Breaking Bottles

Essay 1: An introduction and morning inspiration

Perhaps the most important personal story I feel a desire to share is that of my journey with alcohol. Ironically, I wasn’t much of a drinker as a youth. In an era where getting hammered was the event du jour, I had equally-bad interests but in slightly different directions. Sure, I drank plenty, but I would have laughed at the notion of me becoming an alcoholic. I’m not sure I had drank a single alcoholic beverage at this point in my life that I truly thought tasted good or really lured me in. It wasn’t until my first few years out of college that I truly began to “become a drinker”. I have paced back through that mentally to see how the pathway came together. It pops now; but boy, it crept up at the time. My best friend in life said to me back then, “Be careful about drinking, man. Alcoholism sneaks up on you.”. I kind of thought that comment was funny at the time as my chapter of true drinking had only just begun. But nah, he has always been a special breed. He saw the waves picking up that would come crashing down hard in my life many years later. I’m going to write an essay about that, about him, within this series. I’m ready to share these experiences and morsels of wisdom I picked up over this journey of fun, wild times, blurred nights, damage, struggle, and pain. I think our cultural obsession with alcohol is a plague to our nation. One of those unspoken crises that everyone is happy to continue hiding from because they know how close the scrutiny lands to home. This is the first in a series of essays I intend to write about my increasingly-feverish years dancing with Lady Alcohol and what led to me finally being able to break out of that vortex. I intend to be painfully honest in these writings. I want to show how I broke the bottles that were breaking me. I was frighteningly close to losing everything that really mattered to me in life. And I largely didn’t have a clue!

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I was up and adam early this morning, as is my new schedule in life. I beat the sun up these days, which is a really strange feeling for this lifelong night-owl. But my kids’ new schedule demanded it and this is way of fatherhood. I am a firm believer in creating your own moments of solitude and serenity amongst the craziness of life, and so I always get up an hour+ earlier than I have to get moving on a day. If I’m hitting a 6:30 flight requiring me to be up at 4, then I’ll be up and chilling on the porch with coffee by 3:30. So this has become my new schedule. 5:20am the coffee pot starts doing its thing (fresh ground ftw!) and by 5:30 I am out of the bedroom, smelling the bean-driven heaven, and excited for my new day… especially this little window I created for myself. Every day of mine starts off with those good vibes. I make sure of it.

This morning I went up to wake my daughter at the usual time as she too likes to have a little window of me-time before the hecticness of the M-F begins. She was turned over on her side, as always. I sat next to her for a few moments and lightly scratched her back, as always. I’ve done that to her as long as she’s been alive. Definitely since we moved her to this big-girl bed at the new home when we took her to a new community and she was about to welcome her new baby brother. I remember that first year so well. I remember those mornings so well. Back then, real school was new for her. She was starting Kindergarten! Another upending first all at the same time. I had to wake her up for school as she would rarely herself. (Saturday or Sunday? Different story. Always!) I would do that by sitting next to her in the fading darkness and rub her back. Doing the same years later brings me back there every time. And you know what I think about almost every time? Headaches and dragon breath.

Because back in that era, I was an alcoholic. And I don’t mean I liked to drink, I mean I was a full-blown highly-functioning alcoholic. I drank every single day of the year. I found a reason TO drink every single day of the year. When I told you “I didn’t drink last night”, what that ackshully meant was I just had wine for dinner or something. I hadn’t kicked it into full-gear like usual. What would full-gear look like? A happy-hour beverage around 4ish or 5 (I was lucky never to fall to morning drinking… more on that later in this series: “The Parachute”), with another one or two I’m sure before I got home; some wine or some paired cocktail with dinner, which means a few while we’re making dinner and maybe another while we’re cleaning up; and then you can’t just shut down the engines at that point, and so I’d ride out the night on something liquid. Towards the end of my robust tenure, that last round was the brown water. Whiskey. Once you’re there - both the willingness to sip whiskey late by yourself as well as the fact you’re ## amount of drinks deep before you even begin - this is taking a night of drinking to a whole ‘nother level. A depth of drinking that a non-alcoholic could never really understand. Sure, you may have been blown out of your shorts one or two nights in your life on some really heavy benders. But how did that end for you? Probably with vomit and soiled shorts. Top-tier alcoholics consume booze to this level like workout junkies do supplements. Like the health obsessed do vitamins. Every day. What’s so chilling about alcoholism of this intensity is you wouldn’t be able to appreciate the scope of it unless you knew what lived inside the world, what exists under the surface. (Mental note to be sure to share later in this series the story of the man living two lives; the sad scene taking place weekly in an office parking lot). I could bang 10 or 12 or even 15+ drinks in an evening and I would be chilling. I’m not out on my side in a bathroom; I’m life of the partying it and not even slurring. As you pound more and more booze like this, you open (and permanently modify) your receptors and your tolerance soars! This makes you need so much more to feel the same buzz, but also be able to consume a god-like amount of alcohol and be damn near sober to the untrained eye.

And so damn near every time I sat there and stroked that five year-old’s back, I was experiencing the aftereffects of booze. And like I described, this was the aftereffect of heavy boozing. I would ALWAYS have a fogginess to my head. Usually it was a downright headache. And most times, I could still taste the fire of alcohol on my breath. My disruption from last night already bleeding into this day anew. So many times I felt so bad at that moment physically that I’d have these self-talk moments where I’d talk inside to her but was really talking to myself. “I’m going to be a better daddy for you, sweetheart. I promise. You deserve that.” They were painful moments, in hindsight. I mean, I knew they were painful at the time. But looking back, OMFG they were screaming from the inside-out painful moments I had very little appreciation for or cognizance of. I knew I was spiraling and was doing nothing to stop it. I’d just give myself the same speech again tomorrow. Vortex! But not this morning now deep into 2024. I once again thought of those days. That’s quite a sad reality, but one I can’t help. Those are the scars; memories forever stained with that liquid. I turn it into a good thing though. Return to today…

I legit smiled wide when I had these thoughts because I felt so good! I had woken up to the smell of some new beans from a newly-discovered local roaster. Had spent some time doing what I do out in the predawn hour and had ran into a bunch of energy over at Tommy’s Diner. It was only 6ish and we were popping over there! I had commented how Heidi was already full-octane and dominating on a Thursday. Such awesome energy to start the day. Think of the contrast between that and the drag of so many previous mornings I described above. That’s precisely what I was thinking about as I rubbed her back today. I actually smiled this morning as I thought, “I am that better daddy now, babygirl”. That would never have been possible with that poison so omnipresent in my life. If you are someone who has fallen to this level of drinking, consider whether it’s the person you truly want to be. That’s ultimately what moved my needle. Yeah, I did it for the benefit of many; but the time I finally quit (after many failed attempts), I was doing it for myself. I wanted to be that better man and father and husband and person in this short run we get on this rock. I didn’t want my legacy within my family to be that of alcoholic. And based on some stories I’ll share here later, I was very close to that point of no return. We have a lot of those in my family tree. I’m not preaching here. I’m not even anti-alcohol. I share these thoughts because I care. I care because I know this shit all too well. I have a strong desire to talk about these subjects because I know so many people are in dire need of help with this largely quiet killer. I’m hopeful sharing my story might help others find the key to their own code.

One of the things about the rhetoric around quitting drinking (or any substance abuse) that bothers me is how it is always framed as a means of running away from demons instead of resolving them. I don’t at all deny that many people running from demons do so by sinking into a bottle or diving into drugs. That self-comatose is the very definition of running away from your own problems. But it’s not always that; it’s not absolutely that. I wasn’t running from demons and misery. Now, perhaps you can analyze deep enough and kind of land at the same place, so I’m not trying to dismiss the angle. But applied as a blanket explanation it leaves too many out. And in my case, it made me resistant to dialogue that otherwise could have been helpful. I just enjoy getting buzzed, man. I’ve never known a sober life since I was a teenager. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, it just is. Even today I still get buzzed. I just have a medical card and smoke instead of filling my liver with alcohol. It does a whole lot less collateral damage, but that underlying engine of why I use substances to disconnect to some level from reality remains. I enjoy smoking herb. I don’t ever see myself as someone who would elect to live fully sober. I run a million miles an hour and I chill dramatically at times too. It’s a yin-yang for me. It’s my yin-yang and it works for me. The ‘ol pressure cooker story I tell all the time became a core mantra to my life. I dove into alcohol every day for similar reasons I enjoy puffing at the beach. Demons? Nah, man. But bad things in that arena? Yeah, I think so. They hide and lurk there, for sure. I’ve always had a mega addictive personality and when I shut one channel down another inevitably opens. It just is; this is who I am and I’m not interested in a life quest of self-perfection. I am on a self-quest of building a castle and paying it forward. Those two missions aren’t at all the same. One is external while the other often becomes a consuming self-focus (narcissism). Think gym people who do nothing but go to the gym. You do you, but that type of pursuit doesn’t attract me. Life is too short. I go out of my way to have these “me moments”. I have them every day. I’ve done that as far back as I can remember. “For quiet times, disappear and listen to the ocean. Smoke my ‘ports, think my thoughts, then it’s back to coastin’.”

My point in sharing that in a negative lens is if we want to help people struggling with these issues, we need to be open to other ways of thinking and see it more as meeting people where they are. Finding the right tools that make sense for them rather than force-feeding the solutions others believe are righteous for all. Another great example of this is AA. I shirked that approach entirely. Hated it! I recognize that it has helped thousands of people get damaging addiction out of their lives and so I’m not anti-AA as an organization. But their approach couldn’t have been more wrong for me. I wasn’t interested in ditching my life and starting it all over with a clean slate. I loved my life! I was proud of who I was, even at my lowest doldrums within those bottles. I wanted to become a better me, not abandon me. Thankfully, I found the approach that was right for my situation and personality type…

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I didn’t recognize it as CBT at the time. “Cognitive therapy” was my guy’s brand. But the reason it clicked so well with me is the approach was geared around understanding and not reinvention. Well, the fact I even went to those sessions and did so on my own was key. It’s possible any form of that may have unlocked my puzzle, as it was the first and only time I’ve ever been fully honest with anyone about the depth of my drinking. That honesty, that regular honesty and discourse about my reality, was the tool that tightened in my screws. But that’s really the core of cognitive therapy. I was finally able to understand myself. This was the profound “wishes he was right-handed”-moment I had that snapped me forever out of the vortex. I’ll share that too. I was finally able to see that alcohol could not be part of my life. Well, that’s the wrong way to put it. I finally saw that there was no such thing as moderate drinker-me. I could keep drinking, of course, but that would mean I accept being a drunk. I was facing The John Mayer Dilemma. Instead of explaining what that means, I’ll save it as the title to the second essay in this series.

You have to make the big decisions and walk the tough path in life sometimes. It demands it. At least if you want to be able to look back at the end and know you lived it right.

https://x.com/Theo_TJ_Jordan/status/1406794522156273664