Internal Sunshine of a Thoughtless Mind

How quitting alcohol and finding my rock bottom lead to my own personal freedom.

Every action we take is like a vote for type of person we want to become. From our childhood and through our adulthood, we’re accumulating evidence of a new identity and showing ourselves our potential by taking a swing at a new adventure, getting that degree, exposing ourselves to different cultures, starting a new relationship, etc. We’re creating a new experience for ourselves because this is what we’re made to do. We’re made to evolve. We’re designed to create the image in our head of who we think we are based on these experiences and throughout these experiences we search for meaning in our lives. In turn, how we perceive ourselves often comes through the experience we have with others. Their opinion of us, their agreement of our ideals and lifestyle, their encouragement or validation in our every day conversations. That’s because our self esteem and our need for love and belonging are essential components of human motivation.

Our whole lives we’re programmed to want praise, love, respect and approval, and we do things consistently to appease other people whether we may be aware of it in that moment or not. Deep down inside we need that praise, love, respect and approval. Sure we can find that satisfaction within ourselves and our own accomplishments, but then there is an inherent need to share that with someone special, friends, and relatives — the need for validation of our self worth from someone else. We look for that validation in many ways on a daily basis (see small ‘like’ thumb) and we hope to connect with someone who agrees with our own ideas or interests. Yes, some of us practice “self acceptance” and I understand the backlash of opinion I might be getting if I was reading this to you in person. Well…thats cause we all have a little something called “confirmation bias,” a form of validation, where it might be difficult to look at different ideas or opinions objectively. Sorry.

Just as much as I’m spending time writing this, it is, in a small way, an active attempt at seeking outside validation for my thoughts and ideas. I’m trying to give myself an experience (writing this “essay” if you will) to show myself my potential in my writing abilities, conveying a message, and perhaps challenge your attention span for you to get to the end of this. Maybe some inspiration might be sprinkled in here somewhere. All I know is that I should probably keep this interesting. This internet behemoth of words is essentially me accumulating evidence of my identity to show myself what I’m capable of and perhaps show a few readers some insight into something they may not have thought about before.

But my point in all this isn’t to make a delicious literary layer cake of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” you can Google that if you want to. And for people who know who I am, this isn’t to show you a shiny new “me” for those who have seen some kind of transformation unfold on my Facebook profile over the last year (again, see “like” thumb). Because, to be honest, even I don’t know who “me” is right now. And that’s because through the last several decades there was an identity that was formed through experiences leading up to January 1st, 2019.

False Evidence Appearing Real

Last New Year's Day I made the decision to quit drinking. I know what you might be thinking…no, this isn’t going to be some lengthy memoir on the health benefits of not drinking or how I turned my life around. And it’s not going to be about coming out on top with some type of success story. This is about mourning the loss of myself and the identity that I had constructed over the last few decades as someone who used drinking and alcohol as a tool to create an experience. An experience, which I soon found out, diluted my own “objective opinions” about who I was as a person as well as the people around me.

As an aspiring DJ, I surrounded myself with an abundance of alcohol (to say it mildly) and forged a mindset that I needed alcohol to have fun. I only drank on the weekends but would do so to the point of near blackout, with only fragments of the previous night to recall the next day. I wasn’t using alcohol as a means for basic functioning worthy of 12 steps. I didn’t have a wife and children to ground me in responsibility. And as most of us soon realize with age, I can’t exactly party like I used to in my 20’s. I was however, certainly good at waking up on friend’s couches. I was also an active gym participant sweating out the alcohol consumed on the weekend to achieve that “balance” entitlement to start the process over every weekend. I supplemented with anti-hangover supplements, vitamins, and recovery shakes. I had my process down. I ate a disciplined healthy diet almost every day. I sometimes even managed to drag myself into the gym on the weekends, knowing I could start again Saturday night. But there was a shift occurring in my head that needed to break up the monotony of this “rinse-repeat” lifestyle of alcohol and nightlife. I realized that after years of alcohol consumption I didn’t have anything to show for it. Like literally.

Did I meet the love of my life on a drunken booze cruise somewhere in Lake Michigan? No, I didn’t. Did I drink my way to the upper echelon of DJ stardom with a Grey Goose sponsorship? No, I didn't. I did thankfully maintain a graphic design career effectively walking into Monday’s with the smirk of “if you only knew what I did this past weekend” smeared across my face with a sleazy arrogance week after week after week. I soon realized that all that was left were the somewhat funny recollections of drunken mishaps, inside jokes, dance floor shouting, and plate-passing deep conversations at after parties. I get it. This is a choice that I made for myself. But I realized that the vote I was casting for who I was going to become was right in front of me and I saw the person who I would become 10 years from now and I didn’t like it. The same old song with the same old dance, pun intended. Something needed to change, and as I soon found out, alcohol was the common denominator in all of it.

Alcohol is a tricky one. As we create these experiences of fun, excitement, and camaraderie with friends and sometimes strangers alike, I’ve realized that the evidence I was accumulating in my life was based on a mind-altering chemical in liquid form. Add a cheesy salesman with a briefcase full of dopamine combined with super effective advertising, then you might as well leave the front door of your prefrontal cortex wide open (you can Google that too). Which is exactly what I did for many years. Feeling sad? Make it a double. Celebrating? Shots. Need to muster up some courage on that first date? Dirty martini please! (Okay, I needed a lot of courage). But that’s just it. What does it take to be content? I had to ask myself this question, cause week after week it was affecting my emotions, it was affecting my willpower, it was affecting my actions, it was well…a welcome sidekick to life, love, and my pursuit of happiness — doing exactly what alcohol does. And what did I have? A life I dreamed of? No. Love? No. Happiness? Not really.

See I was creating an image of who I was supposed to be in my head, you know…like what humans do when we’re evolving, and I surrounded myself with people who drank as much as I did (for the most part) because what I was doing — the nightlife, the afterparties, the blackouts — other people around me were doing too. That was the respect, the love, the approval, the feeling that I belonged when I walked into a corner bar and said “hi” to the bartender I’ve known for years. The respect, the love, the approval, the feeling that I belonged when I entered a nightclub just to see some of my friends. I had all the confirmation bias that I needed because they were all doing it too. We all talked about the last weekend bender reconvening at the same places almost every weekend. We all felt like shit. We all had hangovers. We all decided on Bloody Mary’s or even the third shift bar the next morning. The alcohol was the self esteem, the need for love was the guy checking ID’s and what awaited on the other side of the coat check. The belonging was the card placed on the bar knowing that it was going to be a long night (or day) with friends. Was this the true component of my motivation as a human? Alcohol? Just as we post a picture of our awesome vacation, our kids first steps, our new hairdo or job promotion on social media in hopes to get that “love” or “like” validation, I soon realized that I was using alcohol not only as a confirmation of who I was at that time, but a coping mechanism for who I wasn’t. Like a mouse at the end of a maze who pushes a lever to get that piece of cheese over and over again, that lever for me was the tall double vodka. The maze was the end of my week. Like scrolling through an endless feed in my brain to stop and look for something to “like,” it came as easy as picking a reaction button. It was the quick dopamine hit that gave me the meaning I needed, or at least tell myself that somehow in someway I was “reacting” in a way that benefitted me, or even someone else. All of this was the self-worth validation that I was unknowingly participating in. I began to realize that week after week, I began to see the “like” thumb turn upside down. It was time for a new experience.

Fuck Everything And Run

I’ve always been the type of person to think of a New Year’s resolution on my birthday. Cause, well…technically thats the new “year” for me. I turn another year old and I reflect on what I have accomplished. Most New Year’s resolutions I never really considered. I thought of them as false promises to ourselves and not things we actually wanted to do deep down in our hearts, but things we feel we ought to do. All of us know perhaps we “ought” to do something for our health, but most of the time it’s our self-critical voice in our head that we’re trying to appease. Then on the 1st of the year as we always do, we try, we fail, and then it just ends up adding a bit more authority to the voice the next time around. This year was different for me and I didn’t want to fall in that trap. So when it came to my birthday in April of 2018, I took a hard look at my life and started to re-examine what I thought my life would look like at my age, and so far, I certainly felt like my life didn’t have any substantial meaning. I felt like I wasted time with the experiences that I had with alcohol, DJing and the party scene that I created along with it. I felt like the person I envisioned myself to be at almost 40 years old wasn’t who I was, or maybe, who I was meant to be.

I know…by now you might be saying to yourself, “Maybe this isn’t an alcohol issue, maybe this is a self-esteem issue.” You may be right, but how do you really know? As the alcohol surfed through my bloodstream weekend after weekend, it became a tidal wave of excuses for my acceptance of my own reality. Think of how people instinctively understand what it means when people say, “Hey, let’s go grab some drinks!” Do we clearly know what is going to happen or what we’re actually gathering for? Perhaps it is to relieve stress, perhaps it is to talk about the work week, gossip about some kinda of drama, perhaps it is just a mindless excuse to speak to one another. It’s was so natural to me (and probably for most of us) because I had been programmed to understand that this simple phrase meant something positive. After a while my brain really couldn’t distinguish, or at least just resigned to, what this simple and almost natural activity produced — a false narrative of what my happiness really consisted of. I had almost unknowingly stopped trying to truly pursue my happiness because alcohol was liquidating my confidence, self-esteem, and my motivation because it was providing a temporary solution to what was really happening underneath the surface. A need for something more. It was time for a change.

For around 6 months leading up to January 1st, 2019, I began to try and understand my motivation for drinking, not to mention my own mental health. I’m not one to finger point and avoid all accountability and I knew that these drinking habits were excessive by any standard, but I wanted to dig deeper. I did attend several therapy sessions, which could be summarized by a professional as, “Well just don’t do that” when it came to my grievances of my own actions pertaining to my lifestyle. People and friends don’t shove alcohol down your throat. It’s all on me. So it’s up to me to understand “me” and breakdown my decision making process when it came to socializing, relaxing, celebrating, stress, sadness, and sometimes what I felt was depression. What I started to discover was that those symptoms of life — the positive moments, the stress, the sadness, the depression — are all part of a constant loop within my brain called “emotions.”

Wow. What a concept. We have feelings, got it. But emotions are basically just quick examinations of situations that drive your survival and wellbeing (see Maslow’s layer cake). So we need to think of emotions as guidelines for every decision. It’s all part of an internal process of self-appraisal combined with a feedback loop that we can program ourselves into thinking is our reality. In other words, I knew that something in my life would happen (an unfortunate incident, a negative comment, a bad relationship, or even my own success, etc.), I would react to it, make a decision on how I felt about myself afterwards, and then reach for the closest most convenient solution or partnership — alcohol. “Well just don’t do that” you say? Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? That would be the logical decision now wouldn't it? Well, everyone processes information with both the rational and emotional parts of the brain which are constantly competing. Think of the times you’ve decided against your better judgment, ate the cookie, skipped the gym, or smoked the cigarette. The emotional part of your brain sometimes overcame the downside to these habits, justifies and even rationalizes these bad behaviors, and then convinces you to keep doing everything wrong for your health. With that understanding, I realized that my emotions were trained by years of logic and experience, I drank week after week, year after year…retaining it all for what I thought was real wisdom.

The reality was that my emotional brain was stubborn as fuck. Facing facts, data, and even hangovers, I always chose the path of comfort, even if it was temporary. No matter how you rationalize a decision, if you don’t feel like it, isn’t convenient, or requires more work than what you want to expend in that moment, you won’t obey the logical or “rational” side of your brain. Now reverse that — if the decision is usually fun, convenient, requires little work, and everyone is doing it, how likely is your emotional brain going to say “Yes?” That was my relationship with alcohol. It was easier to choose a mind-altering substance to help validate my self-worth. Even though I had some negative dialogue running through my head, I had a friend (aka alcohol) and maybe some actual friends to help me forget why I was running to escape in the first place. It was too much work for me to choose to face my problems because it wasn't comfortable. It made me angry with myself and others at times. What is a better solution, based on my emotions at the time, than to reach for something that would disguise that as fun? When you take a feeling, put something in your hand to mask or distort that feeling, then that feeling will go away or at least become something else. Well, temporarily. Sorry alcohol. My emotional and rational parts of my brain need to start working together. And so I made the decision to stop drinking cold turkey. I had my last glass of wine the morning of New Years Day and I couldn’t even imagine what would come next.

Face Everything And Rise

For a long time after I quit drinking, and pretty much from the first day, I was overcome with fear. Fear of a loss of social life. Fear of the loss of friendship. Fear of the discomfort I would face when confronting my emotions. Fear of losing my identity. I wasn’t a mean drunk, I was a pretty fun (and funny) guy to be around. I wasn’t loud, reckless or emotional. The person I created in my head for the last decade was forced to be confronted by someone who I actually didn’t recognize — myself as a non-drinker. What ensued was a flood of the emotions that I had been diluting and disguising with each swallow of Pinot Grigio. It was overwhelming. So overwhelming that I did surrender to anti-depressant medication. There had always been a stigma that came with choosing that remedy, but if you think about it… what have I been consuming every weekend for the last few decades? An FDA-approved liquid depressant. But I wasn’t one to surrender to some “condition” I had now knowingly put myself in. It wasn’t my excuse to be sad, an excuse not to try, nor did I blame alcohol for getting me here. I knew from the start that what I was putting into my body had to be temporary, so I set out to replace the daily narrative that was the loud screaming voice in my head. I couldn’t quiet it with booze. I couldn’t quiet it with serotonin reuptake inhibitors. What I did do was replace the voice in my head with a self-help narrator that came in the form of 60 plus audiobooks over the course of 12 months.

I eventually found out it’s called, “bibliotherapy,” a therapeutic approach that uses literature to support good mental health, or at least in my case — a shit load of self-help books. These were the guidebooks that changed my, “don’t do that” into, “why are you doing that.” However, what it wasn’t was some kind of cheat code to my own happiness. I felt guilty in that fact that when I took the earbuds out, the same negative voice would creep back in. So back in went the earbuds and my replaceable consciousness and self-talk. My Audible credits became my proverbial slot machine with “7's" and cherry icons replaced with “aha’s” and “oh fucks.” Title after title, digested and consumed, exchanged and discarded with actionable steps to take away from each one. Some of those actions meant saying “NO.” Some of those actions meant pushing away “friends” and toxic relationships, or just losing what I thought were close relationships that I found out were predicated on the weekends watching the sun come up with a bottle of tequila. Some, if not most, stopped texting. I no longer heard the weekend stories anymore cause I wasn’t a part of them. I wasn’t getting the validation from my friends through the environment I was so accustomed to. It sucked to go through all of this. I just wasn’t used to it and it made me feel uncomfortable and isolated. But I understood that it was a choice I made and it came with consequences. This turned into my “rock bottom.”

I felt like Steve Aoki throwing Maslow’s layer cake into someone’s face as I reached each sober milestone. One month turned into two, two months turned into six, six months turned into a year. As I mourned the loss of my previous identity, the people who I found really mattered made a genuine attempt to reach out and hang out sober without judgement or awkwardness. I am certainly grateful for that. Most importantly, I realized I was looking for the love, respect, and approval in the wrong direction. I needed to find it by looking inward and create my own experiences in which to form a new identity. I had been doing the same thing for so long that it just so happened that it took giving up alcohol to understand this. I went on a solo adventure to Spain with the money I saved not drinking, something I never imagined I could do with my salary. I started picking up the guitar again and teaching myself music theory, something I would have never had the discipline to do in the past. I got off the anti-depressants. I created habits that were beneficial to my physical health, mental health, and my self-esteem. I felt like as I cut through this metaphorical cake of human needs, I realized that I was using the wrong knife to cut it (aka. my motivation) — and that was what was holding back my eventual enlightenment. Without alcohol, I was actually trying to uncover the layers that were my reasons for being unhappy. I was no longer running from my source of discontent. I was no longer using alcohol as a distraction of the real issue. After nearly a year, I soon realized my “rock bottom” ended up being the bottom of a mountain that I could now see through the fog that I had been walking through all these years. I had the confidence to now scale this mountain with the desire to show myself my true potential. I’d like to think Maslow himself left me a walking stick.

A year ago today I couldn’t even imagine writing this. I’m not a writer nor am I aspiring to be one. This is my first attempt at spilling out my experience in some type of formal medium. I also had alot of first attempts this year that made me feel really uncomfortable. I’m also not a fortune teller. I can’t predict the future and I’m sure whoever is reading this can’t either. But that’s the point. We don’t know what lies ahead of us but we also don’t always know what simple pivot or decision can make a dramatic shift towards our own happiness. I know the arguments that can be made about moderation and alcohol-abuse and I completely understand that. But I just wanted to share with you one person’s attempt to TRY. We need to look at our own actions, as objectively as possible, to determine which actions contribute positively to our journey of self-betterment, and how they actually fulfill those different tiers of needs. Love and belonging, friendship, intimacy, a sense of connection, self-esteem, recognition, self-actualization and the desire to be the most you can be. Our every day experiences need to be paired with continuous self-assessment and self-work in order to be aware of our own needs. We’re one decision away from changing the rest of our lives.

Mine just happened to be quitting alcohol.