Oh jeez, where do I even begin… This may be a long first post. Oh yeah, this is my first post, by the way, so hello.
My name is Adam, and I’m a 26 year old tile worker. I am about to get my “one day chip”, and I wanted to get my story out there. So, let me just start from the beginning:
My struggles with addiction began long before I was born, with my parents. They were both users of meth at the time. When I was 2 or 3 years old, my parents moved our small family, younger brother wasn’t born yet, to Colorado to get away from all the drugs that were flowing through orange county and the rest of the addicted family. It was at that time my parents put down the drugs for good, but my mother instantly switched to vodka and box wine to cope. She never looked back.
In 1998, my mother, older brother and I took a Greyhound to go stay with my grandmother so my father could get our living situation in order. We stayed there for 6 months, where I turned 5 years old. I want to say it was around this time that my mother’s drinking really began to ramp up. When we took the bus back after Christmas, my father had worked hard and we had a shiny new apartment in CO to come home to. My brother and I even had our own rooms for the first time ever! We lived there for one year before we moved back to CA, but about 500 miles away from where we started in Orange County.
It wasn’t seen as strange to see mom with water bottles full of boxed White Zinfandel, or to find empty half pints of peppermint in the bedroom trash bin. Being a little kid, I don’t think I really was able to put two and two together, because I had seen it almost all my life. She would take naps all the time, especially while my father was at work. After some time, my guess is between 2006-2008, my mother found out she had partial cirrhosis of her liver, and it was around then I recall my mom first going to AA. That didn’t stop the drinking, though.
I remember my mom’s drinking becoming much more of a talking point in the following years, and our family unit began to show cracks. I was still young and naive, however, and I still didn’t really put 2 and 2 together. This continued until we had to start calling the ambulance to help her after she started vomiting blood and chunks of internal body. My little brother was around at this point, and his small child eyes bore witness to a score of awful things I did not personally see. I was in middle/high school by this point, and was almost always out with friends. For me, drinking wasn’t on my radar at that time.
In 2011, a best friend of mine was killed, thrown out of a car and off a bridge to his death in a DUI crash in Sacramento. I vowed never to drink and drive, or to let those demons take me over…
Fast forward to 2012,
The family moved for my father’s new job to the East Bay Area, and this is when things began to get BAD. for both my mother and I. My mother was frequent in AA at this time, but she could rarely get past a one day or one week chip. I had just started college for music composition, and this is when I started to get in to drinking.
I took to drinking like a fish seeing water for the first time. Many of my friends were in their later twenties and into their thirties. They were veterans at partying, and I quickly learned to keep up. I got huge into the craft beer scene, and had an extensive bottle collection in my room. I began to get shit faced regularly, sometimes moving to booze, buying personal 12 packs of high strength brews, handles of booze, all personal for the most part.
This is when I started to slip. My parents were finding me passed out in my car, passed out in the hall, the bathroom, the bush, etc, and I landed my first DUI at the age of 20 in 2013 after driving my car into a wall just outside our neighborhood. I blew a .23, and The downfall was immediate.
I had a BAD underage DUI so I was car-less, my long-term, long-distance girlfriend of 4 years -we started dating in high school in the sacramento area- broke it off with me, I was kicked out of my band, I had to leave college, my mother couldn’t cope with her own demons and landed herself back in rehab, my family lost their trust in me.
I didn’t learn to get better on my drinking, but I became a pro at hiding and stashing my copious amounts of alcohol, usually under loads of unclean laundry in my closet. Multiple packs of beer, handles of booze. I’d put one of those handles of booze in to my 5’9" 120 lbs body in three days or so, and this is when the body pains started. A solid shit wasn’t seen for years.
Less than two years later, In 2015, I was 21 and had a car again, now with a new shiny breathalyzer. I couldn’t cope, I needed more beer, so I took my mom’s car instead and drove into a tree just outside our neighborhood. I blew a .25 this time. I got kicked out, but was invited back home after two weeks. My stubborn as even brought booze back with me from Sacramento. We moved to the Central valley shortly after, following another of my father’s jobs.
We lived in a house for 6 months before my father simply couldn’t take my mother being hammered all the time. We all moved out, my mother to her own place, and the divorce began. in early 2016 I noticed my mother hadn’t answered my calls in two days, so I went to check up on her. She wasn’t there, and her apartment was full of empty boxes of wine and moldy food, even the fridge food…
She was in the hospital.
I didn’t go see her at first, I couldn’t muster the heart. The 27 months of DUI class I had gone through had taught me the end stages of alcohol abuse, and I just couldn’t bring myself to see. There were a few times I even went to her floor in the hospital, but turned back, my head low. 4 days after she was admitted, I saw her.
She was on the phone with her sister, and I was relieved when she instantly recognized me and got off the phone to chat. She was hallucinating BAD and her short-term memory was going. She told me fanciful stories of what she had been up to, seeing her father -who lived in Reno, seeing her sisters -idaho/michigan, seeing her sisters first husband, the cook -he killed himself 20 years ago. My heart was sinking, and it was at this point I saw the lights flip in her eyes, and she asked me if I had seen Adam yet, that she was waiting for him… Boom…
Wet brain. 47 years old.
I still didn’t learn. I was completely out of control at this point. My mother got out of the hospital, and moved down south. Back to her family for 24/7 help and I continued to drink, ignoring my own failing health.
2017
I started dating a toxic Mormon girl. She didn’t drink, but she didn’t try to stop me either, and I was drinking HARD. My family was in pain from losing my mom and actively losing their son, but “that would never happen to me”, of course.
A year later I was kicked out by my father after multiple threats, and I moved in with Mormon girl’s family. It was an hour drive home now, and I drank on the drive home every day. I showed up fucked up all the time, often only lasting an hour or two before passing out on the living room couch I now called home. I lasted two months there before our personal issues got the best of me and I left. I chose to live in my car rather than stay.
I found a room for rent on Craigslist the following day, 5 minutes drive from work. I was now totally free. I drank and drank and drank, and 2 months later I landed DUI #3 at age 25. No crash this time, but I blew a .28 . I was given 150 days this time, but was able to opt for house arrest because I had rent to pay and a full-time job. The day I was supposed to get off was the day COVID shutdown happened in fresno county. Long story short, I did 240 of my 150 days on $14/day HA.
Staying sober this time was actually a no-brainer. I knew I would be faced with BAD jail time and homelessness if I drank, so … I just didn’t. It wasn’t hard for me. It’s like the addiction was just gone.
The day before I actually got off house arrest in June of this year, my younger brother and I got an apartment together under the rules I wasn’t allowed to drink at all. I have failed that rule just about every single day since then, and he has caught me about 4 or 5 times. I started drinking the very day I got off, back to the races.
He has taken many of my possessions to try and stop me: PS3, laptop, vape, bank cards, all my hundreds of beloved books, but I took it as a challenge. Because who the hell is going to tell ME what to do?! Why was it so easy to quit for court, but impossible for my own damn family?
Alcohol had turned me into a professional snake, liar, thirf…
Fast forward to Monday:
He found a shot of whisky on my desk. He realized he couldn’t stop me, and that I was hammered and I saw the look of utter defeat in his eyes, the way his shoulders slumped as he walked out with his head low, the way he just swing my door shut and quietly said to go to bed. No tears, we’ve cried together many times over my addiction. He already had his mother taken, and he’s watching it take his brother as well.
Seeing that look of defeat and acceptance in his eyes was a light switch for me… He gave me my bank card to pay for a clinic bill and said he didn’t want it back…
He doesn’t want to live with me anymore.
He doesn’t want to see me
Or talk to me.
I’ve been sober for a day now, but even that is a victory. I’m done hurting my family, my life, my job, my friends, my future.
I’m done hurting myself. I’m done with alcohol.