well into my 13th year

On September 16th I celebrated my 12th sobriety birthday. Yes, it’s true. I’ve been sober for 4383, well now it’s 4387 days, but who’s counting. I know some of you can’t believe it, but they have all been consecutive. It’s a freaking miracle! There’s a long standing joke when you complete a year of sobriety that the very next day people start saying that you are well into your next year. Very dad jokey, but I’ll take it. In any cast this time of year I get a little weird and reflective on the twists and turns of life. The ups and downs of where my life was and was going, and to now the present of where I am.

“I look back and reflect as a reminder of what life was like. I share my story so that it may help others and give hope. I need to point out that even as far as I have come, I still have so far to go.”

I was talking with a friend recently about my alcoholism, and his, and although we were different in how we got to the program there is one fact that holds true- we both had hit bottom and needed to stop living the way were. I won’t mention anyone else’s name in regards to sobriety, ever, unless they tell me it’s OK to do so. The reason I mentioned the above is because addiction and alcoholism take on so many different forms. Some of us get up and go to work everyday and make it through and then party hard as hell every night and twice as hard on days off. While others wake up and crack a bottle just to stop the jitters or to be able to feel “normal” enough to get out of bed. I was the former. I should also mention that I was mostly a beer drinker and I really enjoyed smoking the pot.

I never had a problem with drinking and drugs… until I did. Wait. What? I’m sure some of you read that and thought “What the fuck does that even mean?” Well, like a lot of things the alcoholism( I’m gong to use this term from here on out to make it easier so not to differentiate between weed and booze) creeps up on you. At least, that’s how it was for me. I wasn’t an alcoholic the very first time I took a drink or a bong rip. Perhaps, I was though. Maybe I had alcoholic behaviors long before I ever knew it. I liked the feeling produced by booze and other substances(mostly weed, but I dabbled with acid and shrooms too, but nothing beyond that). I enjoyed changing how I felt and I liked feeling good. To get back to the statement at the top of the paragraph, the effects that my alcoholism were taking me down slowly, quietly and subtly. Like a thief in the night that came back over and over again, but only taking little things so you don’t notice until everything is almost completely gone. Hence, you don’t realize you have a problem until you do. Until it’s almost too late. In many cases, for some, it is too late.

I didn’t realize I needed help or that I was an alcoholic until one little moment. We call it having a moment of clarity. It never dawned on me that living at my parents house at 33 years old(my mom and stepdad were both double digit years of sobriety) was a problem. There were many other signs that may have indicated that I was circling the drain as my mom liked to say. But, alas, I was the last to know. Unless you count my friends. I called a few of my closest friends to let them know I was getting sober and they were like “we never knew you had a problem.” I was good at hiding. Hiding in plain sight. This isn’t something unique to alcoholics or me for that matter. It’s just how I was. The last night I drank was just like that. I was on the end of a multi-day fiesta for a friends wedding and decided it was a good idea to drive from San Diego to Long Beach at the end of the night. I had a friend ask what i was doing as I was heading to the car and I let them know that I was heading home. They told me I was wasted and in no way should I make the 100 mile journey, but I’d swear to you I felt as normal as I feel right at this very moment. At the end of my drinking I couldn’t get drunk. I should probably clarify. I WAS completely wasted, but I couldn’t achieve the desired effect no matter how much I drank or smoked. Regardless, I listened to my friend…briefly. I went along with the rest of the crowd and hung on the sidelines long enough for people to not notice me. Let me state that when I say people, I mean some of them were really good friends and some were acquaintances. Then I slinked out of the crowd to my car(when I say my car I actually mean the car that I was driving which belonged to my sober parents) and made the drive anyway. It took me about an hour that night and I probably would have made it faster had I not had a moment where I scraped up against the center divider and slowed down to 85 MPH. WTF? Seriously, the fact that I didn’t die that night still blows my mind. Especially, when I examined the vehicle the next day and found that all five spokes of the drivers side front rim were cracked. That morning when I came to I had the shakes for the first time ever. I thought I just needed to eat and smoke a bunch of weed. Yep, that was my solution. Smoke some weed and figure out how I was going to explain, errr lie, my way out of this one. That was September 14th, 2007 and I didn’t drink that day, but I did self medicate. The next day, September 15th, was the last day I’d smoke the pot and the first time I admitted that I had a problem and the day of my first meeting… I’ve been sober since that day, but it was pointed out to me that my actual sobriety date would be one day later because that was the first day I had nothing.

I look back and reflect as a reminder of what life was like. I share my story so that it may help others and give hope. I need to point out that even as far as I have come, I still have so far to go. My character defects haven’t gone away and from time to time I struggle with keeping them at bay. I haven’t worked my program perfectly, except for not taking a drink or a drug one day at a time.