Beyond Alcoholism: How I Navigated My New Reality

People will tend to fall into a routine once they migrate and settle into the adult world. They go to work, come home, may exercise or not, will catch some social media or television and then repeat that cycle for the next four spins to the weekend. Where they may go out with friends or entertain their children with baseball and badminton, sleep a little later, rinse off the grind only to start it again shortly. The alcohol largely decreases once past twenty-five, as work, family and chores become the norm, which has been normal since man strolled out of the cave.

But the routine of the alcoholic is an entirely different scenario. Most of us who did gain recovery will have a remembrance of disbelief of what our lives once were. Although it has been almost two decades clean for myself, the images of destruction are as clear today as they were in action those many years ago. Waking to the hangover every morning—to the point where the sickness was the normal. Going to work with elevator rides that caused mild vertigo. The pins and needles in the kidneys and liver. Eating only half a lunch with the continued Gatorade infusion. The lethargy of the afternoon until the whistle blows you back to the liquor store, where the guy at the counter knows you by name. The first beer at five-thirty and the last at midnight-thirty.

While everyone else is recovering on the weekends, you are only continuing the physiological assault. Why stop sucking the hops at midnight-thirty when there is no alarm waiting for its ring in the a.m.? The binge lasts until well into the small hours. You sleep intermittently, the unrest of the living dead, waking periodically to dry heave in the bathroom. And you pop the bottle cap with the sunrise, alternating between passing out and coming to slow consciousness with the illness of the long term alcoholic.

THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK

That was my life for the last years of my thirteen-year addiction to the friendship with John Barleycorn. I could go on about all the stupid occurrences that happen when in this toxic alliance. The bad women and fellow kinship with those like my former self. And all the drama that goes with the brethren of the addict. But the story is the same with everyone who has a substance abuse problem.

Then one day I stopped. On January 22^nd, 2009, I had about six or seven beers in me. I looked in the mirror and saw a harrowed middle age man of forty. I looked at my passport photo, taken a year earlier, which resembled the same. I knew my kidneys and liver were now being damaged from the sensation of tiny knives twisting in them. I had three beers left in the fridge. I got up, grabbed them and tossed the cans into the garbage. I couldn’t imagine a week without alcohol, let alone the rest of my life. It seemed impossible. But what was more impossible was the way my life existed in this dark alliance with Johnny B. I had tried to moderate my drinking in the past. I had tried to quit twice. Third time would be a charm. I put my .357 with a bullet in the chamber on the dining room table. I thought about a line from the movie, The Shawshank Redemption. Get busy living or get busy dying.

And I didn’t eat the bullet. I made it to sobriety. The first five days were hell, the next forty not much better and the cravings were frequent to the six month mark. What I call phase one, two and three in my created program to recovery and cure. The protracted withdrawal syndrome lasted the full two years. But eventually the wave from the tsunami receded. But my old world had been swept away. I was now looking at a land I didn’t recognize.

Normality.

There are positives and negatives to this brave new terrain in which you will now walk. And that’s what it is—new terrain. My addiction lasted as an official alcoholic for thirteen years. But there was sporadic drinking for nine years prior to that. Alcohol was my anesthetic since my high school graduation party, which as I described in other articles, did not go well for me. It transformed to a weekend part of my life. Then it migrated to a few nights during the week as well. It waxed and waned, on and off for years before the demon finally drove its stakes in the ground and claimed the land as his. What I pictured in my mind during that first few months of withdrawal was my life before John Barleycorn introduced himself. That was at the age of seventeen. I lived a perfectly non alcoholic life when I was seventeen and prior. So I could return to that life, even though twenty-three years of booze had passed under that bridge.

The first thing I noticed, once the tsunami returned to the sea, was the terrific feeling of not being sick every single morning. What it was like not to have a small knife in my kidney or liver. No vertigo in the elevator rides in the hospitals I worked. The sensation of not only eating a full lunch but a breakfast as well. And the regretful acknowledge of how did I do this to myself every day in my not so distant past.

It was the six month mark that I really gazed around at my new world though. The cravings were starting to become less and less frequent with a drop in intensity as well. The daily pains in my kidneys and liver were now gone. I didn’t have insomnia as much nor the horrific nightmares that I had in previous months. The beer advertisements and neon bar signs no longer made my mouth water. I was on a physical fitness program as well as a nightly emotional meditative program. I was ready to return to the world. The problem was it was a world in which I was unfamiliar.

The first thing you will feel is an incredible amount of time seems to have dropped into your hands. For you aren’t spending every night arm in arm with John Barleycorn any longer. Which is why I state in my reinvention of Self program, one must begin a physical fitness regiment, emotional meditative routine as well as other self-advancement hobbies after the completion of second phase, which ends at forty-five days sober. Many former alcoholics state their lives are suddenly boring once they quit it. They shouldn’t be. Your life should now be one of continuous advancement.

I say, as I say in all of my articles, that Alcoholics Anonymous is not the answer for where to spend these newly granted idle hours. As it is a negative environment. It would be a place to go in the early phases of withdrawal. But if you are in AA, after second phase clears, it is a place that should be weaned off as you start the holistic return to an even better version of yourself than before you met J.B. Your new world shouldn’t resemble another version of the same darkness. You may be comfortable with these people in AA since they are like you. But comfort doesn’t always mean healthy.

I firmly believe this is why the AA member makes the rooms his life. Because he is afraid to step into that new world. The rooms are the safehouses. It becomes an us versus them mentality. The former alcoholic and the rest of normal society that isn’t. You haven’t explored the trail that walks through the normal world. And you will have to cut a great deal of brush to find it.

I kept myself in largely isolation the first two years after I threw those last three beers away. For what social event had I been in prior to sobriety where I wasn’t consuming? Even before to what I give as the year the official addiction began. Alcohol was the only means where I could socialize, a syndrome that went all the way back to a social anxiety disorder created in high school. I was supposed to intermingle straight? Talk to a girl without my Dutch Uncle Buddy? No way.

Here is how you deal with a disorder as I called the one I had created in high school. This is where I veer from the entire medical profession whose answer to disorder is a script. You don’t take a pill to mask the disorder. You developed a disorder, true. So you undevelop it.

I quit drinking in 2009. The first real party I went to was just under eleven months sober. A small work event where I knew everyone already. But the first real extravaganza of people I knew as well as many I didn’t was in 2012. It was a hospital Christmas party, where I was contracting in Sitka, Alaska. I wasn’t afraid I would drink, I was just filled with anxiety of being around people sober. I had finally had enough of the isolation and forced myself to go. I stayed in the dining hall for twenty minutes then sat in my car outside for a half hour. I spent more time in the car than at the event. But I was popping in and out so no one knew of my internal angst. It really was like living on planet earth as a Martian. I had been raised in a completely different world.

But something was developing, which will develop in yourself as well if you follow my reinvention program of physical fitness, emotional health and continuous advancement of Self. You will start to gain confidence of being comfortable in your own skin. I stated in a previous article that at the same town of Sitka, I gave a myofascial release seminar to a few hundred people one night. And the recording I later viewed showed someone of command demeanor. I was solving my childhood and more importantly, beginning to negate that disorder.

The constant anger that had held me was beginning to abate as well. True, I had reasons for this anger, as I was in a profession that was completely corrupt most of the time. How many street fights I had been in with hospital administrators and corrupt managers in my field of physical therapy? But the mind was gaining a calmness now, not a continuous edginess on a hair trigger release. Stoicism was beginning to evolve in my outlook. For the world has always been the world in which most will not do the right thing. Instead of being in a rage at those who were operating unethically, in lieu of threating to punch a director in the face for telling me to operate in this fashion, I began to guide my life with indifference toward them. I was learning how to navigate the world without the aid of Johnny B.

The only way to gain adaptation in this new world is to venture into it. And that is the problem with AA. They work in the world but at punch out, the members run to the rooms for refuge. You are not an alcoholic anymore. You should be able to intermingle with the rest who never were as well. Heresy, I know, AA.

A month later, I went to another lounge get-together. This time I didn’t go to my car once. As said, it is a simple principle of adaptation. The more I did it, the more I realized I could. Not to mention, that without the countenance of three out of four sheets to the breeze, I was a much nicer person. People actually wanted to approach me. You will find that stoic mindset acts as a magnet. The stronger you become, the more you will attract good people. If they ask you why you don’t drink, you just tell them. I used to be an alcoholic. I’m not anymore. Then raise your glass of soda water with a lime.

The new terrain is washed clean by the tsunami, as I said. But this means you can build a brand new neighborhood. Part of being transformed into the new world is you will occasionally glimpse at pictures of your old one. And some of those photos will portray old friends and acquaintances. People from that world were like you—and many still are. I stated before in a previous article that I had to leave behind a few long-time friends from that world. One was like a brother from a very hardcore and tight-knit military team. If you had told me at twenty-four, he would one day be an ex-friend, I would have punched you in the face. But he is a chronic alcoholic to this day. The last I saw him, years ago, he was beginning to develop the obvious signs of Korsakoff’s syndrome, common in long time alcoholics. Many of these symptoms raise their heads in the form of being insufferable. I would regress into my highly negative past just being around him as he popped open his first beer at nine in the morning. I had to let him go.

You have to think of this new terrain exactly as I described—a clean and sparkling new shore. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have had a collection of acquaintances and friends those first few years after I quit the substance abuse. It was I just didn’t know how. And I was afraid of learning how.  

I began to follow a philosophy of only letting positive people into my circle. As I was a transient medical contractor, many times those friendships lasted only a few months. Some lasted longer and some exist today. But I adopted the mindset that anyone I would associate with would only result in a positive experience. Everywhere I go in my new world, I try to promote this whether it is an after work get-together or just talking to the vegetable stand lady in Guatemala.

By nature, I am a loner, that is for sure. I revel in a great deal of solitude. But I am no longer in a state of fear concerning social events. I can just as easily fit in a large after work Christmas party, filled with strangers, as I can being alone in the mountains. I adapt to any arena now.

You train yourself to be a beacon of kindness to everyone you come in contact with. Cheerfulness goes a long way in an uncheerful world. You follow Jim Rohn’s advice of making sure the people that surround you are of high quality and that you are of high quality to them. And you handle confrontations with a species that seems to seek them using as much gentleness as you can and still getting your point across. For your anger really won’t be important a hundred years from now, will it?

But this is your new world, ex-alcoholic. It’s scary, I know. But if you force yourself to live in it, instead of hiding in the rooms, one day it won’t be a new world any longer. 

It will just be your now normal world.

To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

(Usually free on KDP)

To recreate your life on all planes for the best version of yourself as possible:REINVENTION OF SELF: HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND BEING FOREVER 

(Usually free on KDP)

For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK

(Usually free on KDP)

John Barleycorn taken from Jack London's book, John Barleycorn. First published