Confessions // Relativity
I was 15 years old and my pastimes consisted of neighborly antagonism, womanizing and extreme, prolonged intoxication. To shake loose from the structural toxicity that housed and conformed me, I impelled myself into a fantasy-land foray of disarrayed behavior and rebellious chaos, shattering the conceivable architecture of my civilized life. In doing so, I became intricately nested in crowds of young men who disobeyed laws and lived to feel, often in an exaggerated, intense manner. My actionable role within the whole was progressive, beginning with sober, unruly conduct such as minor vandalism, trespassing, petty theft and communal disruption, mutating into booze-infused mayhem, massive parties, police encounters and general illegality. Seemingly, I did not know better—this was my liberation, my salvation, my connection to something greater, my own micro-sized world of madness-based sanity, and it worked, at least for awhile.
Before turning 17, I had witnessed gang-violence at least twice—in the first, assault by wooden baseball bats at one of our group’s classic “bush-parties;” in the second, a stabbing, preceded by an attack with bear mace at an out-of-control house party. Both instances drove my closest friend and I to flee, into the forest in the former and into my parked vehicle in the latter, where the attempted-murderer later showed up seeking refuge, entering for a moment, covered in blood, before being coerced to leave. I was associated with a small-time gang, a group of older guys who did shady things with shady people, joined by the aforementioned friend, my most reliable lifeline at the time, who had met these people through his work and introduced me to their streamlined realm of darkness.
Despite the group’s sketchy dealings, the majority of which my friend and I were not directly involved in, they were family. They looked out for us, offering protection and stability in a world otherwise gone from our grasping desire for control. They knew pretty women and supplied vast quantities of fancy booze, teaching us how to fight and hustle, acting as a baseboard of sturdy comfort which we both so keenly sought. With such an affiliation came perils, of course, not only those of observed harm and criminality—it substantially warped my sense of morality, detracting from the family-based goodness my father had attempted to distill in me, giving me a taste of the unhinged hedonistic bliss that came with unfettered partying and wild, twisted nights of havoc.
Before this group there was another—peers from my school who consumed crazy volumes of marijuana and bottom-shelf beer while roaming the streets of west-Edmonton, searching for incidental trouble and disorderly escape. An amazing sensation of freedom was found in such nights—the hours between 2 and 5AM left just us and the streets, nothing off-limits in our endeavors of discovery, inflicting enough environmental damage to be mutinous yet not enough to be evil, flirting that fine line between youthful exploratory defiance and condemnable offenders. We would gaze at the sunset after a long journey of carelessness, cracking our final beers to attenuate the creeping realization of impending normalcy, the return of integral citizens in a society governed by rules, at least until the next time, which usually was not far away.
Inevitably, this was a passing phase and I soon grew apart from these friends, provoking the transition from member of an unlawful collective to destructive, unstable individual, unable to halt the incessant party-life, constantly trying to revive those early-day feelings of wonderous autonomy and belonging. Instead of pursuing reformation and redirection, I channeled this chaotic derangement inwards. I blossomed into a shameless man-child, a dilapidated party-favor who could drink your local lowlife pub’s gnarliest alcoholics under their own tables before even reaching the legal age of drinking. I once set fire to my comrade’s furniture in a swift act of idiotic pride, playing loose and dangerous with bottles of should-be-illegal Everclear, perpetually blanketing my insides with 180-proof liquor just to prove I could, entertaining anyone who dared to partake in my corrupted rituals. I spent at least half of my young-adult nights blacking out due to consumption, losing memory of whatever mess I would abandon to the formless void, in years where my brain was yet moldable, still developing inherently crucial circuitries that would serve my executive functionality for life.
This is what I knew—this is simply what happened. There was never an instant where I could stop and question what exactly was unfolding. I was surrounded by enablers for years, willful participants of my compulsive self-poisoning, some who blatantly protested when I finally decided to get better. To them, a fleeting teenaged dreamland; to me, a death-sentence, doled out in abundance with ample shame, self-hatred and suffering. I was convicted from the first time I got wasted, from my first joint that spiraled into habitual usage, from my first time inebriated behind the wheel a moving vehicle. On countless occasions I was beat-up in a belligerent state of total self-absence, showing up to family affairs with hideous cuts and bruises layering my fresh face, not to be questioned, but accepted as status-quo, shoved away under the metaphorical rug to be filed as “don’t ask, don’t tell," along with the many other nameless travesties that littered my daily being.
I was the guy who showed up plastered for his high-school graduation ceremony, reeking of cheap whiskey and Pall Mall while embracing his sweet old, still proud grandmother. On numerous occurrences I would slowly blink back into conscious perception with not the faintest clue of where I was, sometimes naked, covered in filth, devoured by a rapidly-hastening inkling to sort out my next fix, and quickly, lest the malicious imprint of shaking nightmares became too raw, forcing me to face whatever stupid stunt I had pulled with a sober mind—not a chance in snow-white hell, not in that period of my life. Alcoholism is said to be progressive and for the first decade of my addictive career, this notion was appreciably valid. The bleakness of my late-stage drinking career, around the years of 2015-16, was incomprehensible—I was all but dead, cut-off from self and humanity with a dwindling urge to survive.
One of my sharpest memories from that duration is coming out of a blackout in a running bathtub with my ear split cleanly in half. I had a newfound affinity for sleeping pills—zopiclone, which reared its metallic ugliness many times in the decade to follow—and I had combined a bottle of whiskey with a vial of pills, losing approximately 8 hours of conscious time. Whether this was attempted suicide or reckless conventionality, I do not know. The former would have made sense—I despised my existence so strongly that I could not stand to glance in a mirror, lest my grotesque figure hauntingly pierce my bubble of debauchery, so riddled with disgust and self-pity that I could not dare ask for help. I clearly needed stiches yet the shame prevented me from entering a hospital, so I rigged myself a sling-like bandage that wrapped around my head.
Despite my then diseased soul, I was somehow holding down a well-paying and highly-technical coop-engineering position at a world-class oil company, and in the days following I was to present my work to a room of higher-ups, a grossly amateur appendage fixed to my ear, spotted with old blood and fresh pus, evidently in rough shape. In accordance with thematic normality of the time, nobody said a word about it—I was the office drunkard and this was just another hilarious stunt I had pulled in a standard weekend of delirium. My own family hardly inquired—I had allegedly hurt my ear playing football with friends, and this coating of disguise was enough to dissuade genuine interest in my sanity.
My body has always been a pressure point—owing to the sheer volume of calorie-dense beer, putrid cheap spirits and greasy pub-food, my physicality faced a massive toll. In the worst of it, I was grossly overweight and not in a typical way—I was bloated, the skin on my torso, arms and legs was stretched so expansively that deep, lightning-bolt shaped scars had formed, a result of leaving a semi-normal weight rapidly, affected also by alcohol’s ability to destroy the natural elasticity of healthy skin. I live with these aesthetic defects to this day—they serve as a reminder of where I have been and how I once treated my earthly vessel. It took years of willful therapeutics to accept how I look and the irreparable damage struck to my embodied form. I have struggled with shades of dysmorphia, a shifting image of my body’s shape and appearance, generally a function of mental fortitude and levels of wellness.
My internal organs suffered a similar destruction—in my early 20s I was diagnosed with liver damage and ulcers, and for multiple years in succession a terrible gnawing pain actively taunted me, situated somewhere around my liver/pancreas region, accompanied by a greasy, stabbing in my back. It is difficult to relive these days nearly a decade beyond them—I was utterly trapped, waiting to die yet terrified by the prospect. Pure hopelessness permeated the fundamental essence of my livelihood; suffering was all I understood yet simultaneously seemed so senseless. Binge-drinking was my respite yet ultimately did nothing but amplify my suffering and worsen my situational circumstance.
Life got darker before it improved—2016 marked the pinnacle of my alcoholism, featuring two overseas trips that were non-stop, hardcore benders, my health fastened to a globalized minimum, my potential as a human being entirely masked and eroded by my fatalistic condition. I had graduated from university in volatile fashion, terribly hungover at convocation where I received a medal to commend my academic performance, all of this in the wake of a departmental party saturated with insanity, a night that went tragically south and tore apart multiyear long friendships in a drug-infused instant. My reputation on campus was dual-faceted and contradictory, known both as a formidable intellectual force and an unpredictable, wild party-animal for whom trouble tailed like a shadow.
Post graduation, I departed my hometown for a month-long stay in Japan, accompanying an old friend now turned lost-connection who had been one of my core drinking companions for years. He was meeting me in the heart of Tokyo and I was meant to bring some critical documents delivered originally from his father. Unfortunately, the night I met his old man to exchange the package, I was hammered and misplaced it in a total blackout, coming to in a frenzied panic as I realized what I had done, searching high and wide throughout the streets and bars that may have entertained it. It was gone, I made the call to tell his father and I will never forget the anger, the yelling—I had made an enemy, I felt awful, one of the most dreadful feelings I have ever hosted. I was not to be trusted—my uncontrollable alcoholic madness made me a liability and everyone knew it, myself included.
Regardless, the adventure through beautiful Japan ensued, my friend considerably less angry than his father, and somehow we both survived the resultant dishevelment. There are things that happened in Japan that should probably stay there, and I feel a reparation is owed to the country as a whole for the stupidity we introduced to its peaceful lands. By its end, I was afraid to step onto a plane, concerned that I would need some emergency treatment in the air and die an untimely alcoholic death. I recall wandering through a Japanese hospital bewildered and drained from the non-stop, full-throttle madness that has taken place since my arrival. I made it home, however, and fell immediately back into the boiling pot of benderism in light of my family’s then traditional “ski-golf weekend,” an event of united belligerence with old acquaintances.
On one of these nights, after a 12-hour shift of heavy-boozing, out came a surprise bag of psilocybin mushrooms. Not being one to turn down consumables, I ingested a handful and entered a nightmare, mentally destroyed from my time abroad and totally unfit for psychedelia, at one point writing a suicide note and threatening to kill the oafish friend who had offered the drugs. Radio silence deafened the following day, and soon I was on a bus home, feeling indescribably awful, inhuman, a morphing, warping, alienated shell of a person confined in silence yet screaming internally, begging for something to change or my life to end. Life did change, miraculously-so over the following three years—something shifted on that miserable bus, change was effected, not linearly so but sporadically and overarchingly, loosing nearly 100lb and giving up alcohol entirely for over 3.5 years, entering graduate school and eventually publishing a strong theoretical paper in multiphase fluid dynamics.
I clawed my way back from the dead—I located a will to live and I was sticking with it, no matter what happened. My friends, with whom I had drank and used for so long, met my newly found attitude with resistance, creating a universal friction that transmuted into distance in the times that came. I was not sober—I had largely switched to kratom, a plant-based legal opioid, and weed, allowing me to first salvage my body and develop a semblance of stability. I also began experimenting with a wide range of entheogenic, psychedelic, nootropic and prescription substances, sometimes inducing incredible, life-transforming experiences and other times landing me in the hospital, traumatized and wary. I devoted countless hours to the mirror of my apartment, finally coming to know and love myself after years of self-hatred and destruction. I used MDMA often—its potential for healing is profound and I owe a great deal to it; however, its usage alone is not recommended, as it brings with it inherent risks and pitfalls, which can be read about in an article I wrote months ago.
I wish I could tell you that life was all uphill from here—this is far from the reality, however, as my father’s sudden death in early 2019 catalyzed an entirely separate and arduous journey into the depths of hell, lasting nearly 5 years, segregated by multiple devastating events, periods of unbelievable drug abuse and addiction, wild spiritual explorations and metaphysical absurdities, police encounters, psychiatric visits, dealings with the legal system, toxic relationships, betrayals, deep-isolationism and more, concluding with a 7-week stay at an inpatient treatment center on Vancouver Island. This secondary life is highlighted by lasting traumatic incidence and inexplicable distortions of ordinary consciousness, comparable in magnitudes of suffering to my original journey yet entirely different, incomparable with respect to self-connection, purpose and inter-relationality.
Life in the present has become rewarding, enriching and fulfilling, the aftermath of a 17 year undulating battle with a wide variety of substance addictions and mental health struggles. I am everlastingly grateful for all that I have and all I have seen, for it has molded me into who I am today and supplied me with fuel that drives me towards altruism and actualization. My body is still moderately dysfunctional and likely suffers damage that will never fully heal; however, relatively speaking, I am incredibly fortunate. I straddled the edge of death innumerable times and walked away able-bodied and equipped with all my standard senses, and that is a wonderful gift. This essay includes only a fraction of all that transpired—I deliberate on the utilitarianism of outlining the entire story, which would require a moderately-long novel to do so, likely proving to be both cathartic and capable of assisting others on their paths. Perhaps this will come to fruition one day—for now, I remain vigilant and self-aware to continuously propel myself in the forward direction. Just one drink or drug could drag me back into a world of hurt and I have far too much to lose. In thankful contemplation, I celebrate 8 months of sustained sobriety this coming week.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this please consider sharing with a friend or subscribing if you have not already.