I'm 23 yrs old and i've been sober for 533 days today.
I dont really remember what i felt like 533 days ago. Most people say say that alcoholics just try to remember the good times. that they grandoise their past and try to bargain with themselves. To be honest i cant really remember any good times. I was never the type of drinker that used the social excuse. to this day ive never ordered a drink in a bar. I was always alone in my room sipping straight from sailor jerrys neck.
At 18 i started drinking. mickeys 40 oz bottles my friends and i would steal from the grocery store down the street from my house. The rival grocery store across the street i had been working at for over a year, so that one was not an option...until the first store started catching on. then i was the get away driver as my friends would come running out of the automatic glass doors. more than a few times those doors were alittle too slow opening and came dangerously close to destruction as my friends would run directly into them while looking backwards at my boss who had to have known i was involved since these same friends would come smoke cigarettes with me on my breaks.
Not only cigarettes. It was about this time i started smoking weed too. I had never smoked in highschool. Not because i was opposed to it. in fact most of my friends were heavy smokers from 8th grade on. one of them actually being sent to rehab at 15. but thats not my story to tell.
A group of friends and i used to play raquetball almost every night of summer. The same routine every night. after playing for about two hours everyone would pile into the biggest car we had that night and smoke. everyone knew i didnt smoke and never pressured me because they knew after years of experience i wasnt going to. I was sitting in the cargo area of a nissan xterra while 5 of my friends passed a world class blunt from one to the next. As it came around to me i asked, "can i hit it?" Everyone in the car fell silent and in my head i remember even the radio dialing down as if in disbelief, wanting me to repeat myself just to make sure. The thing i didnt expect is that while i didnt smoke weed i had smoked cigarettes for about 3 years at that point. I had been a pizza delivery boy in highschool and it was a requirement to listen to obnoxiously loud music and smoke cigarettes every second you were on delivery. Anyway, i was unaware that my friend Matt was exceptionally good at rolling blunts. And that the years of smoking cigarettes had given me the skills and technique to inhale way more weed than i needed to for my first time. i puff, puff, passed just like i knew was routine. For about ten minutes i felt normal, the only noticable difference were my eyes began feeling swollen. We hopped out of the car for some fresh air and i immediately went straight to a tree stump and sat my ass down before i lost my balance and embarrased myself. I am told it was 45 minutes later i was still sitting on that tree stump holding my head in my hands. i was too afraid to stand up because i felt like i would immediately fall. my friends eventually led me inside and i sat on an orange couch for the remainder of the night. From that moment until 533 days ago, i smoked weed every single day.
Drinking was just a fun time at that point. I rarely did it, but weed was a daily habit. My first year of college i never made it home before 4 am once. it was pipes, bongs, and blunts in a car every night. I was still living at my dads house so i would leave home at 8 am to head for "class", but i would stop and park at the church 4 blocks from my house and go back to sleep. i passed 3 of 8 classes that year. When my dad started seeing how absent i was, he told me unless i started being more respectful of their rules, i needed to find another place to stay. My friend was also going through a similar situation so we made a budget and found apartments, and prepared to say Fuck off to our parents. about a month before we were set to move my other best friend, the third of the trio told us he was moving to chico for school. within three days i was accepted to the community college and had an apartment set up for both of us to live in up north. Why stay in my home town where all my family is if i can move 400 miles away and forget about them. We moved and that first year felt like the greatest time of my life. Chico is an amazing city and with a job and full load at school i actually felt productive. however chico is also the biggest party school in the nation next to Arizona state. Playboy magazine had ranked it in the top 3 for 4 years in a row. But i was making it work.
first yr of living in chico i was working hard, going to school and had a girlfriend. around the one yr mark, i failed all my classes and broke up with my girlfriend. the weed and booze came on alittle stronger. My roomate and i moved to a bigger apt, for our second year. it was a four bedroom so we needed a roommate. We put up a posting on craigslist and since i was working so much i told him "just interview people and find the best match. we like the same kind of people so after you narrow it down ill meet him." a week later i was sitting in our upstairs patio talking to the cream of the crop apparently. he was a year older so 21 and could buy us booze. and he was a weed dealer that moved here from LA. He had his card and would make monthly trips back home to pick up from the clubs since he had a card, and bring back about 3 ounces to sell in Chico. He was going to school too so he just seemed like a business saavy college student. plus we were paying alot of money on weed and what he was promising us was irresistable. did i mention the entire time we were talking i was taking shot of jack daniels? oh yeah. at some point i dropped by box of cigarettes on the ground and leaning over to pick them up i fell face first onto the patio floor. that really broke the ice and nearly my two fron teeth. We let him move in and the slow spiral downward became a cliff to my rock bottom.
Within one year of living with a drug dealer i was going to school maybe once a week, smoking 3 foot bong loads on my lunch break from work, and consuming at least 3 grams of weed a day plus a handle of booze every night. that year was alot of fun but also alot more of me just sitting in my room alone how i liked it, sipping on bottles and trying as hard as i possibly could not to focus on the complete fuck up i had become. By the end of that year i knew i had to move back home or i wasnt going to survive to see 25. I lived at my moms house to save money and still had a reliable job that had transferred me to and from Chico. I was working but had given up on school.
I was still smoking everyday, every lunch break at work, everynight on my drive home from work, and about half way through my handle of rum in the middle of the night i would get in my car and drive around the block to smoke another few bowls while my mom and step dad were sleeping. I would also go to my friends house, my roomate from chico who had also decided to move back home and live with his mom. We would sit in his seperated garage and watch tv. we would get drunk and high and then i would take the 10 minute drive to get home. I remember i actually drove right into a checkpoint one night. luckily i hadnt been drinking yet, i was on my way to buy some. However i had smoked a bowl in my car less than 2 minutes prior and the entire car was filled with the smell. I lit a cigarette and set it in the ash tray to burn. I lit another one and puffed it till it was nearly gone. by the time i got thru the line to the cops my car was filled with cigarette smoke and apparently they couldnt smell it because they took one look at my license and told me to go on thru.
The good luck stopped abruptly when one morning after the usual drinking and smoking i woke and came out of my room for some water. my mom was lying on the couch reading a book, obviously waiting for me to come out. I knew something was wrong because she was supposed to be at work. i walked past her casually and said goodmorning. She followed em to the kitchen and asked "you dont remember anything about last night?" after some defensive back and forth i got the full story. at around 3:45 am both my mom and step dad were awoken to the sound of what they thought was either a hammer going thru a wall, or a muffled gunshot. apparently i had gotten up to go piss, and fallen head first into my bedroom door, which cracked. when they both came to check on me i was sitting with my back against the door completely naked and passed out. My step dad helped me into bed and i woke up 10 hrs later to hear this story.
The next day i was driving to a rehab facility at the coast. My grandparents have a vacation home about two blocks from the rehab house so it seemed the perfect place to send me. I say send me but it was entirely my decision. I guess i failed to explain the moment i knew i needed help.
about two months before this all happened i found out my grandfather, who was really more like a father to me growing up had terminal bone cancer. and about two weeks before my dreaded last drunk night i found out he said to my grandma while lying in bed one night..."here i am fighting for my life, trying to survive, and Spenser is just throwing his away." as soon as i heard he had said this i nearly collapsed and knew i needed to do somethign about my drinking.
My thirty three days in an in-patient rehab facility was difficult. not in the sense that i didnt want to be there, i actually loved everyone of the staff memeber, nearly everyone of the co-habitants, and definately the fact i was walkign distance from the ocean for a month, even if we couldnt leave the grounds it was still nice to go outside and smell the ocean air. However it was difficult because for the first time in 3 or four years i had to deal with my emotions. deal with the fact i had failed and dropped out of school, that was probably going to be stuck at my same job for the rest of my life, and the fact that my grandfather, my hero, was going to die. more sooner than later.
I left rehab and came back home feeling broken down but left with what i needed to build up again.
I went to meetings everyday for about 8 months. and i chaired a meeting of alumni from my rehab facility.
more recently I haven't been to a meeting in 7 months. if i feel even for an instant i am slipping i will be in a meeting within the hour, but i feel remarkably strong.
I waited 6 months before agreeing to meet a girl i had been talking to over the phone for nearly 2 yrs, because i didnt want to let her see me physically or emotionally until i was ready and capable.We are still dating and we have been living together for almost 8 months. and in fact, today is our one year anniversary.
I still see my friend and roomate from college. Hes a light drinker but gave up cigarettes and weed when i left for rehab.
I still smoke cigarettes, because i need at least one vice in my life.
I have three nephews and one niece that make it impossible for me to think about moving away from my family again.
i enrolled in college again and am starting over. the first paper i wrote since going back to school after two years was for my philosophy class and i scored a 98%. it feels amazing to be productive in that area of my life again.
and my grandfather passed away three weeks ago. the one event, 8 months ago, i was almost certain would push me back into drinking. I smiled when i got the message he was gone. I knew he was free from pain, and i also knew in that instant, i wasnt going to drink. After all he had taught me, and all he meant to me, and how much of an inspiration he was in my sobriety, i knew there no way i was going to drink. I spoke at his funeral and it was incredibaly difficult. He meant more than anyone in my life has ever meant to me, and its a sad strange realization he is gone. i know its going to be a long and hard road but i will see my grandfather again.
i'm glad i got to spend time with him sober toward the end..
and now everyday i am sober, i honor him.
Its been 533 days since my last drink.
it has been the hardest and greatest 533 days of my life.
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