Serendipity to Sobriety
I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone the story of my last (volitional) drink. It was Monday, April 10th 2023. I doubt I’ll every forget the date, because of the miserable and pitiful behavior of the day prior and the stupid decision I made that morning. As it happened, the day before was Easter. Coming up on one’s last ever drink can, on some occasions, be pretty unremarkable. There’s a lucky subset of people that never really take to it, and one day they have their last drink without thinking about it, or even realizing it will be the last. The habit simply falls away out of disinterest. There are, of course, countless examples of the opposite. Examples of the most tragic means of quitting, where it’s not their last drink by choice, but the last thing they ever do.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel that the days, weeks, months and years that lead up to my last were much much closer to the latter. I’m certainly not proud of the fact that I let it get so far, but I’ve managed to move past the shame. That’s due to the realization that it wasn’t a conscious choice for me to continue to drink and in the end it wasn’t a conscious choice to stop. So you see, to accept that they weren’t my choices in the worst of times, I can’t be proud of my recovery since it wasn’t my choice either, not really.
I rarely saw my dad’s dad, whom we called “Grandpa”, and so had no concept of how much or how little he drank. I was told on many occasions throughout my childhood and really my entire life that he was not only an alcoholic, but a mean and physically abusive husband and father when my dad was growing up. My mom’s dad a.k.a “Grandaddy”, on account of his having come from the South, drank so rarely that I never saw it for myself. That being the example my mother grew up with, coupled with the fact that she had an almost comically low tolerance for alcohol, resulted in her abstaining to the point that the only story I know of her drinking was a single instance after I had grown up and moved out.
Then there was my dad. He drank often, but nearly always in small amounts so far as I knew. He’d have a cola and whiskey in the evening, sometimes two. Being a bit cheeky, he would have my younger brother or me make his drinks for him at times, starting when we were quite young. Around age 8 if I recall correctly. While an abhorrent concept nowadays, for a man born in the 60’s, as a young father in the 80’s, I can see how it would be at least a little funny to see a child not even 10 years old making a cocktail. As far back as I can remember anytime my mom mentioned my dad’s drinking at all, she would add that he was an alcoholic. So you can imagine she didn’t find it amusing in the least. Theirs was not a great relationship and looking back, I figure he kept doing it, in part, to push her buttons. My brother and I were too young to see any fault in it and any young boy wants to impress their father, so we were both happy to do it from time to time.
“Grandpa” always seemed like a big teddy bear to me, but that was only because he had mellowed out so very much by the time I was born. Here then were two alcoholics in my life and neither seemed all that bad from my firsthand experience. Alcoholic is what they called it back then, but the term has fallen out of favor. Like the literal “scape goat” of ancient sacrifices, it seems society hopes to transfer all the shame and stigma to the term itself before making its mention unacceptable. Perhaps in the hope that the judgement will disappear along with the label. These days I hear it referred to as alcohol use disorder, or substance use disorder, to include any other mind altering substance(s) one might use in place of coping with life. Having gone through it myself (we’ll get there) I think even “disorder” is missing the mark. Disorder sounds like exactly that, not ordered. There’s orderly, the straight and narrow, or the way things “should” be and the “dis” does little more than hint that things are off kilter. This, however, is an affliction. It’s something you start by almost accidentally inviting in, and its that initial invite, that time when you still had control but chose to let the poison in that has been the source of so much blame on the one that ends up suffering later on. We do it to ourselves, right? Take a little responsibility. Have a little self control. But no, it’s a benign and comfortable guest at first. One that, only when its too well established in your life, becomes unrelentingly abusive. By that time, however, you have a deep love for your abuser. Sure they hurt you now, but it wasn’t always so and surely you can work to getting back to they way things were, and the only way you can repair the relationship is to be IN the relationship, so of course you must stay. To leave would be to lose a loved one and to admit defeat.
But I digress…
I was a very nerdy kid and was very “by the book”. Not only did I not engage in any under age drinking because it was “against the rules”, but the thought that it killed brain cells made it seem like an unforgivably foolish thing for anyone to do at any point in their lives. My dad even offered a few times on special occasions like new years or graduation, but I stubbornly refused. I would tell him and others that it was never going to happen in my lifetime and I meant it. The trouble was, it built in me an awful and forceful self righteousness. I wasn’t content to simply make my choice not to drink and leave the rest of the world to do as they please. In every social situation I was a part of where drinking was involved, I was seething. I wasn’t making a conscious effort to shame anyone. I wasn’t preaching or telling them how unwise I thought it was in the moment, but they could feel it. I would, without meaning to, stare daggers at people. I would silently rage in the corner, with a look that communicated just how I felt about such “irresponsibility”.
After being permanently uninvited to a few things, as in “Hey, you can come around, but don’t ever bring him again.” I decided to make a concerted effort to relax my position and be more forgiving. I even went so far as to marry a woman that was, in retrospect, an alcoholic herself. I would tell myself that I could adjust to it, that over time it would get easier to accept, but I couldn’t do it. Without firsthand experience, I couldn’t see beyond my armchair expert’s opinion on the subject. I had read and heard all the negative effects of alcohol. I had seen the foolish behavior of those that consumed it. I had all the information I could ever have, short of trying it myself and it wasn’t enough to get me to understand. It was destroying real relationships with real people. The only data left to gather was to finally have a drink myself. So that’s what I decided to do.
It was not an easy decision by any means. From the moment I first entertained the idea until my first beer, it was three weeks of bothering friends and family, asking their opinions on if they thought it was a good idea and myriad questions about what it was like, and what I should expect. Back to that nerdiness, I even prepared a list of math questions to take with me so I could test my ability to think as I had more to drink. So it was time and my wife was over the moon. Finally I would stop shaming her. Finally I could join her for a glass of wine at dinner, or a few drinks on the couch while we watched something in the evening. She worked at a bar then, so the plan was we would go there on one of her nights off and I would have my first drink and my second and a few more. I was 29 at the time, and became the fascination of everyone within earshot. They all thought it was peculiar that I was 29, not religious, and had never had a single drink. They also thought it funny to laugh at me as I described the experience. I remember being endlessly fascinated with the warm numbness of my cheeks, and I kept squishing my face around to test the feeling.
That was it, that got me to do a complete 180 on all my previous judgements. Recently, relative to the time I write this, I was diagnosed with autism and I’m given to understand it often comes with rather black and white thinking. Its been true in so many other areas of my life, that its no surprise it followed here. I woke that morning thinking there was nothing redeemable about drinking, and went to bed thinking there was nothing wrong with it. As is the case with many that start so late, I had no idea how to gauge how much to drink or how quickly and my only goal each time I started was to get drunk. Not tipsy, not just relaxed. I wasn’t drinking for the taste of it. It had an effect to offer and that’s all I was after.
Over the next year my relationship with my wife completely crumbled for reasons that had nothing to do with alcohol, but end it did. After the divorce was final and she had moved on, some time later I did the same. I dated a little bit before meeting my current wife and for years drinking wasn’t a problem. True, I drank to get drunk, but I wasn’t drinking on the daily. It was reserved for weekends and social gatherings, but as is the case with most that drink regularly, the amount and frequency only crept up over time. So it began with Friday work lunches where everybody would get a drink or two at lunch. Then some Friday’s we’d get more than two. Then on some Mondays we’d get some, then Wednesdays, until it bled into nearly every lunch.
Eventually it did become a daily habit, but it never felt like I had a problem because everything else in my life was going great. My wife and I were inseparable and so very in love. I did well at my job, receiving promotions and raises. I took care of all my other responsibilities around the house, paid my taxes, and made it to the gym 5+ times a week. Surely these were not the things a person with a problem got done day in and day out, but somewhere along the way it became Pavlovian. I’d get home from the gym after work and my mind, knowing I had done all I was supposed to do for the day, would almost need a drink. Going to restaurants, I would order the drink of my choice without even considering if I wanted one. My first sign that things were not only bad, but outwardly so was when I went to lunch with my mother and she simply said “I think you’re an alcoholic.” I thought she was overreacting, because again everything else was so great, so that couldn’t be the case. She knew when she said it, as she informed me years later, that she couldn’t do anything to change it or even convince me. She just had to make it known because, in her words I “would either figure it out on my own, or I wouldn’t”. In case I haven’t made it clear, I can be very stubborn. So on and on it went and I would drink at least a little nearly every day and I would handle all the rest of life just fine until… Covid.
Gyms were closed, all my social contact with people at the office was cut off, there was nowhere to go, no one to see, and little else to do, so rather than being one of those shining examples of the pandemic that learned new skills and took up new hobbies, my new wife and I chose Netflix and drinking. Rather I chose it and she, wanting to be with me, joined in. What makes my downslide so much worse is the fact that my wife never would have gotten as bad as she did, were it not for my never ending need for another. Addicts are well aware that they’re far more likely to make an addict of their loved one, than the love one is in getting them sober. On so many nights she would have preferred to abstain, but if I was already having a few, she’d eventually crack, go grab her wine, settle in and join me. I could see it stripping her of who she was and taking hold of her. The most painful memory was a night when she was coming down the stairs with probably her third glass of wine for the evening when she slipped and landed flatly on her butt, wine all over the wall, and down her shirt. She immediately burst into tears and yelled out “I’m not proud of myself!” I could tell she wasn’t talking about what had just happened. She meant her entire self. She was no longer proud of who she was. It broke my heart and I knew it was largely my fault. I could see that if I could stop, she would too, but I didn’t. I didn’t even want to. It was terrible. I was terrible.
Fast forward to 2022 and my wife and I had had many discussions about our drinking, about how we wanted to cut back and made concerted efforts time and again, only to fall back into the pattern. She was better about it, calling for breaks more often and doing better at the aged old bargain of “How about we only drink on the weekend?” I would agree, lying to her face. My work remained entirely remote, but after some time she was asked to go into the office twice a week. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to drink in the evening when she was around I would rush to the liquor store first thing on those mornings, buy the same two bottles of high point beer, rush home and pound them as quickly as I could. My intent was to get my buzz and metabolize it all as early as possible so there would be no hint of it on my breath or in my mannerisms hours later when she returned home. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes she knew as she would call me out point blank. “Did you drink today?” On the more regrettable days, and there were many, I would flatly and falsely tell her “No.” I just couldn’t take that look in her eyes when I would admit to it and she would always follow up with “Why didn’t you tell me?” Of course I didn’t tell her. If there was any chance I could get away with it, then I could have my drinks and not suffer her disappointment. This went on for far too long and each time I would drive to the liquor store I would be telling myself, literally mumbling out loud, to not do this, to turn around and go home, but I’d always end up in the parking lot completely resigned to my fate, walk in, make the purchase, down the beers and live in fear that this would be another day I was caught. Why didn’t my wife simply ask everyday you wonder? I think she wanted to avoid her disappointment as much as I did.
As the days of repeated failure piled up I began thinking seriously that I should empty my bank and retirement accounts, give all the money to my wife, tell her to go and find a better life and drink myself to death. I honestly couldn’t see anyway out. I thought I had only two choices. One, give it up completely and be tortured by the want of it for the rest of my days, or “enjoy” it for the rest of my life, but make that life as short as possible to bring it all to a close. It never, ever, ever occurred to me that I might be able to stop by simply not wanting to anymore. How could I NOT want a drink, it governed most of my thoughts. If I wasn’t actively engaged in it, I was thinking about the shame of the last time while mentally planning the next.
Now there are far too many embarrassing incidents to recount them all, like the time I got drunk before anybody even arrived at a New Year’s party my wife and I were hosting, only to end up crying and passing out in front of everyone. So we fast forward again, this time to January of 2023, where out to dinner with a group of friends conversation turned to vacations and warmer weather and the group ended up planning a trip to Mexico. We live in Utah at a pretty high elevation and this group of friends had taken another trip to Hawaii a few years prior. The effect of coming down to sea level rendered me unable to get drunk the entire trip and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Thankfully I had enough sense not to push it too hard, and simply accepted it. This had me worried for Mexico, so I mentioned it off handedly to my mom a couple months later as I discussed plans for the trip. I told her I wanted to stop drinking from now until we left to reset my tolerance so I could “really enjoy myself”. Its absurd to think about now, that my idea of making the trip worthwhile was risking the inability to remember half of it, and to make a fool of myself in another country. Here was the moment of serendipity. Here is the moment that saved my marriage, my career, my health and ultimately my life.
My mom told me then that she had been listening to old episodes of the Podcast, Armchair Expert and on one episode they mentioned a book about helping to cut back on drinking. She remembered the title was something like Naked Mind and that’s all. She had no idea what it contained, or if it was any good. She had just heard it was about drinking, remembered a portion of the name and later ended up sending me a link to the book after looking it up. I was up to try anything and had a few Audible credits to spare, so I picked up a copy and started listening. Mind you at this point it had such a hold on me that if someone had had some magic ability to get me to quit forever, right then and there I would have refused. Despite all the shame, misery and ruin it was bringing to my life, I was so under its influence that I didn’t honestly want to stop drinking, I just wanted it to go back to the way it was at the beginning. All I wanted in the end was to have my fun in small, appropriate doses at appropriate times. All I wanted right then was to abstain for four months and get hammered for a week in a tropical location with my friends.
The book began by describing shamefully drunken nights from the author’s own life that very closely mirrored the events, thoughts and feelings of my own. I listened intently and after a few chapters I implored my wife to get a copy and start listening with me. She later told me she didn’t want to because she didn’t think she had a problem and that it was only me that needed it, but agreed to as an act of solidarity. There was also a little fear that maybe thinking she didn’t have a problem was a sign she actually did. As the chapters went on I started to get really scared. I could sense that as much as it kept mentioning that it was not recommending to completely quit drinking, it was well on its way to that very conclusion. I almost stopped before getting through it the first time for fear of hearing what I knew was true, but wasn’t ready to accept. Thankfully I did not stop. After listening to it the first time I had a eerie sense that I could actually do this. It was in that first time through that I had that last (volitional) drink, and yes, we’ll get to that. The sense was something of a hunch or gut feeling that it might be possible. Certain points leaped out at me and held my attention as the author/narrator carried on. I would ruminate on different sections each time, knowing that as my thoughts remained on one paragraph, I wasn’t getting 100% out of what came after. So as soon as the book ended I immediately went back to the very beginning and started listening again. Each time through I had time to process the most salient points from the last, and had the bandwidth to latch on to new ones. I cannot over stress how helpful it was that my wife had taken my advice and was doing the same thing, listening on repeat, because it became all we talked about for weeks. Any other person would be justified in getting tired of hearing someone drone on about all these “revelations”, hashing and rehashing points, but not us. We spent hours comparing insights, reliving past faults and expressing our hopes that it was almost over. I listened to This Naked Mind five times in total. I listened to nothing else in that time, no songs, no YouTube or Netflix, no Spotify, just the book. I needed it to sink into my subconscious and reprogram my thinking the way alcohol and alcohol culture had conditioned me to think it fun and virtuous.
It had an instantaneous quality in that when the lessons of the book finally sunk in, I stopped drinking entirely. No last hurrah, no weaning myself of bit by bit, just a sudden lack of desire to ever touch the stuff again. Still fearful of the idea that I might never drink again we come finally to my last (volitional) drink. I have to specify volitional because 10 days later I ordered a tonic water at dinner with friends. They brought me a gin and tonic which I sent back after tasting it. I was pretty annoyed, but I still have to count it. Anyway, on Easter Sunday my wife had plans to hang out with her niece and sister. She would be gone for hours and I was still at the point that I was hiding how much I was drinking. We had plans to have Easter dinner with my mom and her partner that evening and I had struck a deal with my mom that I wouldn’t drink around her, so like the days that my wife would go into the office, I left as soon as she headed out for the day. Liquor stores are closed on Sundays in Utah, so my only option to get something I could drink at home was a local brewery. I drove there listening to the book, still on my first time through, and got a four pack of 16oz beers that were 10%. I listened to the book the whole way home and when I got there I downed two, feeling ashamed, sitting in my living room still listening to the book. It was beyond embarrassing to be getting secretly drunk while listening to a book about giving up drinking, but that’s where I was. That evening I was feeling sick and still a little tipsy as we headed to dinner. I have no idea if it showed, but I always imagined everybody knew and saw right through me. I suspected that I never fooled anyone and it was just too uncomfortable for anyone to say anything, so nobody every spoke up. I stuck to the deal with my mother and didn’t drink at dinner, but when I got home I secretly drank a third beer from the four pack while my wife and I watched some streaming something. I went upstairs, cracked the third and would sneak up periodically to chug a bit before coming back down. It was too much for the day with how little I had eaten and rather than a pleasant buzz I just felt tired and nauseated. I had intended to sneak both of the remaining two, but didn’t have it in me.
Now it takes an alcoholic brain to even consider this next situation a problem to be dealt with. The “problem” was that now I had one beer left and work in the morning. I laid in bed and considered my “options.” It sounds ridiculous to say that I had to consider it at all. I should have just been able to go to sleep, get up in the morning, go to work and think of any other facet of my life, but no. As with most of my thoughts, I had to plan my next drink. I had to think about the fact that if I had it in the fridge when I got home, I would certainly drink it and if I had that one I would return to the liquor store to buy more. At this time I was working in an office again, going into work three days a week, so I had to come up with a plan and to my addict mind my options were.
1. Dump it down the drain. Oh what I would have given to have that ability.
2. Go to the liquor store on the way home and grab some more. That way I’d have “enough” for the evening.
3. Try to only have the one. After all it was 10%. I’d get a good buzz, but I doubted my ability to stop. See option 2.
4. The insane choice to pound it right before going to work. I’d get a quick buzz that would wear off before any liquor stores or serving establishments opened, robbing me of my choice to have another, and with the buzz for the day achieved, I could always abstain for the rest of the day. The office was only about 10 minutes away, so I wouldn’t be driving drunk, as it wouldn’t hit me until I was already seated at my desk.
I’m sure you’ve guessed it. I chose option 4, and I listened to the book the entire way into the office, hating what I had just done at 7:00 in the morning, the sun not yet up. I was awash with shame, but I was still listening and still trying and that was it. That was my last volitional drink. I kept listening to the book in the evening when I drove home and for the rest of the night and more and more the lessons sunk into my subconscious. Through the repetition I learned that yes, I had made each terrible decision, but I hadn’t done so consciously. I came to realize that my brain, my subconscious, had already settled on the choice without involving my conscious mind, and wasn’t about to be deterred. From that point on I was just carrying it out time and again. My conscious mind only got involved when I began to put it into action and that’s the tragic part of the experience. I, and most people, know that what they’re doing is wrong. They see it, they hate it, but they/we don’t realize a definitive, stubborn choice was already made, and now we get to watch it with horror, having all the wits of our higher reasoning and moral judgement brought on board only after its too late. Rather than continue that cycle, I had to get my subconscious to make the decision not to drink and take it out of my hands just as effectively as the decision to drink had been. I’m happy to say that it worked and I never chose to drink again. Thankfully, I haven’t had even an inkling to drink again. It’s the same for my wife. Both of us are amazed that we ever found it appealing and can’t put ourselves back in that mental space. The desire to drink is a foreign concept to us both now. It only crosses our minds to consider our gratitude for that book and our new lives. My father is in his 60’s now and very proud that I beat the family curse and quit drinking. It was something he, his father and my brother never did. I, of course, told him about the book. I recommended he do as we did and listen incessantly until it becomes ingrained in him, but he did not. He listened through once, likely with less than 100% of his attention, and came back to me with critiques over certain points. It was likely his subconscious fighting the message. I hope he’ll revisit it someday.
The serendipity of the chain of events leading to my sobriety truly blows my mind. The Podcast my mother was listening to was from 2019, about four years before she mentioned it. Several months after we stopped drinking I decided to find that episode and listen to it myself. Its one with Pete Holmes, who is the one that mentions it briefly in a telling a story to Dax. It might not have stood out well enough for my mother to catch it were it not for the fact that later in the episode Pete took the time to go back to it, mention the title again and briefly describe how it gets its point across by not condemning the alcoholic to always be an alcoholic and call them powerless, but to consistently and repeatedly point out just how brainwashed we are about the joys of drinking and if you really look at it you can undo that brainwashing, with… more brainwashing. If I’m going to be susceptible to such influences, I’m glad this influence exists for my benefit. So I’ll end with some gratitude and words to those that are still living with this disease. I am so very grateful for Armchair Expert and grateful to Pete Holmes for pressing to mention the book again. I’m grateful to my mother for randomly listening to that episode years later to bring it to my attention, and to Anne Grace for writing the book and to Alan Carr for his book that heavily inspired and informed Anne’s. I’m most grateful for my wife that loved me at my worst and put in the effort to climb out of the hole that I dug wide enough and deep enough for us both to fall in. To those that understand all too well the pains and shame that I’ve described here, you know what I recommend you do. Remember that you’re not weak willed, its the strength of your will that is getting you to act against every ounce of your better judgement. Rather than fight that will, change its mind and it’ll lead you to much better outcomes. I truly believed that there were only two options. Quit and be miserable in wanting, or dive in and drink myself to death. I hope now you can at least consider this new way out and if you have anyone in your life that can go through it with you so you have the support and conversations to cement these ways of thinking, I highly suggest you get a little book club going and I wish you success and lasting peace of mind.