My belief is that to some degree or another we're all addicts, addicted to feeling good. It's just that some of us get a little lost along the way.
This past summer I spent about a month in Bali, Indonesia and I've just returned from a week in Nosara, Costa Rica. I post pictures to social media as keepsakes and more significantly as a guiding light to hopefully inspire my nieces, nephew and (eventually) my kids to what I found important in life. Besides family and friends, travel is the number one thing that I'm grateful for. It's humbling, connecting and it always shakes me up in ways I can never account for. My life becomes richer with each trip I take. Also, there seems to be some magic behind expressing gratitude - that which you're grateful for, you seem to get more of - in ways you can't even expect.
This might be a strange way to open a piece titled "addiction". But the reality is that my travels, my successes and pretty much most of the good things in my life have come as a result of addiction. Of healing old wounds, overcoming suicidal tendencies, debilitating anxiety, depression and getting sober at the ripe age of 22. Addiction - something that is generally perceived as a weakness, a liability, something to be ashamed of - has actually been one of the biggest gifts in my lifetime.
The fact is I struggled with addiction for most of my teenage years. I started casually having a beer with my older brothers and their friends around the age of 12 or 13. It was a ton of fun at first, in fact for a while, it was a blast. I love a good social life and drinking seemed to facilitate that nicely. I'd party on the weekends and leave it alone during the weekdays, it never really bothered me much to be without it. No obsessing over it, things seemed pretty damn good. I had a bunch of friends, played sports, attended my classes and got on really well with my colleagues at school.
Forward the plow and off I went to college! I was excited and nervous. New school, new people, new experiences. I was a freshman and I was starting on the college lacrosse team. I was a part of a team, a tribe. I had a girlfriend who was attending another university that I was madly in love with and things felt great. I was on top of the world and performing at my peak.
And then it happened, while playing collegiate lacrosse, I suffered a slight tear in one of my groin ligaments. Like any good athlete, I bandaged it up and kept playing. Only my performance started to suffer and as I continued to play, the tear grew.
We made a trip to Hahnemann hospital in Philadelphia and the doctor diagnosed me with a rare injury called "Bilateral Athletic Pubalgia". There were two choices:
have surgery now and be sidelined for a year
take 2 cortisone shots (1x each side) and continue to play
Well, this seemed like a no brainer. Hit me with the shots!
The pain disappeared, it was like magic. Only the physical injury was still there, hidden deep beneath the numbing cortisone. Lurking for it's moment to punish me for not listening to it's first call for attention.
I was on the field and my whole family had traveled to watch me play. I was defending a guy who was slower and less agile than me but he was working me all over the field. Mentally I was pushing myself 150% but physically I was moving at 75%. My mind couldn't reconcile it. I was baffled. How could this guy be owning me!? I played what was the worst game of my life and I was humiliated and ashamed.
That night I partied hard, I was faded by the time I decided to walk home. All I recall was that on the (very challenging) walk I had the most severe pain coming from my legs. In fact, I was having a massive challenge putting one foot in front of the other. For sure the booze was not helping, however this was not just a coordination issue - my axis was definitely on a tilt - but there was something very wrong with my legs!
The next morning was a bitch. A hangover coupled with legs that did not want to function.
Little did I know but this was the beginning of my experience with addiction. Only in hindsight could I recognise that those formative years where I started drinking at an early age, I missed something critical. I missed the lessons of learning how to cope with life when it's not going according to plan or what to do when things go to shit. And now it was time to pay the piper.
I'll spare the details but to sum it up succinctly, alcohol and drugs kept me afloat for next 2 years. Just like when I was younger, I never craved it. I was never the type to mentally obsess over it. But my problem was that once I had one, I flat out had no desire to stop. When I would drink, the pain, the mental anguish would disappear. I would feel a sense of elation, the suffering would halt and I would feel my natural state again... and damn it felt good. I wasn't so much addicted to alcohol as I was addicted to the sensation of joy, elation and just feeling good.
Who can blame me? Isn't that what we all want? To feel good.
My experience with addiction isn't so much about the substance but what the substance did for me. I was addicted to feeling good and unfortunately at the time the only access I had to feeling good was drugs and alcohol. The problem with that path is that addiction becomes a method of sweeping the real problem under a rug and you wind up trading short term joy for long term suffering. Sweep, repeat. A self perpetuating cycle that never ends.
A terrible trade, yes, but when you're in the trenches, it appears to be the only option. You feel so alone and isolated, the substance becomes a friend, an ally. Someone/thing you can turn to and trust. "More" became the general ethos of the period for me.
More. Painkillers, marijuana, occasionally some mushrooms, booze - keep it coming! The less I had to feel the better off I thought I was. The unfortunate thing about this predicament is that what the universe wants you to experience, you can't hide from. The universe will give you more of whatever it wants to experience until it's experienced. At least that has been my lesson. And with the universe, there’s no point in hiding.
But I tried hiding, I tried so hard to escape it. Drinking and drugging frequently. But the more I hid, the harder it hit.
I wound up having surgery. They cut me from hip to hip, going through my lower abdomen to reattach my tendons to my pubic bone. It was a long, slow, torturous recovery. I was told that I wouldn't be able to play lacrosse again. My whole identity was tied up in lacrosse, my heart was rocked - I felt devastated.
Shortly after, the girl I was in love with called me while I was in the hospital and told me she thought we should see other people. Another devastating blow. Two of the things that I loved the most, yanked out from underneath me. In all fairness, I can't blame her. Once things went south on the lacrosse field and I stopped being able to play at my peak, I became anti-social. Hiding in my room, full of anxiety and not knowing really how to communicate with the outside world.
I dropped into a downward spiral. I was out of control. Every waking moment I just wanted to shut it down, turn it off. I was being tortured by my very own mind. I tried to run from the problem but everywhere I would go there I was! Anxiety through the roof, melancholy gnashed its teeth into my heart, I wanted to die. The only door to feeling somewhat okay was substance.
So I used. As a result I would black out, get into fights, do things I wasn't proud of. I totaled a cop car in Philadelphia and suffered a concussion with retrograde amnesia. I was told my memory and concentration would never be the same again, launching my anxiety and depression to new heights. I earned traffic tickets in blackouts and only knew about them when I would stumble upon them weeks later in my glove box. And finally I woke up behind bars for a DUI, right where I belonged. I'll never forget that night, the feeling that it was finally over as the cop put cuffs on me. It was almost as though from outside my body, I was watching them catch the villain, I felt relief. I didn't know what it meant but deep in my body I felt a sense of closure, that this shitty period of time was over - things might stand a chance to start looking up.
When the chips settled it turned out that over the course of a two night weekend, I lost all of my money gambling in Atlantic City. The officer that had arrested me for a DUI tacked on nine tickets in addition to the main offense. I had to get rid of my apartment. I couldn’t afford it anymore. The scorecards all read 0.
I was dragged into recovery with the proposition of two choices:
get sober, stay sober and do whatever my oldest brother tells me to do. Do that and I can live at my parents house until I could afford to find my own place.
take my own path but there will be no shelter for me at my parents. Basically, I was on the streets.
I took option one and as a result the last 11 years have been beyond my wildest dreams. I'm married to a girl I adore. I've lived in Tokyo, Dubai, India, Singapore, Miami. I've made friends in almost every continent. I'm a member of a community that I love. And I'm sitting here proud enough of my life and with enough love and compassion for myself to feel confident to share my story with the intention of hoping to reach anyone that might be suffering from addiction or suffering from just not feeling good. To let you know that you're not alone. And that this too shall pass.
This can go on forever, there was a lot of color to the last 11 years. But I suppose I want to end with a thought, that maybe, just maybe, we're all the same. And that maybe we all suffer from addiction, whether it's an addiction to feeling good or even just to your thoughts (ever notice how much your thoughts control you?) and that just maybe if together we can bring enough compassion and love to ourselves, and accept that we’re all in this boat together, that we can change this world to one where we're all brothers and sisters. To create a world where there’s no need to hide from anything or anyone.
We all have something and we’re so much stronger and more connected when we share it.
