I have not had a drink since December 31, 2018.
I haven’t talked much about this here because in a way I didn’t feel like it was relevant. However, I’m not sure this blog would be here if it weren’t for giving up drinking. I doubt I would have let alcohol go if it hadn’t been for psychedelics. Why did I think this wasn’t relevant?
For one, I have a hard time calling my lifestyle “sobriety.” Before my 11-year bender, I spent a third of my life “clean and sober” in a 12-step fellowship and part of me still sees the concept of sobriety that way. My current lifestyle would not fly if I was still running with that crowd. It seems so stupid. I was hopelessly and aggressively addicted to nicotine for all 15 years that I spent in that fellowship. Most of my friends were too. Why was that ok? How could we really say we were dealing with or recovering from addiction when we were still actively addicted to a drug?
I also felt like I couldn’t really take credit for quitting drinking. The spiritual paradigm shift I experienced on mushrooms changed my mindset so much that, when I stopped drinking, it didn’t really feel like I was doing anything. It felt more like I was watching it happen; like it was just something to observe; like it was an inevitability. There was this one hellish trip in July of 2018 where the voice of the tryptamines was mocking me for my sense of agency. Laughing at me and my hubris for thinking that I had choices for how things could go for me after the awakening I’d had in March.
There was also the post-enlightenment decision I’d made to discontinue taking SSRI medication I’d been taking for almost 9 years. It was a strange, risky choice. I felt like Lexapro was giving me an out from the real fallout of my alcohol addiction. The depression caused by my hangovers could only get so bad with them in place. By discontinuing them, I felt I could force my own hand. I’d be removing the buffer and have to take alcohols blows directly on the chin. And for a few months, I sure did. After getting off my meds, having a couple of beers would make me sad for 3 days. Tying one on would make me want to stay in bed for a week. And god forbid I used cocaine and alcohol...the suicidal ideation scared me so much I thought I might have to check myself into a hospital. It was clear, I no longer had the serotonin to spare on drinking. I just could not do it anymore. When I awoke in hell on New Year’s Day 2019, I told myself, “I’m not gonna do this for a while.”
After 9 months of abstaining from alcohol, I’m not sure why I was surprised that my relationship with cannabis changed too. In a moment of intense, psychological crisis in at the end of September, I reached out to an old therapist for guidance. I was experiencing many intense PTSD symptoms ranging from panic and depression to flashbacks and dissociative/depersonalization episodes. It was brutal. He suggested that I might want to try taking a break from all substances for a month or two to see if that helped. I gathered up all the grass in the apartment and smoked it all in a big, silly, last hurrah. It felt really stupid and empty.
Two weeks later, my symptoms all radically decreased in severity. Some of them disappeared entirely. I couldn’t believe it. I looked through some old emails from 2008 and 2009 that I’d exchanged with my therapist and remembered the conflicting feelings I’d had about smoking weed even back then. I wondered, “Did I EVER really like smoking pot or did I just want to like it this whole time?” Toward the end of November, when I decided to just take a single hit from my one-hitter to see what I thought about it after a two-month break, I had to admit I didn’t think much of it at all. Since then I’ve smoked weed 5 or 6 times and I haven’t enjoyed it all that much. Music sounds great when I’m high but that’s about it. Otherwise it makes following the plot of a movie or the flow of a conversation annoyingly difficult now. I usually end up regretting having done it.
Why am I writing all this? I think I just needed to write this to give myself a little credit. I’d been treating these lifestyle changes like all the glory had to go to psychedelics. Psychedelics brought my mind to a place where I, at least for a moment, believed that I was actually a complete, valid, real person; one that didn’t need to feel ashamed to exist or work towards annihilating myself. The real work is in learning how to be that person and the practice.
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