Day 0

This is the first installment in a series about my journey through the “90 meetings in 90 days” program of alcoholics anonymous. The intent of this series — other than to record my thoughts, emotions, and realizations to look back upon — is to provide insight to a common-sense and no-dogma approach to AA for those who would like to quit drinking. All names have been changed to protect the identity of the individuals mentioned.

My name is Nero, and I am an alcoholic.

I can characterize my relationship with alcohol in two words: Stockholm Syndrome. I looove whiskey, but whiskey has kept me captive for all of recent memory. It’s stolen my health, my confidence, my sex drive, my job, my house, my car, all of my money, several friends, nearly my husband, and most importantly, my ability to do the simplest things in life: pay bills, buy groceries, do laundry. I am useless and miserable. A leech on those who love me. A liability.

Genesis

I come from a family of alcoholics and addicts. Some of them don’t realize it, some of them do, but for my entire life I saw a pattern that I assumed was normal: Get upset, get drunk, feel better, get drunker, fight, repeat. Alcohol was the cure for everything.

It was also obligatory at celebrations. That meant that no matter what the occasion, positive or negative, profound or mundane, there was alcohol to be had. And I don’t mean just a few beers; my family went hard. Really hard. However, I was perceptive from an early age that alcohol turned people into stupid, impulsive, aggressive, impaired animals. My nice and loving aunts and uncles, over the course of the evening, would degrade into a bickering, arguing, stumbling mass of bodies that I simply couldn’t wait to escape.

Fast-forward to 2006, when I was awarded a full ride scholarship to study abroad in Germany for an academic year. I had dabbled in alcohol but I couldn’t really say I’d been drunk before, and off I went, to the magical land where I was old enough to buy beer and cigarettes at 16. I wasn’t necessarily interested in drinking, but that was what the Romans did so I joined in occasionally. In these early days, there was no addictive behavior. I drank very rarely, I knew when to stop, and only a handful of times did I drink enough to really feel “drunk.” It was, for lack of a better word, normal.

After returning to the States, I drank even less. This was less because of the fact that I couldn’t buy alcohol anymore, but that it never even crossed my mind. I knew I enjoyed a drink here and there, but unless it was offered, I never sought it out. Several years later, when I met my husband in 2010, my habits were simple: I smoked cigarettes, I smoked weed, and I had an occasional drink. For the first couple of months, our cute evening routine was that he would have a small glass of his Irish whiskey, and I would smoke my bowl. That’s it — one and done.

In November of 2010, I suffered the first real trauma of my life. My brother came home high on some unknown drug (today we believe it was bath salts — nasty stuff), and attempted to murder my father.

Triggered.

All of a sudden, the self-medicating pattern that had been latent in my brain for so long, hardwired before I could even walk, was activated. I immediately reached for the bottle. My husband was surprised when I asked him to pour me a drink. That wasn’t the beginning of the binges. It started slow. I would join him for a drink occasionally, normally when we received more news about my brother. Then, I started having one here and there just because. Before long, our nightly ritual was to have one or two glasses of whiskey after dinner while we watched TV. It was nice. It was relaxing.

Things stayed relatively stable for the next couple of years. We were in college, we would party and go to bars occasionally. We would get drunk, sometimes we would fight, but mostly it was just good fun. It was, for lack of a better word, normal.

In 2012 I was accepted to Berkeley and I moved there for my last two years of school. Immediately I started drinking more. I was alone there, I had just left the love of my life, as well as my entire family and all of my closest friends, behind in Colorado. I was also standing in front of one of the greatest challenges I would face in that period of my life: UC Berkeley. I was terrified, and I was isolated. The only friend I had to rely on was the bottle of Breckenridge Bourbon I had been gifted before I moved. I finished it in three days.

Over the years in Berkeley, my struggle with alcohol began slowly. It started as an argument with myself in the store about whether to buy one or two big bottles of Heineken to drink with my dinner. I knew that one would be sufficient, but maybe two just in case. I would wake up for class just fine, go to the gym, and be OK. Although I hadn’t developed a habit that was disruptive in my life, something in the back of my head knew where this was headed, and ignored it. Before long, I was going to the bars regularly, drinking with my friends every day, and I rediscovered my old friend Whiskey.

This is where it gets blurry. I did well in school — I graduated with a 3.89 cumulative GPA — but I don’t remember taking my finals my last semester. Graduation day was spent drunk, and I continued to drink the summer away. I started working as a tutor, and I would spend all my time between tutoring sessions at the bar. Often, I would conduct my sessions while I was drunk. Not long after that, I started working in a pub, which of course provided me almost unlimited free beer. The spiral continued.

A couple months later, I started working for a startup. That’s about the time I developed the routine that would run my life for the next three years. I would start drinking immediately after getting off work. Stressful days would make me drink more. The more I drank, the more hungover I was the next day, and the more stressful the day would be. And the spiral continued.

I won’t bore you with the gruesome details of the next few years. Instead, let’s fast-forward to January of 2017. I had been working for my second startup for about a year and a half. I went to Europe for a month — two weeks in Germany with family and friends, and two weeks in Poland for work — and I was drunk for nearly every waking minute of it.

Rock Bottom v1.0

It was time to go home. The day that I was supposed to fly to Frankfurt to catch my flight to the States, I was so drunk that I slept through four alarms and woke up at 1:00 pm. My flight was at 2:00. I couldn’t believe it — I had never missed a flight before! That was just something that I didn’t do. After much frantic phone call making, fretting, and self-flagellation, I drug my sorry ass into the office, much to everyone’s surprise. I arranged to stay with my coworker that night, since my Airbnb had another guest.

I was so afraid of missing my next flight, the one I had paid almost $200 to rebook, that instead of trying to sleep that night, I stayed up all night drinking. However, I knew that I had overdone it, so about half way through the night I stopped drinking beer and started drinking coffee. From then on, everything was normal. I made it to the airport, caught my flight just in the nick of time, and made my way to Frankfurt. I thought I was well on my way home, and happy to be so. Krakow had been a drunken blur and all I wanted was my own bed.

I landed in Frankfurt, where I took my customary smoke break, and made a beeline to the nearest place to my gate where I could choke down some breakfast and have a beer (or three) before my flight. I stopped at an Italian place in the international concourse, ordered some eggs (I probably had about 7 bites) and a beer. The place was incredibly busy, and the waiter was so appreciative of my patience, he brought me a free beer. My boarding time was in just a few minutes, so I sucked down the free beer (number 3? I can’t remember) and made way to my gate, with just enough time to stop and have a few cigarettes first.

I was dehydrated, stressed, malnourished, and I didn’t know it yet, but alcohol withdrawals were slowly and quietly setting in.

You may be thinking, “Wait you just said you had three or four beers… how are you withdrawing from alcohol already?” Well, dear reader, when your daily drinking habits include no fewer than twelve standard drinks, those few beers are the equivalent of a glass of water and a cracker.

As I was finishing my cigarette in the smoking cabin outside my gate, I got a nosebleed. No big deal, right? It happens to everyone. I noticed right away that it was a lot of blood, but I didn’t really think anything of it, so I went to the bathroom and took care of it. It happened once more before I boarded, and then again after I boarded. I went to the airplane lavatory, where I spat out approximately 3 fluid ounces of blood. Ok, I thought to myself, this isn’t normal.

I deboarded the plane and the agents at the gate rescheduled my flight for the next day. I had to find my way to the airport clinic, which was a nightmare. The clinic tried to treat me and couldn’t, so I was sent to the hospital.

I nearly died.

My blood pressure was insanely high and rising, hence the unstoppable nosebleed. I was admitted, treated with hypertension medication for my blood pressure, tamponades — 4-inch long foam sticks wrapped in finger condoms that go into your nose and put pressure on your sinuses — to stop the bleeding, and tranquilizers to prevent a grand mal seizure. The tamponades were the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.

Amidst hallucinations from the tranquilizers, and fear for my life, I called my mom and urged her to come to Germany, which she did. Once I was released from the hospital we stayed in the hotel for several days to be sure I was ok to fly. In that time, I processed what had happened and that was the first time I realized that I had a serious problem with alcohol. We planned strategies for me to get my life back in order and quit drinking so much, and I enacted those strategies by sneaking shots at the airport bars near our hotel. Logical, right?

Intermission

After returning to California, I did my best to control my drinking. I rationalized my choice to consume alcohol at all by telling myself it was for my own good; that quitting too abruptly would be dangerous, which is true. However, I used it as an excuse to slip back into my old pattern. And so, I kept on drinking. For the rest of the year, it just got worse.

And worse.

And worse.

By September of 2017, I needed at least two shooters of Jameson every day just to stay functional. When I woke up for work, I would immediately go to the freezer and take one or two good swigs of whiskey to reduce the shaking in my hands. I couldn’t hold my coffee at work. I wasn’t performing my duties. I would spend my entire evening at the bar, stumble home drunk, fail to eat anything for dinner, and wake up with the shakes. Rinse and repeat. I would ignore calls from my husband and family because I didn’t want them to hear how drunk I was. When I would speak to them, I would try to convince them I wasn’t drunk. I almost believed it myself.

My friends had distanced themselves from me. My roommate and best friend told me he didn’t want to live with me anymore. I made stupid, hurtful decisions. My husband began ignoring my calls past a certain hour. This was obviously distressing to me, so I coped by drinking even more. At this point, I would sneak out of work at lunch time to go to the bar downstairs and have two shots and two beers. I would go back to work and sneak shots out of the cupboard in the kitchen. After I was done with that, I would “work” for 30 minutes, leave at about 3:30 pm, and hit the bar until 8 or 9. I’d stop by the liquor store when I got off the train and grab two more shooters of Jameson, if not a fifth. It’s safe to say that at this point, I just didn’t give a fuck.

Rock Bottom v2.0

On September 18th, 2017, I was laid off from my job of two and a half years. I felt cheated, as my boss had told me just four days prior that I had nothing to worry about. I tried to put the blame on bad leadership, shitty company HR policies, and just about everything except me. My head was spinning. How could they do this to me? I was a good employee. I was a loyal employee. (I was a professional alcoholic — but nevermind that). My lease was about to be up on October 15th, and I had no idea where I would go. Now that I didn’t have a job, I couldn’t afford a new place. I was screwed. How did I handle this devastating news?

I spent the next month laying on my couch getting drunk.

The 15th rolled around, and a very good friend put down two months on a storage unit and a U-Haul. We put all my stuff in storage and I officially lived in my car. I spent a week or so sleeping in my car, on friends’ couches, at the sailing club, or anywhere I could pass the time. I kept beer and whiskey in my car and would drink while I was driving around the bay. I had no idea what I was going to do. I don’t remember even thinking about a plan for the future, or even tomorrow — I was only interested in the next drink.

I have never felt more worthless in my entire life.

Things started to look up a little when a good friend offered to ride with me down to Los Angeles to visit his parents. Two days into our stay there, he decided to leave with his dad on a fishing trip to Mexico, and I was allowed to stay in the guest house for several days.

There was a small interlude as I drove back to the bay to pick up my German friend from the airport, drive with her to Colorado for a week (where I embarrassed my parents on a few occasions by being a drunken fool), and drove her back to the bay to go back to Germany. I stayed in the bay for a few days and then headed back to Los Angeles, where I found a place to live and started to build a network.

Part of this networking was spending a lot of time with my friends in Pasadena, mostly in bars — ok, exclusively in bars. I would drive very drunk back to my house in Hollywood on almost a nightly basis.

In December, I was invited by my friend’s mom to her house for the pre-Christmas tamale making party. We spent all day drinking gin and tonics, ate a little bit, and I took my tamales and left. I was wasted. On the drive home, I remember being genuinely worried that this time, I was really too drunk to drive. At some point, a semi truck came into my lane, spinning my car around on the highway 360 degrees and totaling it. Of course, I was arrested for DUI and I spent a long, introspective night in Los Angeles County Jail.

That was it. That was the kicker. Alcohol had almost killed me twice now, and I needed to make a change. In my newfound clarity and revelation, I decided that I would start going to AA. I found a meeting and attended it that Friday, and I heard some good stories from some good people. I felt empowered. I was finally ready to make the change, so I walked out of the meeting with my head held high and a new sense of confidence.

I went directly to the bar and sucked down three shots and three beers in the first hour.

The Decision

My grandfather is dying. I am his namesake, and we are very close. He’ll be the first grandparent of mine to go, and this is some of the hardest news I’ve had to swallow. It hit me hard. Really hard.

On Wednesday, February 14th, 2018, I had approximately $500 dollars in my account. That night, I decided that I would attend a meeting at an AA center, again, in hopes of making a change. I met someone at that meeting that changed my life. His name was Brian. He asked me how long I had been sober, and my answer was “about three hours and fifteen minutes.” He took my phone number, and every day from then on, he texted me to see how I was doing.

I was touched that someone actually cared. A complete stranger even, but still, someone actually gave a damn. I started thinking, but I didn’t stop drinking.

By Saturday the 17th, I had $15 left to my name. I spent the rest on alcohol. In those four days, I had two meals. This was my lowest point.

That day, Brian texted me inviting me to an AA meeting for newcomers. I avoided answering, terrified that this was finally it. It was finally goodbye to alcohol, my oldest, dearest, and most sadistic friend.

They say the right way is always the hardest way, and I’ve yet to encounter any situation where this is not the case. Change never comes easy, and rewards are earned with hard work. I was finally ready to stop. I wanted to stop for the first time since I started drinking. I was tired of hurting my family, my friends, and myself. I was tired of being drunk.

I used to move mountains. Now, all I was moving was booze. It had been enough.

After years of deep and dreamless sleep, the titan awakens.