God, grant me the serentiy to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
My name is Zach and I'm an alcoholic.
I've posted some stories here before - including about multiple PI arrests and totalling my car drunk a couple of years ago. None of those stuck with me the way that I needed them to, unfortunately. I began to relate more and more to step 1 sometime in the last year but never did anything about it. An excuse I particularly enjoyed was "Well shit, I'm an alcoholic - nothing to do about it but manage the best I can and have a couple more drinks".
On April 24th, 2020, after 2 visists to the ER back to back for cocaine, xanax and booze induced severe panic attacks (including showing up the 2nd time with a blood pressure of 160/105) I finally came to understand and accept step 1.
I had gone through a major depressive, borderline suicidal, phase after dropping out of grad school last fall due to mental health reasons. I was able to find a decent job to lift myself out of it, appease my parents, pay my rent and get things back on the right track despite having not worked for 5 months (business degrees from SMU do help - even with a middling GPA), but pretty soon started working from home for my new employer due to COVID. I had been clean of xanax for 6 months or so - but my anxiety hit with a renewed vengance after the sudden change of going from being around smiling faces and structure that I had long been missing back to sitting at home all day in the apartment that had intoxicating smells and morbid memories seeped into the walls that whispered thoughts of self harm.
As the world went to shit and my life along with it, I reached out to my old supplier for some xanax that my disease had convinced me was of necessity due to the circumstances.
My stimulus check hit early, I had filed my taxes in January or so. I wasn't spending money on lyft and uber (which was my transportation since I don't have a car right now) and extra cash in my bank account started piling up. Sitting there, with a semblance of innocence that my diseased mind clawed at to take advantage of. Still working from home, I had a decent paying job that was easy enough, and as a young single male generally comfortable with the simple things in life nor crippled by debt - Donald's $1,200 was like nitrous oxide pumped into an old yet potent tank of gasoline.
My anxiety was so unattended, unaddressed, ignored - that it got the best of me despite the warm comfort of disassociation gifted once again by Big Pharma's segmented, rectangular shaped blight on society. In an effort to drown it out further, I began to drink earlier and earlier in the day. And if you give a mouse a cookie - as in, if I was going to drink at noon to take the edge off and subdue any lingering cabin fever - might as well get a sack too to at least get a little work done (this is especially dangerous when you're in Dallas and have a coke dealer that delivers cheap, face-numbing cocaine to your doorstep within 20 minutes).
I've had issues with alcohol - everyone in my life knows this, but in varying degrees based on the information I have presented or withheld or what they have been exposed to as a witness to my insanity. I thought I needed to quit drinking after certain incidents years in the past - but was always able to manage just well enough to scratch by while being a 50-60 drinks a week type drinker. I could still attend family functions, I could hide it if I needed to, and shut off from those that I truly needed in my life in order to stuff my diseased and aching id to some dusty enclave within my conciousness.
A veil of irony throughout my use is that I actually didn't try cocaine until graduating college (despite joining a fraternity at one of the wealthiest party schools in the nation where it flowed like coors light laden piss into a trough).
I liked it pretty well when I was introduced in a cordial, hey I'd like you to meet someone manner. By the 3rd or 4th time my disease was put into the next gear. Within the past year my cravings for alcohol turned into cravings for cocaethylene. If I touched coke I instantly needed booze. If I got drunk enough I started looking for cocaine like a blue-balled, polo-black -soaked clubgoer perusing the crowd of somewhat acceptable women that might him stick it in them at 3 in the morning. This of course, ad nasuem, propagated countless mornings in which I soon realized in a state of self-dissilutionment that I had called 15 or so people looking for something the night before - and usually 12 of them people I shouldn't have called, hadn't spoken with in months. The worst example was when out of booze, but not out of coke (but what's the difference? You can't create a painting without both the oil and the canvis) I reached out to a high schooler that I used to tutor in the middle of the night to see if he could snag me something from his dad's liquor cabinet.
Right after COVID hit my demon really let itself out of the box of all human vices. I was doing xanax all day, the 2 weeks prior to going to treatment I had probably burned $500 in coke, and was having 20 drink sessions every couple of days.
On one Thursday, I checked out of work at 2 in the afternoon. Started boozing, blowing down, playing a new game I had got into, popping more xanax whenever I needed to lessen the edge. From Thursday at around 6 pm until that Saturday at 2ish in the afternoon I didn't leave my computer. I played my game - further injecting myself with an original addiction on top of the newfound concoctions I was destroying myself with - for no less than 43 hours straight to the tune of 30 beers or seltzers or whatever I was drinking and probably at least an 8 ball of cocaine. Never ate a bite. Never left the house. My beer was delivered, I had all the xanax I could ever need, my dealer knew where I lived and would come drop off from just around the corner. Nearly passing out at my desk, I retired, bringing with me auditory hallucinations of a virtual escapist landscape I had bored into my skull.
The insanity of it - the insanity we all suffer from and carry with us collectively - was that that wasn't my rock bottom to get my ass into treatment. I had more nights similar to that. I had started dealing xanax with a friend on a crazy profit margin (300-400% per pill), got really messed up, manic, and crazy one night and thought about buying a gun without a serial number to start trapping (Speaking of insanity - this was while I was still holding down a $45k/yr job). I stole a bottle of liquor and some weed (I don't even like weed) from my best friend - a friend that would bail me out of jail if it took his life saving to do it - on a night where he passed out early on his couch. Another night, my veins throbbing with cocaine and vodka, I wandered around the streets in my neighborhood (carrying a fifth of vodka with me) to find someone to talk to at 3 in the morning and had a passing conversation with some schizophrenic homeless person under a nearby DART station. Miraculously my higher power continued to keep giving me chances I didn't deserve. Keep me out of jail. Keep me alive. Keep me from utter destitution.
None of this truly scared me. Probably because i had so heavily masked it with invasive chemicals to the point where I forgot what fear was. I knew I was powerless but my spirit was still not willing. My physical and mental health was beaten into and sealed shut in an alien oblivion that only my disease and demons could have led me to.
And then, one night, (and as someone that has had multiple, multiple - 10/10 sweating, chest throbbing panic attacks) I had "the" one. My heartbeat felt like it was doing a scat jazz performance. I felt like I was going to pass out or die right then and there. I checked into the ER. My blood pressure was off the charts. I REALLY felt like my heart was going to fail. It's doubtful that I would have died that night - but it rewoke something powerful inside me. Not an anxiety coping mechanism of "okay I need to calm down, this will pass" but a raw, visceral, spiritual fear of dying.
They pumped me full of saline. They did an EKG and Echo. All normal. The doctor that discharged me (and I will never forget this for as long as I live) clasped his hands as if in prayer, looked at me in the eyes and said "You are really really young. Please. Get some help" as if he was looking into the eyes in the midst an intervention with someone in his own family.
I walked home from the ER for the 3rd time in just a matter of weeks. Distraught, ashamed, self-pitied, upset, hopeless, utterly lost, but... somehow grateful for the sunlight and air and a reminder from somewhere that I can't describe that this is the life we are given and in this life there are moments worth living for and you can do anything you want but you damn well sure not give up until the bell rings.
That's when.
That's when my integrity and faith and humility and guilt - guilt that I had never come to terms with - was defribrilated through my nervous system so I could begin to rediscover a nascent - but not yet lost - glimmer behind my eyes. A glimmer of earnestness. A glimmer of life. A glimmer of hope and change and the future and all those things bigger than me. That's when I shot my long repressed faith - faith in life beyond self, faith in childhood dreams, faith that the night might grow darkest just before the dawn - and shot my resolve and ambition that I used to carry as a wet-behind-the-ears 18 year old on my way to college deep into the part of my being (which a Father of the Virgin Mary might call your soul) like an epi pen full of adrenaline. That's when I realized I had been a selfish, inconsiderate, hedonistic-driven shell of myself fueled by duct-taped schemes that could no longer distinguish between who I used to be, who I had became, who I was, and who I might never get to be.
I sat in bed and cried. I texted my mom and told her I needed her to come get me. She asked what was wrong, and the three words became the beginning of a new chapter for me:
I. Need. Help.
Thanks for letting me share. I have some more, and actually ended up drunk last night after 50 days clean, but I woke up today to once again take it one day at a time.