Five Years Sober: The Long Road Back to Myself

For most of my adult life, I had a complicated relationship with alcohol and drugs. Very rarely did anything good happen when I drank, but it took me a long time to recognize just how much control those substances had over my life, my personality, and my relationships with other people.

I started drinking when I was about sixteen. Like a lot of teenagers, it began with something that seemed harmless at the time. My friends and I would hang out in the woods and drink beers we somehow managed to get our hands on. I generally kept it pretty low key and I knew my limits. Back then I was more afraid of getting caught than I was of the effect alcohol had on me. But for a shy kid, it did something powerful. It lowered my inhibitions. Suddenly I felt more comfortable around people. I felt like I could be funny, outgoing, maybe even liked. At the time it felt like a gift.

A couple years later, things changed. Drinking stopped being occasional and started becoming regular. I had older friends who would buy liquor for us and we would sit in basements drinking with one goal in mind: get drunk. Looking back, I was dumb and reckless and I didn't understand the path I was putting myself on. That was the point where alcohol started becoming something I relied on. It wasn't just social anymore. It was an escape.

My life felt messy and chaotic in ways I didn't fully understand yet. I carried anxiety that I didn't know how to deal with. When I drank, all of that went quiet. And when I drank, people seemed to like me more. In hindsight, the truth is that I was acting like a fool and people were laughing at the spectacle, but at the time it felt like acceptance. For a kid who didn't feel like he belonged anywhere else, that attention meant everything.

When I went to college, it got worse. I was drinking constantly. It became a crutch that followed me everywhere. I started making terrible decisions. Passing out became normal. I surrounded myself with people who enabled the lifestyle because we were all doing the same thing. I stopped caring about anything that mattered. Alcohol was my escape from reality and eventually even that escape stopped being enough.

That was when I started experimenting with other substances. I began smoking weed when I was nineteen and it quickly replaced drinking as my main way of forgetting about my problems. In my mind it felt different. Alcohol had already started taking a toll on my body. I had gained weight, my motivation was gone, and the active version of myself had disappeared. Getting high became my new hobby.

Soon after that came acid. Then mushrooms. Eventually MDMA. I was chasing anything that would make me feel different from the way I felt when I was sober. Reality was a place I hated being in, and dissociating was the only place I felt calm.

When I turned twenty one, I started to see what this was doing to me. Something in me knew I had to change direction or my life was going to go nowhere. I moved in with my girlfriend at the time, which pulled me away from the environment I had been living in, and for the first time in a long while things started to stabilize. I finished college. I got married. I started working a steady job. It felt like life was finally coming together the way it was supposed to.

I still drank, but it was different from before. I was more selective about it and it didn't feel like it had the same grip on me. I convinced myself that maybe I had beaten those demons that had been chasing me for so many years.

For a while, it seemed like that was true.

But life has a way of sneaking up on you. Before long I was living in a new house, I had become a father for the first time, and suddenly I was responsible for providing for my family. I wanted to be the man they deserved. I wanted to step up and do everything right.

But the pressure started to mount. Finances were tight. I felt like I was constantly trying to hold everything together while things were quietly falling apart around me. The stress became overwhelming and before long I started turning back to the one thing that had always dulled the pain.

Drinking.

But alcohol doesn't solve problems. It only delays them. And over time those problems just grow larger.

Eventually I reached a breaking point. In 2007 I remember sitting there thinking the world would be better off without me. I had convinced myself that I had failed everyone around me. I decided I was just going to drink myself to death. Somehow that felt like the only way out.

That was the first time I tried to end my life.

I survived it, somehow. I told everyone that I had simply blacked out and made up some lie to protect the people around me from the truth. But inside I carried the weight of that moment for years. At the same time, surviving it forced me to take a hard look at my life. It became the motivation I needed to start getting my life together. I stayed sober for several years after that.

For a while, things felt calmer. But unresolved pain doesn't disappear just because you ignore it. Over time I started to feel cracks forming in my life again. My self esteem dropped. I felt like my career wasn't going anywhere. My home life started to feel strained and disconnected.

Eventually I made the decision to move my family to Florida. It wasn't somewhere I had ever really imagined living, but I thought a fresh start might help repair what had been breaking in our lives.

Instead, I found myself feeling something I knew all too well. I was lonely in a place full of people. I struggled to find work. I felt disconnected from everything familiar. I wish now that I had talked about those feelings with the people closest to me, but instead I did what I had always done. I buried them.

Eventually I found a job that gave me a sense of purpose again, but the culture around me revolved heavily around alcohol and drugs. They were easy to access and people seemed to like me when I was participating. It was the same lie I had believed when I was younger. I convinced myself that this was connection.

But in reality, I was slipping back into the same destructive patterns that had nearly destroyed me before.

I could feel it unraveling. It felt like everything was happening in slow motion and at any moment I could have stopped and asked for help. But I didn't. I kept hiding it from everyone in my life while quietly destroying myself.

Eventually I moved to Orlando for work while my family stayed behind. I would go back on weekends to see them, but I could feel the distance between us growing into something deeper. I carried enormous guilt for leaving them behind and shame for the person I had become. Most nights I sat alone in my apartment drinking until I passed out.

I thought that bringing my family to Orlando might fix things. For a short time it felt like it might. But I had never actually addressed the issues inside of me. Before long the same behaviors came back. I started secretly drinking at work. I was doing everything I could to keep life together at home while falling apart internally.

When you reach rock bottom, you stop making decisions based on logic or hope. You simply give up.

And I did.

I made decisions during those years that hurt people I loved deeply. I will always regret the damage that came from that period of my life. I can't undo what I did, but I can acknowledge it and take responsibility for it. That accountability is part of the growth that followed.

My absolute lowest point came on April 24, 2021. That was the day I decided I didn't want to live anymore. With a handful of oxycodone and a bottle of vodka, I tried to end my life.

I don't remember much about the next three days. My first clear memory is waking up in a psychiatric ward realizing that I was still alive.

That moment changed everything.

From that point forward I made a decision that I would no longer use alcohol or drugs as a way to cope with life. I entered rehab and committed to doing the work that I had avoided for most of my life. Therapy forced me to confront trauma I had buried for decades, including the reality that I had been living with CPTSD for most of my adult life.

I had to face the ways my actions had hurt the people around me, especially my family. Those conversations were some of the most difficult moments of my life. Even in that darkness, my ex wife supported me during my recovery. Eventually we separated, and in many ways that separation allowed both of us to move forward into healthier lives. I had put that woman through more than anyone deserves, and I will always carry the lessons that came from acknowledging that truth.

Getting sober forced me to dismantle everything I thought I knew about myself. I had to rebuild my life piece by piece. The way I handled stress, the way I processed pain, the way I connected with other people, and the way I showed up in the world all had to change.

Now, five years later, I can look back at the person I used to be and it feels like looking at a shadow of someone who no longer exists.

I often say that the part of me that wanted to die that day did die. Because the life I am living now feels like the life I was always meant to live. Sobriety didn't magically fix everything, but it gave me the clarity and strength to rebuild my life into something better than it had ever been before.

There are still hard days. There are still moments where life tests me. But I face those challenges differently now. I don't run from them and I don't numb them.

I move through them.

And today, for the first time in my life, I can honestly say that I am proud of the man I have become.