6 Years Ago

I went to treatment.

Springboard 3-18-20.

I had put it on the calendar the day I went into treatment for the second time. It isn’t my sober date anymore, but every year that the day comes around, I remember.

I am a shit person when I am drunk.

My addiction consumed everything. It plagued my life from 2004 to 2022. Half my life was spent either drunk or high, or trying to be drunk or high. To this day, I have dreams that take place in this old life. I’ll wake up panicked before I realize it was a dream, and I haven’t relapsed.

I was self-medicating.

What I’ve learned now is that I wasn’t getting drunk or high like everyone else. I had ADHD and didn’t know it. My brain was overwhelming and out of control. What I thought was “being drunk” or “being high” was my brain experiencing how it should have been all this time. I would experience clarity, calm, and a sense of normalcy that I thought came from intoxication, but it didn't. I would want that feeling to last forever, but that's not how those drugs work. The more I consumed, trying to hold onto that feeling, the more it would shut down my brain until it hit me like a ton of bricks, and I'd be out of control.

I would ruin my relationships and hurt my family with the choices that I made. I’d give up on my dreams of filmmaking and struggle to find any meaning in the things I’d do. I tried counseling and started medication for anxiety and stress. Still, I couldn’t put down the addiction.

In 2011, I had a brief moment where I started getting things back in order. During this time, I met my future wife, but also got my first DWI. I lied to everyone about having a problem. I lied about my drinking. Still, I proposed to her, and we got married in July of 2013. I went to Springboard (Rehab) for the first time in 2014. I was introduced to sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous, where I finally understood my addiction. Once I was out, I went to AA meetings, found a sponsor, and even started preparing for my 4th step. But I missed the day we were supposed to meet, and my sponsor said I was “draggin’ my feet.” We stopped communicating, and I never looked for another one. I did my 5th step with a priest and called it good.

In August 2014, I started college to become a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor (LCDC). I think it was the classes and medication that helped keep me sober during this time. I graduated in 2016 and even worked at Springboard for a few months as a tech before starting my internship with their outpatient group.

I was once again reintroduced to AA, and would frame recovery around the 12 steps, a higher power, or “if you work the program, you'll stay sober.” But no matter what I did, I didn't feel welcome. I didn't have a sponsor, I didn't work the steps, and I felt like a fraud for trying to sell AA as this solution to all our problems when it wasn’t how I stayed sober.

I relapsed way before I drank; I was waiting for the justification to do so. I don't remember completely when it happened, but I bought a 6-pack after work, drank it, and went to bed. I drank two weeks later, thinking that I wasn’t an alcoholic after all, and that's why AA didn't work for me. It didn't take long before I was right back where I was before rehab, but now I was trying to hide it from even more people. Eventually, the guilt ate me up, and I called my boss while drunk and told them I had relapsed. Two weeks later, I was fired. My drinking got worse, and I got my second DWI, which kept me sober while I was on probation.

Since being a counselor was no longer an option for me, I went back to university to study graphic design. I started working at Home Depot and tried to stay busy. However, I couldn’t manage schoolwork, classes, and my job. I fell behind, wasn’t doing well, and once our third kid was born, I dropped out of school. It wasn’t long after I finished probation that I started drinking again.

When my oldest started kindergarten, she had trouble managing her emotions. We would get calls to come to the school because the outbursts were so bad. I remember feeling hopeless and not knowing what to do. I feared my daughter would be kicked out of this school, and we would have to send her to the one in our neighborhood. Things between my wife and me only got worse, and my drinking grew unmanageable.

March 18, 2020, I ran away to rehab. It was a week later that the country shut down due to COVID. I watched the news in rehab every night as it got worse. My wife was at home with the three kids. They couldn’t visit, and we didn’t leave. After I completed rehab, I didn’t stay sober for more than a year this time. My relationship with my wife continued to deteriorate, and I started staying in my car. I would pick up the kids and go to the house, but I’d leave once they went to bed and sleep in the Home Depot parking lot.

It got really bad, and I don’t have much memory of that time. We went to marriage counseling, and we worked out some of our issues. We eventually got our daughter diagnosed with ADHD. She started medication and no longer had issues at school. I started going to individual counseling, where I decided to see a doctor for what I feared was bipolar disorder. They prescribed medication for depression. When I started reading up on parenting an ADHD child, I realized that what I was reading was what I experienced as a kid. I got tested and was diagnosed with ADHD.

Once I started taking medication for my ADHD, my life changed. I no longer struggled with staying sober. I started working at the school district as an assistant, which motivated me to go back for my bachelor’s degree so I could teach. I graduated in December 2021 and started a teaching program in the summer of 2022.

But I wasn’t a teacher. I started teaching 4th-grade math and science at a low-performing school. It was just one other English teacher and me for the entire 4th grade. I was completely lost. I felt like I was making mistakes left and right. Slowly, I felt like I was doing a disservice to my students and felt guilty for letting them down. One day, I walked out after taking the students to lunch and never returned. My principal was mad, my wife was mad, my mentor was mad. I was in a psychosis for a week. The only thing I knew how to do was drink.

One day, while drinking, I blacked out and woke up in jail the next day. I got my 3rd DWI, and now have a felony. I was looking at 10 years in prison, thousands of dollars in fines, and everything that came with being a felon.

11-03-22

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been sober since then. I spent 10 days in jail, received 5 years probation, have to blow into a monitor every time I drive, check in with a probation officer, and do community service. I’ll be off probation in time to apply for my counseling license again.

At first, I didn’t know what I would be using this substact for. It seems like politics takes up most of my time, but there are way more people talking about that on here than is needed. Well, I’m going to talk about the two things I know: my kids and myself. So, that’s what I’m going to do.

Love ya,
Alex