There is no conflict in this world that compares to the hell of needing something you no longer want. I know this firsthand: while most of my friends went to post-secondary right after high school, I went to rehab.
Alcoholism is one of the slowest and most painful ways to die. Sometimes I stop dead in my tracks and catch myself staring at the beauty of recovery—cherry blossoms on the trees, waterlogged cigarette butts in a storm drain; it’s all fucking beautiful—and think about the worst years of my addiction to booze and drugs, the years I learned to live with a constant bloating ache in my liver region as though someone was stabbing me with a machete from the inside out, then wringing my innards through a rusty workbench vice. I learned to survive without living, without existing. The confusion, the vertigo, the incessant full-body trembling, the insomnia—these are things no one tells you about abusing booze. You don’t fall asleep; you pass out. The rest of the time you are dreadfully, awfully inebriated, confused and awake, sometimes for days—weeks—at a time.
THE FIRST STEPS ON CAMPUS
The first time I set foot on Camosun’s Lansdowne campus was a few months before I went to rehab. It was a hot summer day. The Fisher courtyard was vacant, as it often is in July and August. I was struck by the beauty of campus, drawn in by its elegant simplicity and small-town feel, and confused about where registration was. All I could think about was the sweat pouring from my body. I was worried someone was going to stop and ask me what was wrong. I was with my father; he went in to a building and told me to wait outside. As I slouched against Fisher in the relentless heat and tried to light a cigarette, the flame from my Zippo danced an SOS in shaking hands.
“You can’t smoke here.”
I looked up, sun burning swollen, heavy eyes.
A security guard’s shadow was a relief from the hot sun. Part of the confusion is huge lapses in time. Anyone who has been hammered at a bar on a Friday knows this, but when you’ve been fucked for over a year straight, without a day sober, 10 minutes can easily be confused for a few hours, maybe a day. I clamped a hand to my mouth. How long was he standing there waiting for an answer?
“There’s a designated smoking area at either end of campus,” he said.
“Sorry. I don’t want any trouble.”
I tried to get up, legs shaking. It was about 300 metres to the smoke pit, but it felt like a fucking mile.
Before I get further into this, make no mistake about it: there is nothing glorious about this. It’s not a rock-star war story. It’s the story of how close I came to being an average homeless person pushing a shopping cart down Pandora Avenue and begging for your change. More importantly, it’s how I learned the value of my human shortcomings, how to harness my own flaws into something the world needs, not something everyone—myself included—resents.
“YOU GOTTA STOP THIS SHIT, MAN.”
As a kid, I remember questioning everything about the world, thinking too much, and being chronically unhappy with who I was. Our culture taught me what it taught everyone else: to look outside to fix what lies within.
Everyone else seemed to get tired after a few drinks. For me, those first few lit a crackling fire through poisoned blood and made me feel I was someone else entirely, someone who—if the night stopped there—I wanted to be. But it never did stop there.
I don’t remember signing up for Camosun. I remember reading an acceptance letter, but I have no memory of signing up. I think a teacher from high school helped with that. I wrote my provincial English exam hung over and high on MDMA and marijuana (somehow, I still passed that exam); I spent most of my senior year in the bathroom puking or drinking, not matriculating. I smoked dope at the reservoir on Mt. Tolmie, and would zip downtown on the bus during lunch hours to score. One day, after a dealer refused to hand over a skimpy pathetic excuse for a gram and pointed a knife at my bloated gut, I came up with some safer ways of getting my shit.
It’s exhausting to have to go meet the dealers, go through all the bullshit, and pray you don’t get ripped off, robbed, or beaten up. It’s a dangerous way to live, but I only ever feared for my immediate safety once or twice. It’s a peculiar kind of sneaky, cunning hell that I don’t wish on anyone. More as a defence mechanism then anything, I convinced myself that I was pals with these people who wanted my money. One guy, Brandon, was different.
Brandon was a good guy, but he introduced me to hard drugs. He was also the one who urged me to stop. He slept with socks on his hands and had scars everywhere from picking his flesh when he was high.
“You gotta stop this shit, man,” he told me, as I handed him a twenty in exchange for two yellow pills that would keep me up for the next two days.
He said he was going to rehab in two days, that I would need to find another guy. He told me he didn’t want to give me a number; he told me that he didn’t want me to end up like him.
He was one of the good ones.
I crushed that pill up and snorted it when I got home. I still remember the burn of it in my nostrils and the incredible euphoric feeling that followed—as though one could have an orgasm just from looking at a fresh paint on a fire hydrant. That was the last time I did hard drugs. Just booze and pot from that point on. How harmful could that be?
THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO DIE
Alcohol is more harmful to the body than heroin, according to some studies. Within about a year, I was dining and dashing on a regular basis from various bars after work because I couldn’t afford my massive tab. I stole money from family members for beer and vodka.
I tried to quit booze for the first time in November of 2012. It lasted three months. I smoked about 20 bucks worth of pot a day in that so-called “sober” time. Withdrawal from alcohol can be fatal if it is done carelessly. In that sense, it can be far worse to come off of than opiates.
My friend’s uncle had been sober for 10 years. He walked me through what to expect.
“You’re going to shake, laugh, cry, piss, and puke,” he said. “Sometimes all at the same time.”
For the next eight days, I did. Coming off a 24-pack of 10-percent beer and a mickey of vodka a night is fucking terrifying. Even with valium—which is standard for alcohol detox—horrible delirium and delusions, and hallucinations of ants crawling up and down my body, petrified me. More than once, I thought I was having a seizure. This is what it feels like to die, I remember thinking.
But it was the first sign of life to come. My face hurt from laughing and smiling so much, as I cried and trembled; delirium tremens is an absolute clusterfuck of emotions.
Worms crawled on the walls of my room. I grew paranoid very quickly that a friend was recording my every move and planning to hurt me. It was utterly insane.
My central nervous system was waking up again. It wasn’t as though I woke it up slowly on a lazy Sunday with breakfast in bed. It was awoken from a deep slumber with shattering glass and screams.
THE FUNERAL TRAIN
I was left with a gaping hole drugs used to fill. When I relapsed the following February, it was after the death of a teacher from school, Felicity, who I had formed a close working relationship with. Although this was also a lie of addiction: no one can cause me to drink except me. It was no excuse; I had the sixer in my dresser drawer for weeks prior. It was merely a feeble, immature chance to not take responsibility for my life. She never saw me in the true recovery that would soon follow, and that still makes me sad. She dropped dead of heart complications one night as she was crawling into bed. A few days before that, we were talking about mortality during a break from my math homework and she had said in her wonderful British accent, “Don’t fuss about me when I’m gone. Just get on with it.”
I did.
By the summer of 2013, I was spending most days in bed, or sitting out on the back porch smoking up. I had been in the hospital a few times; there was something wrong with my heart. I honestly don’t remember the details, but I do remember being in the back of the ambulance. The steady wail of sirens above me sounded strange. I was used to that sound fading or growing stronger. I realized in that moment how messed up I really was. I didn’t drink much for a few days after that, maybe only four or five a day, because I was scared I was going to die.
That week, I had to sell my shoes to a friend for 10 bucks to get a few tallboys.
“Okay, but don’t use it for beer or any of your…stuff,” he said. I could see the desperation in his face. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he was being manipulated.
“I won’t,” I said. It hurt me to say that, because addiction tells many lies, one of which was that I didn’t have a choice but to be a lying sack of shit to one of my best friends.
I got a weird look from the people working at the liquor store when I walked in with torn dirty socks. I bought as many tall black cans of Faxe Extra Strong as I could, thinking of all the promises and hearts that were broken. I did nothing but drink, take drugs, pass out, then do it again; I was nothing but a useless waste of space on this planet.
Maybe one day I’ll die from this.
That thought made me smile as I left my regular beer store, and walked down Aldridge Street towards Richmond Road. I wanted to cry. The tears wouldn’t come.
By August of 2013, I saw no way out, and, honestly, couldn’t wait for booze to finally kill me.
I came to an intersection: Walk on the green light, I thought. Do it. Everyone would think I was just too loaded and made a mistake. But most people choose life, even on the worst days. No one ever gets enough credit for that.
On days I tried to take it slow, I would end up crying and shaking. I tried to carry on with some resemblance of a life. Work made me feel normal. One of the things about being addicted is that you can actually still work and function fairly okay, but in a really half-assed way. I had met a potential client at the bar one night in Lake Cowichan (I sold kitchen cutlery; it was an awful job) and we made plans to meet at A&W the next morning. I was still gooned when I woke up just before 8 am. I had a couple shots so a hangover wouldn’t set in as I was telling him my pitch. As I rounded the corner between the carport and the house, the world tilted like a teeter-totter.
I fell into blackness. A strange warm liquid seeped over my heart. When I woke up, that same feeling of near death and exhaustion I had felt in the ambulance engulfed me, only this time it felt closer then ever.
Over the next month, I rarely showered or ate. Every time people spoke to me, they seemed to yell (for good reason; it’s easier to get mad than it is to show people a broken heart).
I had had enough. My parents gave me an ultimatum: the street, or 90 days in a private residential treatment centre on the Sunshine Coast. I was petrified. I didn’t know if it would be like jail, but the deciding factor for me was the knowledge that if I did live on the street, there would really be no reason to quit. Being on the street sucks; why wouldn’t you drink? I thought.
There was no fucking way I was going to be homeless. Another lie addiction tells is that there is no choice. For the first time ever, drinking was the greater of two evils.
I made my choice, and spent my last night with alcohol and drugs on September 9, 2013. My mother stayed by my side the whole night and listened to my drunken jumble. I don’t remember anything except an invigorating excitement to be normal again, orange emeralds burning in that awful pipe, and sadness that it was time to let go of substances when they had provided a warm fuzzy cocoon for so long. The late summer air was warm. But the cocoon had turned to ice in recent months.
Eventually, drugs stop doing their job; the only question worth asking at that point is if you want to live or die.
When I woke up in the parking lot of the treatment centre, my father looked at me all funny when I told him I wanted to have one last beer before going in.
“What’s the point?” I said.
“I would tend to agree,” he said.
I don’t remember the last drink I had, but on that last night, they were Cariboos—the ones in the green can—and I remember gagging at one point. It tasted like fucking lighter fluid going down.
THE HITS OF RECOVERY
When I phoned home from Sunshine Coast Health Centre in Powell River for the first time, my mother answered. It felt like the first time I had spoken to my parents in years, even though it had only been about a week since they dropped me off.
“Hi, bud,” she said, in the same compassionate way she did when I was a young boy.
I heard the phone get fuzzy.
“Dad’s here, too,” she said.
I told them detox was worse than the first time around, but the worst was over, from a physical standpoint. I could taste my food for the first time in years, and was playing ping-pong with Jay, a friend I had made there. I had been assigned a counsellor, went to the gym every morning before group, and had taken to morning coffee like a normal person.
The sense of camaraderie at the centre was essential to those first few months, during which the only thing keeping me afloat was the program I was working and the incredibly welcoming group of guys working it with me.
One of the workers there who provided ozone therapy, Davis, filled my head with tales of back-country hikes, meditation retreats, and chopping wood at dusk in his yard as mosquitoes buzzed among the ferns. I sat in the white ozone machine and sweated toxins out of my body. Dark black stained the towel when I stood up afterwards. Jesus, I thought.
The world was new to me. I took up water volleyball in the pool with the boys after dinner, and enjoyed basic hobbies again. When I have a really bad day now, I’m still really grateful that I have a low to compare it to that most people don’t. It puts it in perspective.
“It’s really hard to taste the flavour of your environment when you’re swimming in it.” Someone instrumental in my recovery said those words recently, during a phone check-in. They were talking about being loaded and how it just seems normal when you’re floating in the bottom of a brewery barrel, but the same can be said for getting used to being clean. September will be five years since I had a sip or a hit of pot from that disgusting glass pipe, and some days during that time have felt just as bad as being loaded feels. Sometimes I’ll look at a bottle somewhere and my heart will skip a beat and my mind will flash back to the warm sting in the chest, the quilt it put over my heart. Alcoholism is a sickness, because sometimes I’ll look at someone pushing a shopping cart of empties down the street and I’ll get fucking jealous. Going to meetings occasionally and using my support systems allows me to see the truths of the environment I’m swimming in.
People have asked me how I quit. The answer: I made a choice that I didn’t want to go out that way, then was put in an environment where booze was not an option, an environment where I was taken care of, and shown, in a non-traditional, humanizing, and gentle way, exactly what to do 24-7, but I knew that after 90 days, no one would be telling me what to do. The test began then.
I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life on my after-treatment plan. I made a schedule for myself when I got home: up at 7, gym, counselling, yoga, LifeRing meeting, coffee with a friend from that meeting, basketball, go home, meditate for an hour, journal, eat dinner, then wind down, asleep by 10. It sounds rigorous and strict. It was. I purposefully made it more strict than actually being in treatment. I would say the part of the planning that saved me the most was hypothetical: what would I do in unthinkably stressful scenarios? What would I do when tragedy hit? That came in very handy in January of 2017, after the fate of someone I love very much was very suddenly in jeopardy. I stood outside Victoria General Hospital in tears. I was helpless and petrified, so helpless that my legs started to move toward a nearby liquor store without me telling them to.
It’s been four years; don’t do this, I thought. You can’t fuck up now. Stop walking. All you have to do is turn around and breathe.
When all I wanted to do was self-destruct, when the covert suicide that is alcoholism called, stopping my steps was one of the simplest and hardest things I’ve ever done.
Tears blurred my vision. Snowflakes melted away on my lips. I have never felt a loss of control over my actions in all my time clean as strong as I did in that moment. I thought about the weight of a gallon bottle of Jack Daniels in my hand, the incredible sting of it in my throat. Then the real memories came: shaking, confusion, month-long blackouts. Addiction is so horrible that the hell of watching someone you love fight for their life is about on par with drinking. If I started I would be too ashamed to ever stop. I knew that. I picked up the phone and called Stephen, my dear friend who is over 25 years sober. He dropped everything, and came to meet me in the hospital parking lot. He hugged me and stayed by my side until I calmed down. I owe him more than I could ever convey for picking up the phone and meeting me in the parking lot that cold January day.
Cut to summer of 2018—I’m walking through the Lansdowne campus courtyard. I’m stressed. Deadlines are approaching fast. I compartmentalize and use the obsessive parts of my personality to focus on what needs to be done.
When I get into bed, just before slumber comes, I picture foam smiling over a freshly cracked IPA, the emeralds of marijuana burning in a glass pipe. It would be nice, but it just isn’t an option anymore. Now, I go to sleep with clean water by my bedside and sore muscles from a long run—without fail, when I wake up, I never regret not getting fucked up.
Definetly can relate from my own experiences, good read??