Addiction Recovery Plans

I’m just your average 30-something white guy from a middle-class home in the midwest. Nothing really unusual about my story. Came from a very stable family, parents are both non-drinkers and non-users, been married for almost 40 years now (I saw my mom drink a glass of wine once, my father…never). Some may think that’s strange, but I later learned that my maternal grandfather was an alcoholic…so I guess you could say the disease skipped a generation.

I started drinking beer on the weekends in high school, around the age of 14-15. I remember the first time I got drunk; it was a feeling I never wanted to end. I felt on top of the world, as if I had all the confidence a man could have. I proceeded to binge drink throughout high school and then into college. While at college, I met guys who were more progressed in their disease than I was. I drank with them almost on a daily basis, and experimented with every illicit chemical under the sun. You name it, I’ve done it at least twice (except for peyote). I was drunk, stoned, tweeking, or on the nod every single day in college.
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The summer before high school we moved to a much different town. The first kids to accept me were the “loadies”, so I started partying to fit in. When I was 16 and my parents were in the middle of a bitter divorce, the boy I loved died, aspirating on his own vomit while doing nitrous oxide at home alone. Looking back on it, I believe from that day on, I drank to keep the pain at bay. I never realized it was preventing the healing as well.

I drank and drugged for 28 years, pausing only for pregnancy and child birth. Even while the grief was a constant, I am joyful person by nature and most of the time I believed my life was close to perfect.

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June 2008 was the worst and best month of my life. My partner had said she was leaving me after nearly a year of us being together. She felt that I had an addiction problem and it was one that she couldn’t support me through, she rightly said that the road to recovery would be a long one. I didn’t even think I had a problem but I decided to pretend that I was going to do something about it by saying that I would go to a meeting of alcoholics anonymous. I figured that if I looked like I was doing something she would hang around. I agreed that I probably drank too much as there were some nights I just couldn’t remember; I would end up being violent and aggressive. I would wake up not knowing how I had got home or what I had done. Deep down part of me I believe was really sick of living this life but a way out of it didn’t really seem possible. My problem wasn’t alcohol and drugs, it was living without them. I could stop drinking and using anytime I wanted to. I had done it many times before. Sober life would become unbearable though and I would go back to drinking and using again. Even after being arrested for selling drugs.

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There was the beginning being a innocent, open, loving, unafraid, proud, curly-headed, and bright. I was raised in the suburbs on the outskirts of Memphis, well adjusted, happy, and protected. My parents were together then, and I had a younger brother to pester and play with. At ten years old the family bought some property in the dirt road country and a adequate home was erected at the end of a long gravel driveway. We all moved together to the southern country-side, West Tenn.. In some ways it was great: open spaces, freedom to roam, trees, bare feet, dogs running free. However, socially it was isolating and we never got connected with our neighbors like we used to. The only social regularity was clockwork visits to the Methodist church in another nearby community. All the role models were seemingly in place to form a well adjusted young man, ready for success.
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