The Answer Is Not at the Bottom of Your Next Drink

Drinking alcohol started early for me.

I don’t remember the exact time that I was introduced to alcohol.

What I do remember was how it made me feel.

It made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside, in the mind and body.

Alcohol was an escape that helped me squish some of the lonely feelings that I had.

I grew up a single child in a household that had my single dad working long hours at his job.

He was the type of person who rarely complained about what the company asked of him.

Come in early, stay late, night shift, swing shift, you name it, and the company had him doing that.

It led to a lot of alone time for me.

As a kid, I didn’t understand the stuff that I was feeling.

I was alone and lonely for most of the time.

I was, also, very shy.

Alcohol was the wonder that helped me feel better about myself and had the added benefit that I didn’t feel weird talking to other people.

This was a monumental thing for me at the time.

Do you mean to tell me I can drink, feel better, and be more socially active?

Heck yes!

Let’s do this as much as I can.

So it started to be a weekend staple.

End of the week, find out where the people were going to be drinking and go there.

If that didn’t happen, I would attempt to get other people interested in finding a place.

Alcohol showed me so much of the world that I didn’t know about.

Girls, parties, being around people who were doing the same things that I was.

Drinking became my favorite hobby.

I drank, so I hung around with other people who drank.

We reinforced each other in our drinking ways.

We didn’t have to do anything as long as there was alcohol involved.

I can remember, clearly, we would go out fishing.

It wasn’t fishing, though; it was drinking with fishing poles.

Drinking became my identity.

I could party hard and most people knew it.

I was only seeing and looking for what I thought were the positives.

The negatives weren’t important to me.

And that’s where it took a turn.

I was never worried about what my alcohol usage would do to the surrounding people in my life.

I didn’t care, and it showed.

When it was bad, I would get drunk, and the anger would come out.

I would lash out at people around me, even the people I cared about.

If people said something, then it was a problem for them, not for me.

I was lucky enough to be involved in enough sports activities; it kept the drinking down.

Not so much when I finished high school.

Being lost and not knowing what to do next, I had a bright idea.

That bright idea was that the military would be a great thing for me.

That thinking was so wrong.

If I thought I drank a lot before, the military poured napalm on that fire.

I’m surrounded by 18-24 year old young men who have time and money on their hands.

Drinking is a part of the culture and a recipe for disaster.

If you didn’t drink, you weren’t a real part of the military.

It helped to turn young kids into alcohol zombies.

We would have an event called All American Week, where we celebrated the history of our division.

What it involved was a lot of drinking.

Drink after work, to celebrate our history.

Go to the bar to celebrate our history.

Close the bar to celebrate our history.

By that time it’s 3:00 in the morning and we have to be up at 5:00.

I don’t know if you have ever had to run 5 miles, hungover, tired, with 20 other people who are feeling the exact same as you.

I will tell you this.

It’s horrible.

The smell, alone, would have most people gag.

And, yet, we thought it was normal.

Drink all night?

Sure, as long as we had enough alcohol.

Bored?

Drink.

Happy?

Drink.

Sad?

You guessed it, drink.

The military has many people trying to find themselves, and most found alcohol.

I got out of the military and I was happy to be done with the BS that surrounded almost every aspect.

So getting out was the eventual tapering off of my drinking, right?

Wrong.

The sneaky thing about any addiction is that you make up all kinds of reasons to do that activity.

Alcohol has the curious effect of amplifying any underlying issues that people have.

I got out and that sense of belonging, being a part of something bigger, and the camaraderie that was developed, was gone.

I was lonely and left adrift to my own thinking.

With an alcohol problem already established, this made it worse.

I would drink when I was alone to entertain myself.

Then I would get mad that I was alone and drink.

This went on for a significant period while I sorted out my next move.

I took various jobs and adventures on, and alcohol was present for all of them.

I ended up getting a job in project management for a large transmission line company.

I could put effort into work and do something bigger than myself.

I was looking for something I could latch onto and, secretly, something that I could pour myself into instead of using alcohol as a crutch for my crappy behavior.

If there has been a common theme throughout this adventure, it’s been what I thought was me turning the corner ended up being something that I came to dread.

You see, transmission line work has the mentality that alcohol is a necessity to deal with the stress and pressure that is involved in enormous projects.

It didn’t help matters that the people that I was closest with, my fellow managers, had alcohol problems themselves.

Picture this: a nice house with nice things that were shared by 3 people who drank.

A lot.

We had a fridge in the garage that was filled with beer.

We bought a 6’ tall air tank so that we could run our pneumatic can crusher.

Yes, you read that right.

We had so many cans we went through we had to squish them so they took up less room.

I could crush 12 cans in 10 seconds.

The reason that I know this is that it was a drunken experiment that was performed repeatedly to see if the time could be improved.

Drop a can, push the button, squish the can, and ready the next one.

Repeat.

Each one of us would feed into the drinking of others.

Get off work?

Drink.

Complain about the day?

Drink.

Finish the workweek?

Drink big.

Finish most of a bottle of Crown Royal Black on a Friday after work?

Yep.

And, yet somehow, I still hadn’t seen that this was a bad thing.

How is that possible?

Being divorced from reality.

The stress, pressure, and drinking ate up the 2 other managers before me.

I ended up getting transferred to another project and then getting transferred back to the same project after some time.

In my time away, upper management provided no meaningful direction after 100% of the project management team left.

I walked into a shitshow with no idea of how bad it was.

My solution?

Attempt to get some kind of order and, you guessed it, drink.

I was staying at a hotel that had a bar in it and somehow didn’t think that was a bad idea.

I got so burned out after a period of time that I went to the bar, sat down, and got blackout drunk.

I didn’t show up the next day.

Or the day after or the day after that.

No call, no message, nothing.

I simply didn’t go again.

I was so run down it took me 6 months to feel somewhat normal again.

My drinking slowed way down during that time, it didn’t end completely though.

It was my familiar comfort.

My body is what started my process of ending my punishing drinking habits.

It simply didn’t want to work with me anymore on recovering from the previous night (thankfully, it was minimized enough to be mostly weekends) activities.

I would feel like crap for 2 days after and it would ruin the entire weekend.

I am happy to say that I no longer drink like I used to.

A handful of times of year is about all I want to be a part of now.

It only took me 25 years to figure that out.

One of the things that helped me turn the corner was my discovery of cannabis.

Cannabis helped me understand myself better and gave me a tool to help with my thoughts and my alcohol problem.

Cannabis has helped me slow down my thinking so that I can interpret what my brain is trying to tell me in a more meaningful way.

Is cannabis the answer for everyone?

The simple answer to this is no.

Can it help people like me?

It surely and clearly has.

What’s the point of writing all this?

A cautionary tale, I suppose.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of us the whole time and we still can’t see it.

Drinking was filling a hole that I didn’t know was there.

It allowed me to do things I didn’t feel comfortable with before.

Alcohol turned a shy kid into someone who could have conversations about the world with people and not feel awkward about it.

It helped me to feel incredibly lonely as well.

Stuck in my head and wondering about all the what-ifs and the perceived injustices of the world.

One thing that I can say for certain, alcohol is not the answer.

99% of the questions that you could think of, alcohol is not the answer.

If you or a loved one has a problem with alcohol, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

SAMHSA Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and NIH National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism are 2 places that can help you if you don’t know where to turn.

If you’re struggling and want help, reach out to the people around you that you can trust and start your path to creating a better life for yourself.

I was able to see the error of my ways and create the steps necessary to get out of that fog.

All people are different and there is no one size fits all approach to recovery.

What worked for me may not work for others and that’s okay.

If you have tried before and that one thing didn’t work, great!

You have now eliminated 1 thing that you know doesn’t work, so you don’t have to spend time on that anymore.

On to the next one… and if that one doesn’t work… on to the next one… and if that one doesn’t work… on to the next one…

You’re stronger and more resilient than you know.

It only takes one small step to begin.