A Letter to My Past Self
An Accidental Blog
Recently, I was asked to be a part of Running for Resilience’s Wednesday article Meet the R4R Runners.
In it, founder Matt Breen asked the question, “When you look back on those early days in your sobriety journey, is there any advice you’d give to yourself or someone in a similar position?”
I found it difficult to articulate my thoughts, and although I answered the question, I wasn’t happy with what I had written. I felt like it was clunky, and I didn’t feel like I delivered my message clearly enough.
That’s when I thought it would be much easier for me to answer this question in a letter to my past self. A letter to me at my lowest.
I started writing the letter, and I found myself in some kind of flow state, and I couldn’t stop writing. I felt like the answer was getting too long, but there were too many important bits that I couldn’t leave out, so I kept going.
I told Breeny that if he thought the answer was too long, he could use the original answer, and maybe I could post the letter here and link to it should anyone be interested.
It was a difficult but cathartic process. It’s one that I wouldn’t have done if not for being prompted by Breeny, so thank you, mate.
Anyway, that’s enough from me. I hope you enjoy it, but more importantly, I hope this finds someone who needs to hear it.
Cheers Wankers.
X.
“Sam,
You’re in a bad place right now. It’s not a coincidence that you find yourself here. Nor is it because you’ve done anything wrong. You’ve taken on too much. Your desire to satisfy others and your unfairly high expectations of yourself have led you to neglect yourself. You’ve filled your plate to the point where no time or energy is left for you. You’re desperately looking for more time in the day or more energy to get more done. You’re not alone in that.
You feel like the only way to find peace inside your mind is by drinking and using drugs. That’s the only way to get some reprieve from the whirlwind inside of your head. But you hate that this is the way it is. You don’t want to be this way, but you don’t see any other way at the moment. Every Monday, you wake up and swear to yourself you won’t do it again. You mean it from the bottom of your heart. You tell your partner, and you tell your friends, “I’m not doing this shit anymore”. You mean it and want to believe it, but in the back of your mind, you don’t believe that you can do it. You’re starting to wonder how much longer you can tell people you’re done, only to let them and yourself down again until they eventually get sick of it and walk away.
The paradox is that you are completely aware that your behaviours don’t align with your goals. You know they’re holding you back from getting the things you need to do. But the thought of living without them and without that break from your mind is overwhelming. You’re stuck in a cycle. You want to change, but you just feel like you can’t and worry that you’ll lose everything you have if you don’t, but the stress of that alone drives you back to those very behaviours.
Living like this is wearing you down and gradually taking you further and further away from who you once were. Who you truly are at your core. You’re carrying a lot of shame and embarrassment. You don’t feel like this is who you are, and you wonder how the fuck you ended up in this position, crawling around under the dining room table looking for cocaine crumbs at 3 am while your pregnant partner sleeps. But you hate yourself enough to let it happen. You’re exhausted. You’re giving up more and more each day.
You’re doing all you can to lead something of a double life. You’re doing well at work. The bills are paid. Everyone is okay. Everyone except you. At times, you even use this to justify your behaviour to yourself. Deep down, though, you’re not okay with it.
You’re getting tired. Not like a good sleep will fix you, tired, mentally and emotionally exhausted. Carrying secrets around and being dishonest about what you’re doing adds little pieces of straw to your back daily. Sneaking money out of the savings account to pay off drug dealers each week is getting exhausting. You don’t have the energy to do this shit anymore, but you just can’t seem to stop.
You’ve completely isolated yourself now. You don’t go out and drink anymore. Instead, you prefer to sit at home where you feel safe to do drugs and get drunk, free from the ridicule of others. You’ve convinced yourself that no one else on the planet feels or has felt the way that you feel. No one could possibly understand, so how could you ever tell anyone about it? They’ll only make you feel worse than you already do.
Soon, this weight will become too much, what you’ve been doing is unsustainable, and you’re about to find out the hard way. I know you want to stop. You want to stop more than just about anything and hate that you can’t. It’s not often you can’t do something you set your mind to, and it crushes you to feel powerless to change this.
You’re approaching a fork in the road, and very soon, you’ll be faced with a decision. A decision that logically seems so simple, yet for the first time in your life, you’re genuinely considering making what you know is the worst decision of all. It’s not your fault that you feel this way. You never meant to hurt anyone, but wonder if your existence is more harmful than hurtful to those around you.
Luckily, at the eleventh hour, when the shit hits the fan, after four days of inebriation, thousands of dollars spent and a 3:30 am breakdown on the lounge room floor, you give up. It goes against everything you’ve ever thought. But you realise you can’t do this anymore. You’re too tired. It’s too hard. Something’s gotta give. You can have your job, partner and unborn baby, or you can have this other life, but you can not have both. You’ve been trying everything in your power to have both for months and have now proven to yourself that it’s impossible. In that moment, you surrender to the knowledge that you have to get sober. There is no alternative.
You don’t realise it now, but it’s the best decision you’ve ever made.
The next 21 months are a wild ride. It’s a different ride to what you’re used to, but wild all the same.
It’s scary. You know that there are unresolved mental health issues waiting there for you that you walked away from in the past. The idea of facing them without your old coping mechanisms is terrifying.
Naively, you think that if you get sober, your brain will kind of, untangle itself and recalibrate on its own. This isn’t the case, but don’t let that scare you off. Believing this gets you through the early stages of sobriety.
One of the smartest things you do is tell yourself that you don’t have to worry about never drinking again. You tell yourself that you just need to stop drinking for long enough for this magical brain you think you have to repair itself. This is a good idea. Telling yourself you’ll never drink again is a form of pressure and expectation, the two things that had a lot to do with getting yourself into this mess in the first place. This teaches you probably the most valuable lesson you can learn in sobriety. You only have to worry about not drinking right now. Just don’t drink today.
You learn that you don’t need to worry about future decisions around drinking or drug use because the future never comes. It’s always just past an arm’s reach away, so why worry about it?
You go it alone for months. You write about it a bit, but for the most part, apart from one or two friends, you struggle to really embrace sobriety. You’re probably not even really sober; you’re just not drinking and using drugs.
Soon, you will learn that the sober part is easy. It’s coping that you struggle with. As the mental fog clears, you find yourself in many situations that would once drive you to substances, and you struggle to cope with it. But you cope.
In time, you become more comfortable with your sobriety and start reaching out to more people. You begin to see that you’re not special or unique like you thought you were. There are millions of people just like you, and the majority of them are amazing.
Gradually, you make a shift away from the people you used to spend a lot of time with and surround yourself with more like-minded people. Initially, you worry about that a lot, but you learn that this is natural. There is nothing wrong with them. There is no animosity, and you remain friends with a lot of these people. You’re often surprised at how supportive people are of your sobriety and realise you don’t need to be so scared of telling them what you’re doing and why.
You’re probably thinking, “Why the fuck do I want to go through all this?” and I get it.
You can’t keep doing what you’re doing. You can’t stay stagnant, either. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.
In time, you will see that the most rewarding and fulfilling things correlate directly with the level of difficulty of the things you’re going through. The best things are on the other side of hard.
Day by day, you start to feel more and more like your old self, but better.
You know that psychologist you’ve been talking about going back to but keep lying to yourself and saying you don’t have time? You go back. But this time, you make progress because you mentally show up from a better place. It’s slow, but it’s progress.
You get healthier and feel better physically.
The reduced isolation and shame means your relationships improve. Some of them take some work, but you become a better partner, brother and son in time.
You have a fucking amazing son who has never seen you drunk or high. For the first time in your life, you feel unconditionally loved by someone. You experience this special kind of love that only a parent would know, and you have the clarity of mind to feel it in its fullest form. It’s amazing.
You realise that even though you believed your actions weren’t hurting anybody else, they were. Badly. You realise that your partner should have left you, more than once. But she doesn’t. You spend countless hours trying to work out why she hasn’t. But she sees something in you that you couldn’t for so long. Your constant focus on the bad things you’ve done has conditioned you to believe that all you ever did was bad. But somehow, she sees the good in you. She knows that the version of yourself you have wanted to become for so long is in there. You still don’t feel deserving of her. She’s been selfless in standing by you and supporting you, and you hope that one day you can repay her in some way, even though she says you don’t need to. You’re very fucking lucky, Sam. And although you’re not very good at showing it, you’re equally as grateful.
Eventually, you get to a point where people come to you for advice on sobriety. Friends, friends of friends, friends and family of others who are struggling. At first, it’s a bit weird, and you’re reluctant to offer anything up, but you become more comfortable with it and get better at it in time.
As you start to serve others and see your impact on their lives, you start to feel this incredibly foreign yet nice feeling. You’re learning to be proud of yourself.
Do you know that feeling you thought you’d get after buying your first house or running your first marathon, only to feel deflated because it didn’t make you feel how you wanted it to?
You find that feeling. The feeling you’ve been seeking for so long. You find it in serving others. You get it everywhere. You get it changing your son’s nappy, even the gross ones, or helping him walk up the stairs at home for the first time.
You get it when your mate rings you and drops a bombshell about his drug use, and you help him navigate the early stages of sobriety.
You get it when you create an online support group, and people actually fucking join! Then, they actually talk, and it’s fucking great chat!
It’s hard, man. Believe me, I know.
But the thing is, you’re in a better place now than you ever have been, and it’s because of this journey. It’s the hard shit that you’ve done that has got you here. You feel more than you ever have before. You’re healthier than you’ve ever been before. You’ve surrounded yourself with amazing, like-minded people. You’re slowly inching towards that version of yourself you’ve always wanted to be.
You’re doing things you wanted to do but never had the courage. Stuff you thought was weak or would make you look feminine, and you openly talk about it. Your fear of what others think is slowly but surely disappearing. You sit at the beach with your eyes closed, counting your breaths for 11 minutes straight with people walking by, and you don’t care. You’re writing about gratitude and feelings each night before bed, and it makes you feel good.
You just… feel better more of the time.
You’re finally learning to let your walls down and let people love you without wondering what they want from you. You’re understanding that for some people, you, as you are, are enough. You still don’t get it or see what they see in you, but you’ve learned to accept it and let them. It feels amazing.
Most importantly, though, mate, by learning to let others in and love you, slowly but surely, you’re learning that you’re not so bad after all.
Finally, you’re learning to love yourself for nothing more than who you are.
I’m excited for you to get here.”
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