The first time I drank alcohol I was 14 years old.
It was a foamy room temperature Bud Light from a beer ball.
I had scored the winning goal for our varsity hockey team in the championship game of a New Year’s tournament. My parents let me (read as trusted me) go to a New Year’s Eve party with the upperclassmen on my team.
It was a sleepover.
I was the only Freshman there.
I slept in a bed with two Seniors. Females. One was a peer advisor.
The next morning we went to an iHop, drowned pancakes in syrup and used orange juice to take Tylenol. I learned what it meant to have a hangover. I also learned how to fix a mimosa. A teammate made them for us under the table with the 6oz bottles of cheap champagne he snuck in through the kangaroo pocket of his team issued sweatshirt.
The table toasted me, “Happy New Year!” I scored the winning goal, I was the only freshman at the party, I hooked-up with her.
With them.
This installed a series of narratives that would direct the next decade of my life.
That drinking alcohol, doing drugs, and partying was what popular, well-liked, and admired people do.
That drinking alcohol, doing drugs, and partying attracted women to me, or suppressed my insecurities enough that I could perform and attract women to me.
That drinking more alcohol, doing more drugs, and partying more than peers, would lead to wilder stories. At the time creating an identity synonymous with wild was my goal.
Attention was the reward. Rejection the punishment.
I feared rejection so much that I used alcohol to continue developing into the person that got attention, even if deep down it was out of alignment with who I was.
Today, I’m embarrassed that this was aspirational to me. Not only did I subscribe to it, but I promoted it. This what was I sought, what I encouraged, and demanded of our others.
If you were friend enough to challenge me on this lifestyle, I eliminated you from my life. All I wanted was people to bring down with me. If I was going to self-sabotage and lie myself into a dependency, while advertise it as advantageous, I needed people to believe it true.
Sobriety has corrected all the above, and then some. It saved me.
It’s because of sobriety that I am thriving.
Sobriety is my superpower.
The immediate effects of sobriety came in the middle of the night.
Sleep is the foundation of Health. As Matthew Walker wrote in Why We Sleep, “Sleep is more than a pillar of health; it is the foundation on which the other two health bastions sit.”
For a decade, I had thought the cure to restlessness, bouts of insomnia, and red eye flights was a glass or two of of the good stuff. Sobriety corrected that.
It was Walker’s Why We Sleep that explained why:
“The most misunderstood of all “sleep aids” is alcohol. Many individuals believe alcohol helps them to fall asleep more easily, or even offers sounder sleep throughout the night. Both are resolutely untrue. Alcohol does not induce natural sleep. Alcohol fragments sleep, littering the night with brief awakenings. Unfortunately, most of these nighttime awakenings go unnoticed by the sleeper and individuals therefore fail to link alcohol consumption the night before with feelings of next-day exhaustion caused by the undetected sleep disruption sandwiched in between. Alcohol will also often suppress REM sleep, especially during the first half or two-thirds of the night. People consuming even moderate amounts of alcohol in the afternoon and/or evening can inadvertently deprive themselves of dream sleep. Alcohol-infused sleep is therefore not continuous and, as a result, not restorative.”
Walker wraps with a bit of convincing advice, “The annoying advice of abstinence is the best, and most honest, I can offer.”
As wonderful as sleep is, alcohol would always keep me in bed for much longer than the recommend 7–9. Not only would I snooze alarms into the afternoon, but hangovers would pin me to couches for full days. The effects of alcohol were robbing my days, just as much as my nights. We already spend so much of our life sleeping, I’m no longer interested in wasting more moments horizontal reaching for hydration and headache relievers.
The next upgrade came with a floater of vanity.
Beyond telling me to be confident, alcohol told me I was hungry.
Drunk me liked to eat, everything. I once went to a dollar beer bar in Boston and ran up a $137 tab with only 12 beers. 6 plates of Nachos and 20 buffalo wings will do that.
My drinking weight was around 195 pounds, and riddled with injuries and joint pain. Today, 3 years into sobriety, I weigh 168 pounds and am in what I call life shape. I can answer any invite. Bike 100 miles for charity? Sure. Hike a mountain? Yes. Run a 5k tomorrow morning? Sign me up. Go camping? Fuck no, but that’s just because I don’t much like camping. Because of sobriety, I can treat life like an adventure.
Then there is my skin. When you are hydrated, getting great sleep, and not putting damaging substances into your body, there’s a constant gloaming glow to your skin. I also get healthier doses of sun with natural outdoor movements.
Sobriety also allows me to avoid the alarming effects alcohol has on my immune system and make better decisions that would have put my body as risk before. I’m less likely to drive a car drunk, get in a fight, or impulse jump off something dangerous.
Sobriety has done much more than apply new siding.
I was in the lobby of the MIT library, rehearsing for an investor meeting. I was weak on the financials, getting there but stumbling.
“Why should I invest in you?” We were still roll playing. “Well,” I started, “I’m an Ivy League graduate with a double major in Economics and Political Science. I’m the former captain of the US National Team Under 18 Men’s Hockey team with 2 golds and 3 silvers. I’m a former professional athlete and member of the Italian Men’s National team. I was previously employee number #6 in a company that grew to 50+, I’m curious, I’m without distraction, and I’m sober.”
“Stop. Don’t say that. It opens a convo we don’t need to have and I don’t want to communicate instability,” my cofounder said.
She was wrong. Sobriety was exactly why they should invest, sobriety is my superpower.
The professional benefits of sobriety compound.
Through constant clarity, restful sleep, and intentional scheduling, I find myself not only with a time surplus, but more creativity, more energy, able to incubate ideas deeper, and that I’m more efficient when I work. What used to take days may now take a focused few hours. When your mind has no alterations, it’s constantly making progress. Every thought is working for me now, advancing me towards my goals.
Sobriety also launched my writing career. It gave me more time to engage in deeper research, to pursue curiosities, and has provided me perspective I lacked before.
The final frontier of sobriety is the mind.
There’s a difference between not drinking and sobriety. Simply not drinking is abstinence. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to doing “the work.” The work differs person to person. It has no required pace, but it does demand your attention. Progress has no speed, just a direction. My work has been through weekly therapy, meditation, active reading listening, and sometimes just sitting quietly in a room alone.
I needed to not only unsew how I thought the world worked, but I needed to deeply heal my insecurities and understand why I used alcohol to quiet them in the previous chapter of my life.
I needed to confront my ego, to understand it, and to find the courage to begin pursuing my true curiosities.
I needed to find the language to introduce myself new self to old friends.
I needed to learn to love myself.
I needed to start healing.
I also needed to learn compassion. For myself.
Kobe Campbell said, “Healing is not becoming the best version of yourself, healing is letting the worst version of yourself be loved.” Every day, I continue doing this work. That’s what sobriety is and why it’s my superpower.
Over 3 years, I’ve learned how to speak about sobriety and retrace my steps in society.
At an outdoor bar, the bartender asked if I wanted a beer or well drink. I told him “No thanks, I have a drug and alcohol problem. I’ll just grab a water.”
This response startles most people. They laugh and the ice is broken across the group I’m with.
But still, the bartenders think I’m joking, so do strangers. That’s because I don’t look like what they’d been told alcoholics look like.
Unfortunately, dramatized characters in film and television have allowed many to exclude themselves from questioning their relationship to alcohol, and a cultural glorification of alcohol consumption has only created more distance.
My job isn’t to inform you what counts as alcohol misuse, you can find those humbling definitions here and here, but to at least highlight that alcoholism doesn’t exist. Alcohol use disorder does. And it’s quite common.
Chances are if you’ve ever drank alcohol before, you’ve misused it. My hands are empty, only you can hold a mirror to yourself, your behavior, and your patterns.
What I do encourage those who ask is to remain curious and to challenge your beliefs. Maybe, like me, you’ll find that alcohol in fact is the single biggest parachute in your life and that sobriety could be your superpower too.
-
Every year, I reflect on the previous 365 days of my sobriety with a Soberversary piece. Each Soberversary piece is published as a collectable NFT with a quantity of 26 to celebrate the age at which I chose sobriety. The price of each NFT set in hundredths of 1 ETH, equal to the Soberversary number being reflected on.