This is a post about addiction and recovery. It is way outside my ‘whimsical games’ lane and I completely understand if you’d like to skip it.
I have no plans to write about this again, and I promise I will be back to building nonsense soon.
That’s a decade without a drink for me.
After I quit I was hungry for stories. So today I’d like to share my own.
Let’s start at the end
I’m not actually sure that today is the day. It could be the 16th or the 18th.
What I know is that late in December 2014, cops showed up at my door. The few people still in my life hadn’t heard from me in almost a month. I hadn’t shown up for work. My parents assumed I was dead and asked the local police to do a wellness check on me.
But when the cops showed up I was alive and sober. I had quit - cold turkey - and emerged from several days of severe withdrawal a few hours before they arrived. I was conscious enough that the cops didn’t clock just how bad things had been. They told me to call my parents and left.
(Delerium tremens can kill you; Wikipedia tells me the fatality rate without treatment is ~25%. If you’re in a similar spot please seek medical attention instead of going cold turkey)
My best guess is that withdrawal lasted about 3 days. My memories of it are fuzzy. I know I spent it curled up in the dark on my ikea couch surrounded by half-empty bottles of wine; that I sweat and retched and shook; that I couldn’t tell whether I was dreaming. When I remember that period I remember it top-down - a camera attached to my ceiling looking down at me in a dark room.
The cops showed up on the 20th, so I think I quit on the 17th. Knowing the exact day felt important when it had only been weeks. And then it mattered less when it had been years. And now, for a bit, it feels important again.
And work backwards for a bit
It’s hard to know how much of my story to tell you. I was in active addiction from late 2008 through the end of 2014. That’s a lot of time. I don’t want to write a 30-page blog bragging about how hard I had it, and I’ve got some other things to say.
But I’ll tell you a little bit more, because it’s cathartic for me and because I want you to understand.
2014
In 2014 I lived in Virginia and worked at Amazon. I’d been there for most of a year, and my routine was “go to work, come home, drink 2 to 3 bottles of wine, pass out.” I had no friends or hobbies and spent my weekends blackout drunk.
That summer I found a way to buy bulk stimulants online. Stimulants were what drew me into addiction way back in 2008; alcohol came later, once things got bad, as a way to not think about how bad things were.
I took too many stimulants. I took way too many stimulants. I threw up a lot. I started having trouble walking short distances. And then one day in September I woke up and knew that something was very wrong.
I don’t know how to describe “knowing that you’re about to die” so I won’t try. But I knew, and I called my dad, and he understood that I had been lying, that I had relapsed, that I needed immediate help. He told me to call 911. I called 911, and I collapsed against my fridge, and I woke up in the hospital.
I got out, well aware that I had almost died, and I went back to drinking. I waited a bit - death is scary. But that’s what addicts do. I held down my job for a little longer.
One Monday I woke up at noon, still a little drunk. I was already on thin ice at work, and I decided “well, I guess I don’t go to work anymore.” And I went back to drinking.
In mid-November I got a text from my friend J that said “CALL ME NOW.” He and my friend S had flown across the country without telling me and were about 30 minutes away from my apartment. At the time I didn’t recognize this for what it clearly was.
(I destroyed most of my pre-sobriety relationships, but I’ve managed to keep J and S around. I love them both.)
I tricked J and S, kind of, while they stayed with me. I got drunk late at night and my withdrawal was tolerable during the day. They left. I gave up. I spent every waking hour drunk for about a month. My only memory from this time is heading back to my apartment, wine in tow, alarm bells blaring in my head. All I wanted to do was get home and get drunk enough that I couldn’t think about what I was doing.
And then, for a reason I will never understand, I stopped.
And the cops showed up, and they told me to call my parents, and I called my parents and I knew that something was different and I think they heard in my voice that something was different, and they believed me, and they helped me one last time before giving up forever, and I am so so so lucky that they did.
2013 and before
Look, there’s too much here. It’s hard - I want to write down everything, in perfect detail, as much as I can remember. But I need to go faster than that. The ending is happy and I want to get there.
My addiction started in the Fall of 2008, when I took speed to stay up all night doing homework.
It got worse when I went to college in 2009. I spent 3 semesters in college and dropped out. I went back in 2012 and didn’t meet a single person before dropping out at the end of the semester. I think I made my last friend in 2010.
I ruined almost every relationship I had. I stole a lot. I was depressed, but also anxious, but also embarrassed, but also scared, but also in disbelief that It Had Happened To Me. At college #2 I put my mattress on the floor and made a little tent so that I could sleep, drunk, all day.
My friends started to catch on in 2010. My parents caught on in 2012. Looking back on it, plenty of folks — colleagues, acquaintances — knew something was wrong with me but didn’t know what to say.
I went to rehab at the end of 2012. I left rehab sober but knew it wouldn’t last. I got my job at Amazon and moved across the country and drank a lot and was very sad.
It was bad, all the time, in every way, for years.
But things are good now. And they’ve been good for a long time. Writing about this feels more like recounting history I learned for a test than talking about my past. It’s distant and it feels fake. I sometimes have to remind myself that it’s not.
Let’s move on.
Recovery
I wish I understood why or how I stopped. I wish I could transmit to you how you might stop.
Addiction is a disease that makes quitting hard, even though you’re ruining your life, even though you want to, even though you know that you must.
It isn’t sufficient to want to quit. But, like any behavioral change, it is necessary to want to quit. Quitting is scary because you must face how bad things were; the worse things get the scarier quitting is.
And on December 17th I reached a point of acceptance and desperation that pushed me just far enough to try, one more time, for just long enough that it stuck.
Folks in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) often call your breaking point - the point at which you are capable of beginning the process of quitting - your “rock bottom.”
Speaking of AA
AA is a miraculous piece of social technology.
The day after the cops showed up, I looked up where the nearest and soonest AA meeting was. There was a meeting close by. Every time I’ve looked for a meeting there’s been one close by. I walked there, to a sideroom in a church in my Virginia suburb.
And I showed up, and there were 10 people sitting in chairs in a circle, and everybody was twice my age. And I told them that I hadn’t had a drink in a few days, that the cops had showed up, that I had no job and no idea how to function and that I was scared. And I had no friends, but these strangers listened to me and they were kind to me and they understood.
And I cry whenever I think about that meeting, and I will always cry whenever I think about that meeting, because it saved my life and because it is astounding that that meeting would have been there for me almost anywhere in the country.
Lost time
I think a lot about lost time. I’m lucky that things got bad while I was young; I was 23 when I quit. But at least 2010 through 2014 are lost to me.
Early in recovery I was desperate to return to a normal life, even though I knew I was far from capable of living a normal life. I wanted things to go faster.
It took me:
- 3 months to be remotely functional
- 6 months to get a job
- 8 months to make a friend
- 9 months to begin dating (this was too soon)
- 30 months to feel (a little) comfortable at parties
- 45 months to produce work that I was proud of
I obsessed for years with catching up. I was envious of peers who had, I imagined, gone to college and had fun and learned to socialize and found their interests and made friends and learned how computers worked and remembered what two’s complement was and how to do linear algebra.
So I worked hard. I worked to catch up to my peers and to learn everything that I “should” know. I worked weekends and late nights. I worked hard because I loved working and because it was fun and felt good and because it meant that my brain wasn’t broken, that everything wasn’t ruined, that I could still make it.
I didn’t think about what I wanted to do. I just worked. And I did some great work, and I learned a lot, and I achieved, by accident, the financial independence to do something else.
It took me:
- 84 months to consider what I wanted to do with my life
- 87 months to begin quitting my job
- 96 months to finish quitting my job
- 100 months to make this site
- 107 months to produce art that I am still proud of
- 115 months to appear on wikipedia
- 120 months to write this essay
I don’t talk about quitting much
I’ve met a lot of people in the last two years. And if you asked those people whether they knew someone who had been to rehab I’m not sure any of them would mention me.
Folks who have known me for longer might mention me. But if you asked them for details — if you asked them how bad things were — I think most would have no idea.
And most of the time I think that’s fine. Addiction is not a fun conversational topic. I don’t mind talking about it, but it’s a lot and people often don’t know how to respond and you only get so many conversations in your life and I want most of mine to be fun. So when someone asks me why I don’t drink I’m typically vague.
But quitting is and always will be the most consequential thing I have ever done. Nothing else matters if I don’t quit. If I hadn’t quit I’d be dead and I wouldn’t have done anything else and we never would have met and I wouldn’t have made this site or found my calling or discovered those brilliant teens or hugged my sister again or met my baby cousin or adopted a dog or made a really funny joke about New Yorkers having 30 words for “I’m walkin here” to my girlfriend 5 years ago while we were having dinner before a James Blake concert.
So it feels nice to write this all down. And it makes me wonder what I don’t know about my friends. Do I know the most consequential thing that they’ve done?
Addiction changed me and I don’t know how
Addiction must have changed me. Surely the version of Nolen that never had a drug problem and never needed to quit is different. But I don’t really understand how.
There are negatives. I embarrassed myself a lot while drinking and I am socially anxious now in ways that I have to assume are connected to that. I hurt a lot of people while drinking and I worry a lot about hurting people now. I have no idea how to think about the damage I did to my friends and family.
But there are positives!
My worst day 2018 was so much better than any day of 2014. I am positive and energetic and full of joy for life and I think that is part of why.
Making up for lost time is a powerful motivator, and I’m proud of how hard I have worked over the last decade to end up where I am.
When I do karaoke people are impressed to learn that I’m sober, because how in the world could someone be comfortable shouting that loudly and looking that stupid without a few drinks.
What now
When I write something I try to think about my target audience. And this time I don’t know who that is.
Are you a friend, reading this to know a little more about me? A reader of my blog who thought I made a new game? Are you struggling to quit, or newly sober, or oldly sober, or sober-curious? I don’t know.
But I can leave you with what I would have wanted to hear on December 17th, 2014:
Your heart is still there. And your brain is still there. And it’s very hard, it’s so hard, and I believe in you. And you should go to a meeting.