physical, spiritual, and mental, and I was clearly struggling with all that. I was not remotely ready to be the kind of supportive partner that someone like A needed, and to my discredit, I wasn't interested in trying to be.
I wasn't interested in re-enlisting, because I didn't want to go back to war; so my old unit sent me to a glorified make-work unit, attached to Fort Carson's administrative unit, and I spent the remainder of my Army time feeling sorry for myself.
And drinking. Eventually, A had enough; she packed her bags and left me to my devices, but not before writing me a letter that essentially said I needed help.
In between all that, I landed in politics. As with so many things, I was lucky in my timing and in the people I met. I landed a volunteer role with John Kerry's campaign, met some other folks that way, and by the time I left the Army in February 2006, I was certain I wanted to work in politics. But where?
First: Connecticut. I packed everything I owned into my car, and made my way east. I worked for Ned Lamont's fledgling Senate campaign; we won that primary, if not the general, and I made some friends along the way.
I kept drinking.
Then: back to Colorado, where I landed a job as a staffer on a Congressional campaign. It was there that my drinking got me in trouble. One night, after having a few beers, I wrote a sharp online post accusing my candidate's opponent of being an establishment creature, in contrast to the outsider spirit represented by my guy. Nothing much should have come of it, except for that Colorado's leading political writer splashed what I wrote across the front page of the Denver Post, above the fold.
I stepped down; I kept drinking. Never to any particular excess, but always chasing that elusive sense of belonging that was always just out of reach. One campaign ended; another began, but alcohol was my constant. I left Colorado to go back to school at Ohio University, and then left it, still short of my degree, because I ran out of GI Bill money, but with a job offer at a public relations firm in hand. Throughout it all, I drank.
I spent a year in DC, and got into my first serious relationship since my broken marriage. She and I were happy, but I don't know how much of that was due to my drinking, and how easy it made me feel.
But that ease was illusory; we decided to move in together towards the end of that year, and so I left DC to head to New York City. New York City is such an easy place to be lonesome in, and it was easy for me to sink into that. It didn't help that I lost my job, and had to scramble for another. I landed one, thanks to her, and then landed another, only to crash out of it thanks to my hard-headedness.
That stubbornness also meant that she and I fought, sporadically and then constantly. And it's here that we pick up the beginning of the story I began.
I stopped drinking, just like that, ten years ago today.
But it didn't solve the problems that led me to begin drinking years before that March day. Oh, no, not even close. Because even though I was self-aware enough to know that my drinking was a problem that caused other problems, and therefore something that I needed to stop doing, I wasn't self-aware or honest enough with myself to admit why I was drinking in the first place. I've only gotten there in the last few years, because I underwent therapy, and confronted a lot of the underlying factors that led me to drinking and other addictive behavior in the first place. I am fortunate to be loved and cared for by friends who stuck with me through thin and thick, because they loved the best version of me, even though too often the say the worst version of me.
When I started writing this, I said not to do what I did: stop drinking "cold turkey". There's at least a couple of reasons why:
for one, you may have a chemical dependence on alcohol. If that's the case, you could become seriously sick if you suddenly stop drinking.
for another, it's really important to explore why it is that you're drinking.
This is where rehab programs come in. If drinking (or other substance abuse) is a problem, I strongly recommend checking reputable ones out, because they will help you along both axes of the problem.
What I did in skipping past all that wasn't smart at all. I basically had to do a lot of that work in an unstructured basis, and that caused me a lot of problems downstream from that. I'm in a much better place,
I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting a few weeks after I stopped drinking. I got my 24 hour token there. I carry it around in my wallet, because the only way you get to a point in time like 10 years of sobriety is one hour at a time, one day at a time.
I miss drinking. I miss how it made me feel. I suffer from paralyzing social anxiety; it's hard for me to read social cues, and I am hyper-vigilant in ways that probably scan as very neurodivergent. I suffer from chronic depression; much less so now than, say, six or seven years ago, but it lurks there, and I am watchful of it. Drinking helped, if only because it served to make me feel at ease.
I do not miss whom I used to be. The token reads: to thine own self be true. And at the end of the day, I'd rather be that, than not, one day at a time. Today, it's been ten years. Tomorrow, it will be ten years, and one day. And so it goes.