By the time that I was 14, I was REALLY getting curious about alcohol.

Instagram: @josh_quits_2023

Sober Date: 02/12/24 from Alcohol

I grew up in small town Wisconsin.  It was the 1980’s.  My parents were hippies who had left the big city to enjoy a more laid-back lifestyle out in the countryside around the time that I was five years old.   I learned later that my father also needed to get away from the progression of hippie culture changing to drug culture, and some bad influences in his life.  I always thought that I was raised in the most wholesome of ways.  Sure, there were 5 taverns on Main Street of our village, but there were also 5 churches that balanced the scale.  “We work hard, and we play hard!”   That was the motto.

I was raised the right way.  It was just a normal life.  There was never any abuse or violence in our household.  No divorce.   I was taught to tell the truth.  To be virtuous.  I got good grades.  I was outgoing and enjoyed participating in many extra-curricular activities.  My parents drank most every day, but so did everybody else I grew up around.  

Our family gatherings were always one BIG party.  By the time I was 8 or 9, I would gladly volunteer to go get Uncle Dave another beer so I could take a little sip of foam on my return trip.  “Thanks buddy, here’s a nickel!”   I remember one party where I got so drunk off of “the foam”  that I lost all of my tip money and was disappointed for days.  

Maybe it was growing up in a small conservative town with liberal parents, but I was always a bit of a rebel.  Whether it was listening to unsavory rap music like N.W.A., or playing Dungeons and Dragons (which was seen as satanic to some members of our community), it seemed that me and my group of friends were always looking for ways to stand out and fit in at the same time.  I guess that’s a lot of kids.  

By the time that I was 14, I was REALLY getting curious about alcohol.  Books about Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and Jim Morrison of The Doors that described elaborate tales about the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle were portals into a lifestyle that I fantasized about every day.  And if every adult that I knew was drinking, there must be something to this!  Some of the older kids were already finding ways to get beer and cigarettes and before I knew it, so was I.  This started my 30-plus year relationship with alcohol.  What I never, ever would have guessed was how it was going to end.  

By the time I got to college, I was ready to party hearty.  “If you’re not wasted, the day is!” That was my motto.  And that continued to be my motto for many years.  This is also when a series of events directly related to my frequent heavy drinking should have been a wake-up call to me.  Throughout my twenties I was arrested for 2 DWI’s and I got busted for possession of pot.  I got fired from my good stocking job at the grocery store for showing up drunk and late one too many Saturday mornings.  School work started mattering less and less to me until I eventually quit college and moved to Chicago to play music.  Looking back at this move, it was probably just an excuse to continue partying instead of becoming a responsible adult with a job.  This experiment in the big city lasted for a year.  

I moved back to my hometown with my tail between my legs.  I actually WAS a pretty good musician, but I got chewed up and spit out.  I often wonder how different things might have been if I cared more about playing music than how fucked up I was going to get every night.  By now I had quit school, failed at my dream of being a musician, and moved back to my hometown.  So, what next?  

My father was a bricklayer and had started his own company when I was younger, so why not get that business going again and dive into the world of construction?!  Being young, single, and having nothing to lose, this was THE LIFE!  We could make our own hours, set our own wage, and start building the American dream!  

At this point my father was also a heavy drinker.  Probably heavier than me.  So, when your masonry company is owned by two problem drinkers that enable each other, there is ALWAYS an excuse to quit working early and head to the tavern.  And then there were the rain days.  We could hop in the truck and drive around on the backroads drinking beer ALL DAY - and mom would never know – at least that’s what we told ourselves.  By the end of my time as a bricklayer, we would shut the job down if there was even a CHANCE of rain!  Little by little our drinking chipped away at our early successes, our business acumen drowning in booze, and I started calling my father an “entre-manure.”  So, after 5 years of working construction, I left.  I was financially broke, emotionally broke, drinking more beer than ever, and now had a seriously strained relationship with my father.

I was at a dead end.  30 years old and no career, no family, no house, and very little self-esteem.  My American dream had turned into a nightmare.  So, when people get desperate, they do desperate things.  I still had a few connections at the university where I had previously attended, so after putting my ego aside (as one does when they are desperate), I practically begged to be let back into college so I could complete my BS in Geology.  And thank THE UNIVERSE I was accepted.  I had to separate myself from my father, who was my best friend and drinking buddy.   Although he meant well and always wanted the best for me, I think alcohol got in the way.  In his mind, as long as we could hang out and get fucked up every day, and I had a roof over my head, what else did I need?  What I really needed was my own path and personal identity.

Going back to college as a non-traditional student was a real eye-opening experience.  I could now see how overwhelming the pressure of school and the partying lifestyle can be as a 19 year old.  I saw these “kids” waiting until the last minute to complete projects.  I saw people skipping and failing classes.  I saw myself in a lot of these students.  I knew I couldn’t fuck it up this time, and I thrived!  Even though I was still drinking beer every day, I was also exercising daily and finishing my homework before I drank.  

I graduated with a BS in Geology after 2 more years of schooling but was having a really hard time finding a job in the area of Wisconsin that I lived, so I put my resume on a national job search database.  A couple days later I was offered an interview for a really good job in Virginia.  I had recently broken up with my girlfriend, I wanted to further my independence from my father as well as the omnipresent drinking culture that I grew up in and still lived, and I was sick of the long, cold winters.  So what the hell!  I needed a change.  I moved to Virginia without knowing anybody or anything about the area.

For the first time in my life I was making a decent living, I enjoyed my new surroundings, and in short order met a woman that I loved.  It didn’t take long before we were married and bought a house in the suburbs.  My wife liked to drink every day like I did, so bonus! I had a drinking buddy too!!

Here’s the sneaky thing about alcohol.  Even though I had been drinking alcohol nearly every day for 15 years at this point, I didn’t have the slightest idea that I had a drinking problem. Did I even have a drinking problem?   Sure, I would drink too much at times and would get a bad hangover or the occasional blackout, but who didn’t?  Of course, there would be the occasional fight or argument with my family or my wife, but who didn’t have these?   I wasn’t any different than anybody else I knew.  I didn’t know any non-drinkers - those people were LAME.  

15 years ago my alcohol usage had gotten to the point where I was drinking 12-16 beers every night just to get a good buzz, but I was now well into my 30's, my metabolism was slowing, and I started gaining weight. The last thing I wanted was to be "chubby". I knew that drinking whiskey or vodka every night would wreck me, and I was at the point in my career where I was actually making enough money where I could afford to buy mid-grade wine like a 3 L bottle of Woodbridge merlot. Also, around that time my wife and I bought our first house, and I started to really enjoy gardening and cooking nice dinners. I was becoming a serious "foodie", so drinking wine seemed to go hand in hand with that lifestyle. It seemed so elegant and sophisticated to get a bottle of chardonnay to have with fish, or a nice bottle of red once in a while with a steak. I was hooked on wine. Eventually this led to buying 3-4 Redvolution Bota Boxes a week so I didn't have to stop at the store EVERY night to buy a couple bottles of wine. I would also switch up what grocery store I would stop at too because the cashiers would get to know me, and I felt embarrassed for stopping in so often for my fix.   

By 2016 I was pretty overweight, still a pack-a-day smoker, and drinking 2 bottles of wine every night. Something had to give!  I struggled, but managed to quit smoking, started running, and for the first time began examining my relationship with alcohol. I got the 30-Day Sobriety Solution book (written by the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy) and cut back on drinking for a while.   It seemed that when I DID drink however, I would be drinking more – to make up for not smoking cigarettes.  

In 2019 we decided to make a huge change and left the suburbs for an old rundown farm on 30 acres out in the country. The excitement and overwhelm of this huge lifestyle change supercharged my drinking. I figured that I was working so hard building fences and planting trees that I deserved to drink as much as I wanted at the end of the day, and quickly turned into a blackout wine drinker every night.  But wait, there’s more!  I also started a weekend habit of passing out on the couch around 8 pm, so I could wake up at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and start in again.  There was a certain mysterious peace to sitting in the dark with my glass of wine and listening to Coast to Coast AM until sunrise.  How did my drinking get THIS bad so quickly?!

I started getting this tightness in my chest and racing heart many mornings after I was really "hitting it hard." Some mornings I thought I was having a heart attack. I even went to the ER one Saturday morning, but after 8 embarrassing hours and several thousand dollars later the ER doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with me.  He thought it was digestion related, but I know for a fact that it was alcohol related because when I stopped drinking for a few days this feeling would go away.  I read some research into how heavy alcohol use affects the heart muscle and circulatory system and I will be looking forward to hearing more news about this topic. Another troubling feeling that I would get after a few nights of hard drinking would be a sore lower back.  I have never read anything online about how that sore back feeling is related to drinking either, but I JUST KNOW that it was related.  Finally, I started having prostate issues in early 2023.  A very sharp pain like daggers would start emulating from my abdomen.  Since I quit drinking, I have not had any of these prostate issues pop back up.  I am bringing up these alcohol-related physical abnormalities in case the reader is having similar issues but is afraid to tell anybody about them. None of these 3 issues can be correlated to heavy alcohol use from medical doctors or most Google searches that I could find.

It was after having to visit urgent care for my prostate pain that I hit MY rock bottom.  Black out drinking every night was becoming the norm, which caused me great embarrassment and discomfort. I felt like a fool continually hearing my wife telling me what I said and did the night before.  And all of these health issues were catching up to me in a major way.  Enough was enough!

I had been dabbling in recovery podcasts and social media, so when I decided that I was going to quit drinking, I bought the book This Naked Mind and started watching and following the accompanying online content.  I don’t know if it is because of my background in science, but This Naked Mind really showed me the path to start living an alcohol-free life.  The way I am wired, I didn’t think checking myself into rehab, or AA was going to work for me, so I started the recovery path on my own.  I immersed myself with recovery material, bought more books, started posting and reading material on Instagram, and journaling.  And although I went through 2023 having stayed alcohol-free around 65% of the time, stringing together a few days or weeks, I would find myself dipping back into that glass of wine.  I have heard the average problem drinker tries quitting 7 times before finally sustaining alcohol abstinence, but I must’ve hit 14 times just in that year.  

Something was missing in my recovery.  I couldn’t do this by myself.  And although my wife had reluctantly quit drinking with me a few times, she was still drinking on many nights.  Aside from some very nice people on Instagram that were rooting for me, I didn’t have any outside support.  I felt defeated and spent the holidays dumping as much wine down my gullet as I could physically handle.

But I knew that I couldn’t give up.  If I didn’t quit drinking, I was going to die.  

I kept seeing these words “support” and “community” in the recovery lingo, and I had seen people on Instagram offering their services to be a sober coach for those who might need some of this support.  Although the coaching service was going to set me back financially, I was at the end of my rope and decided to try it.  So, on February 12, 2024, the day after the Super Bowl, I quit drinking again and began attending my coaching sessions.  Supplemental to the coaching, this service also hosts weekly Zoom meetings for a community of people in recovery.  I quickly learned that this was a safe space for me to be vulnerable about my addiction issues.  Where I could talk about my struggles without judgement.  This seemed to be my missing puzzle piece.

Although this is the most difficult single thing that I have ever done in my life, and I am not even close to being out of the woods, I can proudly say that as of today I have been alcohol-free for 114 days.  I am learning that the act of quitting drinking alcohol is only the tip of the iceberg in my recovery journey.  The phrase “doing the work” is often batted around in the recovery communities, but I’ve learned that this “work” is vital.  I am learning to create a new life for myself that doesn’t include alcohol.  New habits and routines.  Rewiring the neural pathways in my brain.  Not lying to myself again and again about quitting.  Learning that living alcohol free is not only tolerable but can be really fun!  Having much better relationships with my loved ones - especially my wife.  Having more energy.  My memory and conversational skills are noticeably improving.  Being able to remember the end of music concerts and sports events.  This list goes on and on.  

If a 51-year-old guy that drank every day for over 30 years can quit drinking, I truly believe that anybody can.  But it has to start with your desire to quit being stronger than your tolerance to keep living in the grips of alcohol addiction.  I’m rooting for you.