Day 3: Where It Started

Nobody picks up a bottle for the first time and thinks they are starting their journey towards becoming an addict…

Odds are, you picked it up because someone handed it to you because they’d found escape at the bottom of the bottle, or because everyone around you was doing it, or because something inside you was loud and you needed it to go quiet for a while, and you heard that this is what alcohol provided.

The first drink is never about addiction; half the people I’ve spoken to don’t even know alcohol is addictive (it is very addictive). People’s intro to alcohol is often about relief, belonging, or being a teen in a world that does not make sense, and you’re searching for anything that makes it feel like it does.

All of those examples were me…

I was thirteen when I remember making the decision to drink with the intent to get “fucked up”. It wasn’t a party; it was me being curious. Alcohol was already in the house. I viewed it as something that made people happier; it was already woven into every celebration and loss I had ever witnessed in the lives of the adults around me.

Drinking was not something I discovered; it was something I inherited.

I think my mother’s suicide, feelings of abandonment, moving to a new home, suffering SA, and much more were, at 13 years old, too much trauma for my brain to handle, and the unprocessed traumas found an escape…

When you can’t handle the terrible events happening in your life, what you do is you just carry it around, quietly, in the background of everything, like a sound you have heard so long you stop noticing it is there, but it’s always lurking, just behind the mask you’ve built. But when you find something that turns the volume down, you reach for it every time it gets loud again.

I grew up in a house that is like most middle-class houses in America; Happy? Drink. Celebrating? Drink. Grieving? Drink. Stressed? Drink. It was not a character flaw in the people around me; it was the culture. It was what adults did, what men did, and when you grow up watching something long enough, you do not question it; you just wait until you are old enough to join in.

I did not wait that long.

When you have that first drink at such a young age, there is no moment where you feel yourself crossing a line; you just feel better, the noise gets quieter, and the weight gets lighter. The secret screaming version of yourself that you drag around gets a little easier to carry, and your brain, which is too young, files that away under “Alcohol equals relief.”

That equation gets written into your operating system before you are old enough to question it, and it runs in the background for years before you even know it is there.

By the time I was in high school, drinking was not something I did on weekends; it was something I did whenever I could. I was sent to “Scared Straight” in middle school, stayed back as a Freshman, spending five years in high school, and somehow I graduated and joined the Navy (The best decision of my life).

I struggled in school, not because I was stupid, but because I was checked out, angry, and lost. While most kids were going through “growing pains” as teens, I was carrying a weight I had never been given the tools to put down. The school system had no idea what to do with me; they didn’t know the secrets I kept, and honestly, I had no idea what to do with myself either, so I drank.

To bring it back to my best decision ever, I joined the Navy at nineteen, and while I learned how to channel all the energy I had, I also walked straight into a culture that had turned drinking into a sport.

We worked hard, we partied hard, we deployed, we saw things, we experienced leaving families behind, we came back, we drank, and it was the reward, the release, and how a group of men who had been operating on adrenaline, monsters, and discipline for months came back down to something that felt like normal. Nobody questioned the drunken sailor; it was who we were.

I fit right in.

The problem was not that I drank; the problem was why I drank. Every single person around me was drinking for the same surface reasons of unwinding, celebrating, connecting, but underneath my reason was something older and heavier that none of those drinks were ever going to touch.

I did not know that yet, so I kept reaching for the bottle, wondering why the relief never lasted. I became the Navy drunk who out-drank the drunks.

I share my story to show you what it is I want you to think about today, Your drinking started somewhere, too.

Not the first sip, but the first reason; the environment that made it normal, and the feeling that was solved. The age you were when you learned that alcohol was the answer is a part of that story.

Most people never go back and look at that moment; they start their sobriety from today and wonder why it does not stick. It doesn’t stick because the root is still in the ground; we are going back to the root, find that, and the true healing process can occur.

Your Day 3 Sober-Challenge

Write down the earliest memory you have of alcohol being present in your life. Not your first drink necessarily, but the first time you remember alcohol existing in your world.

How old were you? Who was there? What was the feeling in the room?

Then answer the question, “What feeling were you chasing the first time you drank?”

Those two things together are the beginning of your story, and you cannot rewrite a story you have never read. Take some time, and go back into your life, chapter by chapter, until you find the first one with alcohol in it.

- Zac