Retiring from alcohol was one of the best decisions of my life

I saved at least $15,000!

A year ago today, Kevin Harrish, one of my best friends, walked into my then-landlord’s spare half of a house that I shared at the time with my wonderful ex-girlfriend, who was at work being a productive member of society.

To say I was “down bad” at the time would be an understatement. My chronic alcoholism, which in retrospect became unmanageable in February 2020 and only devolved from there, had my friends unwilling to watch me gradually kill myself.

As Kevin told me that day, I wasn’t at rock bottom. I had a roof over my head, and many people cared about me despite my selfish behavior escalating over the past six months. It got to the point where I could’t even ride my bike .8 of a mile home from the bar without injuring myself. The bar and my landlord’s spare half of a house were on the same road, too. It was a straight shot.

On Nov. 5th, 2022, roughly 40 days into my newfound sobriety, I went to sleep proud of myself. Labor Day is my favorite holiday on the calendar, and I traditionally used the three-day weekend as an excuse to binge drink. More impressively, I had watched a massive Ohio State vs. Notre Dame game (eat shit, Irish) without sipping from a cup of mind poison.

Unbeknownst to me, one of the best friends of my life, Greg Coleman Jr., was lying unconscious on High Street, mere miles from my bed, after two stone-cold losers beat him within an inch of his life, robbed his pockets, left him for dead, and then uploaded video of the heinous crime to Facebook as a point of personal pride.

My first instinct was to return to my old favorite crutch. Walk down the street to the bar and order the double Tito and Sprites until the pain went away. Had I been under 30 days then, I might have done just that.

I’m glad I didn’t. Numbing the pain is only a temporary solution. It also would have been wildly disrespectful to his memory. Greg knew me as a drinker. We had drank gallons of alcohol together in our heyday. But I have come to deeply regret that he never got to meet me without the alcohol.

After that, surviving football season was my goal. Of all the bullshit excuses I fed myself for why I couldn’t stop drinking. What would I do during the football season on those beautiful fall days when Ohio society handed me a blank check to drink like a fool?

But it turned out that I enjoyed watching football with my friends even if I didn’t drink. And that’s when I realized an important lesson: If you can’t do something or hang out with certain people without drinking, then you don’t like that activity, and those people aren’t actually your friends. They’re your drinking buddies.

According to my sobriety clock, I have saved $15,626.17 in the last year. That’s a conservative number, too, considering it doesn’t include all the money I would have spent after drinking four shots of Tito’s and acting like I was the Monopoly Man.

I have saved my body 505,264 empty calories of mind poison. Again, a conservative number that doesn’t include the idiotic meals I would have eaten while under the influence or the 3,000-calorie meals I would have eaten the next day while hungover on my couch.

Most importantly, I’ve saved 1,041.77 hours. The rough equivalent of 43 days in the last 365 of not obliterating my mind with alcohol. Because that’s what you also realize when you quit drinking, how time-consuming it is to have a hobby that slowly kills you.

Go to the store. Purchase the alcohol. Go home. Consume it over several hours. And those 43 days also don’t include the time I would have spent doing nothing but wishing to die on my couch while suffering a crippling hangover.

Are there times I miss drinking? Absolutely. I would probably pay an obscene amount to have a normal brain about alcohol. I would love to be able to get properly drunk, like, three to five times a year. I’d love for my friends to know it was indeed a special occasion worth celebrating if they saw me with a drink in my hand.

But for better and worse, that’s not how my mind works. There are no rules I can place on myself. If I had a drink tonight to celebrate, I wouldn’t instantly morph back into that broken-down alcoholic who used to purchase pints of Tito at 9 a.m. at the liquor store across the street just to beat the hangover.

But, as Kevin said a year ago, I would be back on the road to destruction. Maybe in the next life I won’t be an alcoholic. But in this one, it’s never just “a couple drinks” for me.

Because I’ve had every experience a man can have with booze. I had some of the best times in my life, but it’s also caused me and people I have loved more pain than I care to list in a public blog post. And near the end, the bad outweighed the good.

I said when I began this quest that I’ve never heard someone say something like, “I went sober for three years, and it was the worst decision of my life.” My only regret about retiring from alcohol is that I didn’t do it sooner despite the many flashing warning signs.

It has made me a better person in all walks of life

What’s your secret to success?

Luke O’Neil, a writer more talented and famous than me, had a line that always stuck with me. He said talking to sober friends was always like hearing about your friend’s trip to Tokyo. At the end, they’d say, “If you ever get the chance, you should check out Tokyo.”

And you always say, “Oh, for sure, man. Definitely. Sounds awesome.” Meanwhile, you know damn well you’re never seeing Tokyo.

I used to say there are two types of people—those that drank and those that don’t. I thought I had made my decision. But in the last year, I’ve done things I never thought I could do sober. Football season. Holidays. Shitty weather days. Moments of celebration. Days of depression. Paradise weather days. Weddings. Vacation! (It’s incredible the money you save on vacation by not drinking from when you wake up to when you pass out. Somebody should write a book about that.)

In the past year, friends and strangers have asked me for my secrets, like I’m a sage of sobriety who won’t be fighting this battle forever. But here is my advice on what I’ve learned in the last year.

• The first two weeks are the hardest. I only stopped drinking that day because my ex-girlfriend sent Kevin to my house to babysit me like a toddler. In those early days, I was winning by the hour because my body craved empty calories. My solution was to eat a pint of vanilla bean ice cream with salt and olive oil every night as a reward for the epic accomplishment of not drinking alcohol. Type 2 Diabetes is easier to manage than Tito’s.

• Marijuana. My big secret to my first nine months of “sobriety” was smoking military-grade marijuana around the clock. Yes, it was less destructive than alcohol, but my addict brain got the better of me. All that stuff about the crazy things weed will do to your mind that you see in 1950s anti-weed propaganda films? That’s all true if you smoke enough of it, save the axe murdering of white women. I put weed right next to the Tito. As of today, it’s been 104 days without the Devil’s lettuce. It’s been as positive an impact on my life as quitting in terms of health, finances and time management.

• The Iron Triangle. Quitting drinking left me with tons of time that a therapist advised I fill with healthy hobbies like an adult. I targeted reading, writing and biking. If the urge to drink struck, I’d do one of those three activities. I'd do the other two if I were doing one of those activities already. If you don’t have three hobbies that are productive and at which you excel, choose some! You will have more time on your hands than you know.

• Stay out of bars, at least early on. Even when I was drunk, the idea of being sober in a bar was my idea of Hell. It was a significant change in my social life, considering that it was usually based on the question of what bar I was hitting that particular night. I’d stay out of them early on until you grasp your sobriety. Your drinking buddies will get you drunk before you get them sober.

• Exercise. It sounds simple and cliché. Because it is. And I am not the first person to say, “Biking saved my life,” but it doesn’t change my feelings. I bought a used bike at a Merion Village garage sale for $75 for two-mile commutes to the gym and home. Last week, I broke my single-day biking record with 76 miles. I’m on pace to bike over 4,000 miles this year.

• Therapy. Rehab wasn’t an option for me for numerous reasons. If it were, I would have liked to have been locked in a room for 30 days at the start of my quest. But I have kept seeing my therapist, and a psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft, which has made a world of difference. The flashes of anger, the bouts of long depression, have dissipated.

• Your social circle will change, and that’s fine. Your friends will always be there. And more importantly, your friends are the ones that would stop you if you walked into their house with a bottle of vodka. Talk to them and be open about your desire to quit. They will work with you. There will probably be some people you view as friends that don’t come around once you quit drinking. That’s fine. Let them go because that’s what separates your friends from drinking buddies.

• Don’t kill yourself if you relapse. I’ve learned that most people relapse five or six times before it sticks. I’m not saying a relapse is no big deal, but don’t let the shame or disappointment drive you back to where you don’t want to go. It’s always a good day to begin a life without alcohol.

And alcoholism is a disease, but at the end of the day, you are the only one who can control putting the nasty juice down your throat. If you think you have a drinking problem, you probably do! Lord knows I did. Don’t let your bullshit excuses prevent you from being a better person.

After 30 days, the financial and health benefits become visible. You will begin stacking the results, and everything becomes easier. Just set a goal and try to get there; if you want to go back to drinking, alcohol will always be there.

If any reader has any other questions, feel free to email me. I promise you I’ve probably been there, and I hold zero judgment on those trying to better themselves. And having somebody to talk you out of those urges might be the most important lesson of them all.

THOSE WMDs. Fake illnesses, illness fakers, and the problems with medical testimony… An elite school, a boy’s suicide, and a question of blame… The ironic pursuit of low-class aesthetics in high fashion… How the Gilgo Beach suspect was found… The biggest wastes of time we regret when we get older.