365 Days

Raw dogging life for a year straight

1 year.
12 months.
52 weeks.
365 days.
8760 hours.
525,600 minutes.
31,536,000 seconds.

A year feels like a long time, but it passes in the blink of an eye. The older you get, the faster the time moves. A fucked up paradox that comes for us all, and sometimes keeps me up at night. Getting completely sober, and just raw dogging life, no matter what the days brought, was brutal at times. You’d be surprised at how little time you spend thinking about the bigger picture when you’re going through the motions of bouncing from bender to bender.

THE AMOUNT OF TIME WASTED

I used drugs and drank for nearly 20 years. Started at 12. Ended at just before 32. I had a few stints of being “California Sober”, but it was bullshit. Instead of drinking, I’d wind up blacking out in K-holes and breaking shit. Instead of coke, I’d take adderall or vyvanse by the handful and get geeked out of my fucking skull for days. This past year was the first time I truly cut it all out. Everything. No booze. No weed. No psychedelics. None of the fun party stuff. No ADD meds.

Fucking nothing.

I opened this piece with a breakdown of the time I have spent dead sober so far.
Let’s crunch the numbers for the 20 years I was not:

20 years.
240 months.
1042 weeks.
7300 days.
10,512,000 minutes.
630,720,000 seconds.

The difference is glaring. When you break down the numbers, it’s almost painful to read. Obviously, I wasn’t high for every single one of those seconds, but I was for a gross majority. And for the ones in the shit, and the ones that got out of it, you already know those sober ones when you’re caught up in that lifestyle just count less. Less productive. Less fulfilling. Feeling like shit. Trying to catch back up to the time already wasted. A vicious cycle that many don’t get out of. I lost track of all the friends and acquaintances that died along the way. They never made it out.

A PAINFUL CLARITY

Being sober has provided a painful level of clarity. If anyone reading this has ever been in an NA or AA meeting room, they’ve probably run into a common character there.

He’s fully committed.
Loves the game.
Loves the room.
He fucking loves you too.
Preaches from his soapbox every chance he gets.
Dubs the program and sobriety as a fucking miracle.

Getting sober isn’t a fucking miracle. It’s not magic. It’s not going to immediately solve all your problems.

The level of clarity you get after an extended period of sobriety (6-9+ months) is uncomfortable. It’s painful. It’s going to make you question everything about yourself and your life. But that’s a good thing. Because for the first time in years to decades your brain is finally escaping from a fog. From fried neurotransmitters. From extreme sleep deprivation. From operating out of a survival instinct. From poor nutrition and physical health. From poor mental health. From fucked up relationships that drain your body, mind and soul more than you could’ve ever realized in the moment.

Whether you do the steps or not, this clarity will eventually force you to do an inventory on yourself, your friends, your position in life, your career, and your finances.

The things you did good.
The things you fucked up miserably.
The things that slipped right through your fingers because you were too high to do anything to stop it.

And that painful clarity leading to some hard life analysis is what will begin the internal sparks for some actual change and upheaval in your life. People will come, people will go. You will quickly outgrow anything around you that was previously holding back. It will keep you awake at night. I know it did for me.

But now I’ve got some baseline data to pull from that wasn’t skewed by a fried and sleep deprived operating system. I can see where my time goes. Which choices have been beneficial, and which were utter failures. Exactly how and why and I was living in denial. Denial might not even be the correct word for this; insanity is much closer.

MENTAL SHARPNESS

While using, if I wanted to be productive, I’d usually have to be on a metric fuck ton of hard stimulants to get going. To stay awake. To stay focused. Just to have what I would now consider a basic level of memory recall. I was what most would consider a high functioning addict. On enough drugs to break the average human, but still able to function normally at work, school or in life. Only the ones closest to me could tell I was high, we all have our tell tale signs. If you think you don’t, the people closest to you just don’t know how to break it to you. Trust me on this...

This is something that took a while for me to notice. Once the fog began to lift I noticed I needed less coffee. My memory was much sharper. I was able to crunch numbers much quicker. My attention span improved. The work ethic I had always possessed grew stronger, week in, week out. Even the way I spoke sounded clearer. I was no longer tripping over words sober. Or having the occasional slur while trying to pronounce something. Forgetting where I was going with a topic. Conversations flowed more freely. Books became interesting again. This improved my confidence and sense of wellbeing. Multiple raises and promotions at work followed.

It’s truly something you don’t notice until you have some time dead sober. While I was doing the California sober attempts, this just wasn’t there.

I told myself the same lie over and over again:
“At least I’m not drinking or doing coke”. That never gave my brain or mind a chance to rewire and heal the damage done.

Real physical and mental recovery doesn’t start until your system is fully cleaned out, and anyone who tells you otherwise is still coping and struggling, whether they realize it or not. It takes a while, in some cases years. At day 0, a few years sounds like an eternity. But at day 365, you can’t believe it’s already been a year.

FINANCIAL GAINS

No more $500 nights out at the bar that led into another $300 the following morning to grab another 8 ball of coke. No more worrying about getting DUIs while driving, or dealing with the tens of thousands in legal headaches that come with getting one. No more missed work. No fights, no drunk tanks.

All of a sudden, you’ve got the extra dollars to keep DCA’ing aggressively in the stock market or bitcoin. Think about it like this. Run the numbers. Every single dollar you spent on coke, or whatever the fuck your choice of poison was. The dollars lost to legal issues. Shit, maybe your use led you right into a nasty divorce. You crashed a car. Maybe two. Credit score nuked from missed payments, and now you’re drowning in loan shark levels of interest payments. Take those numbers, and run the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of those same dollars sitting in something like BTC, or NVDA. Think about the opportunity costs of having those dollars sit and compound for a decade or more, instead of getting vaporized in your nostrils on another Saturday night that accomplished fucking nothing. The math is brutal.

YOU’RE RUNNING THROUGH LIFE BLIND WITHOUT REALIZING IT

You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your reputation.
You’re blind to the damage you’re causing your loved ones.
You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your body.
You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your mind.
You’re blind to the damage you’re doing to your soul.

You just don’t see it. You either don’t realize it, or your subconscious will pick up on it, only to have your conscious mind beat it into submission with a heavy dose of your preferred poison. You’ll cope. You’ll live in denial. You’ll tell yourself next week will be different. Next month will be different. Next year will be different. Time will fly by. And you’ll find yourself high. Again. Years later. Repeating the same lesson in an infinite loop. And the more time that slips through your fingers, the more the damage compounds. It will rot everything in your life slowly. Under the surface. Where you can’t see it, or choose not to see it.

You’ll lose relationships, marriages and friends.
You’ll probably lose a few jobs, or burn your business to the ground.
You might spend some time in jail (the drugs are there too).
You might lose limbs.
You might lose motor function of body parts due to bad reactions from years of abuse.
You might die.

YOU CAN STILL HAVE FUN

You probably got into drinking at an early age. End of elementary. Maybe the start of junior high. Start out raiding the parents’ liquor cabinet, stealing it from stores, or standing around outside of one to get someone to buy you a bottle. That’s how you learned to have fun. The harder stuff comes out as you get older and from there, it’s just the status quo. You can’t imagine going out to a bar or going to a concert without a few bottles of wine and bag coke in your pocket. You might be so used to the liquid courage derived from liquor that you’re now convinced you can’t socialize without it.

I’ve been there. Those first 6 months, where it just fucking sucks. You might white knuckle a few nights out at the bar with your friends, sipping on water, coffee, or a red bull. Probably slightly irritated with the drunk people around you, looking like they are having fun, and you’re just lost in your own head. If you can tough it out, it genuinely gets better. Over time you’ll begin to appreciate hanging with your drunk friends at bars, weddings or other events. You’ll like the fact you only spent $50 on a nice steak, instead of $250 on drinks, half of which you spilled all over yourself. You know you’ve got your car parked close by you can hop into at any time. You’ll be able to scan the area and know right away, when it’s time to leave. And you’ll wake up the next morning feeling great, losing zero days to being hungover.

You’ll find new hobbies, or you’ll start taking care of shit you’ve been neglecting. Buddy of mine, 9 months sober, spent the nights he would’ve spent in the bar finishing his basement. Piece by piece. And he fucking loved it. For him, up next is an appraisal on the house, and then pulling some equity to purchase another property. All it took was 9 months. That’s what those benders were robbing from him for years.

OVERALL

If you’re struggling, and you’ve had the thoughts of quitting, go for it. Do whatever you need to do. Hit a meeting or two. Move if you have to. The fact is, you are running out of time. And your benders act as a direct multiplier on the burn rate for whatever you might have left. No more looking at yourself in the mirror after a multi day bender, seeing the light slowly dim in your eyes. That spark of your soul, slowly getting extinguished and dying inside you.

I’m truly lucky to be alive, and to not be in jail. And even after almost going through with both, I still didn’t end up getting sober. It took many more years of self inflicted punishment to wake the fuck up.

Too many rock bottoms to count, because they do not truly exist. It will just compound and get worse.

Just focus on the next 24 hours.
Then do it again.