It’s Time I Speak My Truth

The issues you struggle with don’t define you.

Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m an alcoholic.

I found myself speaking these words for the first time while standing in front of 20 colleagues who I’ve worked with for years. We were in Tucson, Arizona, for a leadership retreat with my company, and for an exercise, we were tasked with giving a three-minute speech about something personal.

I’m not sure what came over me. This was a leadership retreat unlike any I’ve done before. It focused on the servant aspect of leadership and emphasized the importance of authenticity. I realized I hadn’t been authentic with many people in my life about my alcohol use disorder (AUD).

As soon as the exercise was announced, I remember thinking to myself, “If not now, then when?” I looked around at these people I loved and respected and made the decision that I was going to tell them my truth. It was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life and I stumbled through my entire speech fighting back tears.

But it was a weight off of my shoulders because not many know about my struggles with alcohol abuse. That same day, I decided I will no longer be scared to share my story.

I hope my story inspires others to tell theirs. Or to finally get help. Or to simply reconsider their view on those that suffer from substance use and mental health issues. We are not the issues we suffer from. We are much more than that.

Here is my story.

I started drinking when I was 18 years old, which was later than many of my friends and acquaintances. I went through high school without actually drinking, probably because of my wonderful parents and my focus on playing baseball at a high level. Spoiler alert: I didn’t make it to professional baseball.

I first started getting drunk when I was in college and it was exhilarating to me. It was a way for me to let my guard down and engage with people. It made me feel much more social and fun. I stopped worrying about my surroundings and having to be in constant control.

I’ve always been a bit uptight, worrying about almost everything in my life. I realize now that I was obsessed with control. I didn’t like going to places where I didn’t know people. I didn’t like riding in other people’s cars because it would mean I was stuck going wherever they wanted to go. And I could only leave whenever they wanted to leave. If my parents were late to anything, like picking me up after baseball, I immediately started running through all the terrifying possibilities, like they had been in a crash and were dead, or my grandma had a stroke and they were with her at the hospital.

Back then, I was oblivious to the steady anxiety inside of me. I had no scale to measure or compare my anxiety, mostly because I had no idea what anxiety was.

Hi, my name is Andy, and I have an anxiety disorder.

I had never thought about anxiety until I had my first panic attack when I was 18, my first year at the University of Dayton. UD was only about twenty minutes away from where I grew up and where my parents still lived, so it was close relative to a lot of my new classmates who were from Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, etc.

It was 2004 and it was finals week. I had never been so stressed in my life. I had been noticing how easy school was for my random roommate, an engineer named Nate, who was a little odd but nice and welcoming. I don’t remember ever seeing him study, but I was confident he was getting really good grades.

I felt dumb around all of these private school kids who were engineering, science, and business majors. They all seemed like upperclassmen who had been doing this for years. I was enrolled in UD’s Sport Management program because I wanted to work in professional sports. I wasn’t exactly here to change the world.

I sat down one afternoon and started thinking about the exams I needed to study for and the papers I had due. I was feeling overwhelmed when, all of a sudden, my face felt like it was on fire, I started sweating profusely, and my heart started beating so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack and pass out. I was alone in my room and had yet to make close friends I could confide in.

A terrifying thought came into my head. “I‘m going to die here…alone.”

For those of you that haven’t experienced a panic attack, consider yourself lucky. Many have. Around 40 million adults have an anxiety disorder, which includes panic disorder, making it the most common mental health illness in the US.

It’s difficult to articulate how terrifying the experience can be. The easiest way I can describe it though is to say, “You feel like and truly believe you are dying.” For an 18-year-old who had never heard of a panic attack before, my brain was unequipped to diagnose the symptoms as a panic attack and so I truly believed I was going to die alone in my dorm room.

Because I didn’t know what it was at the time, I went to my doctor to have some tests done. My test results showed a clean bill of health, with no heart issues as I was sure would be the case. My doctor told me more than likely I suffered a panic attack. He described what it was and I remember thinking to myself, “This is so embarrassing. What a wimp. What is wrong with you?” I couldn’t possibly imagine that “real” men had anxiety and panic attacks. It made no sense to me.

He started me on an antidepressant, which I didn’t want to take, but did because I wanted the anxiety and panic attacks to stop. It’s extremely scary to not trust your body. It felt like it was a time bomb that would explode at random intervals with no warning.

The antidepressant did help after a few weeks, but it was a rough few weeks as I tried to make excuses to my friends and teachers for my absence. I was sure I would be perceived as weak and get laughed at by my guy friends. I didn’t know anybody that had these issues. Hell, I still didn’t understand the issues myself.

After about a month on the antidepressant, I felt like myself again, minus the worrying in the back of my mind about everything. I stopped thinking about having another panic attack. I no longer made escape plans from rooms, made mental notes on where the bathrooms were located, and had my phone fully charged should I need to call 911. Seriously. These were the things I was focused on in class. I finally felt good.

Now that my anxiety issues were “solved” with medication, I went back to drinking and enjoying the full college experience. I further fell in love with alcohol’s ability to make me relax and be more sociable with people, especially people I was continuing to meet for the first time.

There were a few times the rest of freshman year when I drank too much and would throw up, or have a bad hangover the next day, but overall, I was too scared to drink much. It was my first experience with alcohol and I was also on a new antidepressant that had a warning on the label to not use with alcohol, so I mostly kept myself under control.

But as the years went on, I was now completely in love with alcohol and how social it made me. It became common for me to drink 2–3 days a week and blackout every single time. It was funny to talk about with friends. “Dude, what did we do last night?” “Oh, I don’t remember that hahaha!” I chalked it up to the college experience. I thought I was drinking exactly like everybody else.

I realized much later that my friends weren’t blacking out every single time they drank. Sure, they might have too much here or there, but completely blacking out and not remembering the rest of the night? I later learned that it was just me. (To this day, I still haven’t told my friends how often I used to blackout).

I wasn’t a doctor, but I did know then that mixing an antidepressant with a depressant (alcohol) was not smart. However, I did it regularly freshman year in moderation and didn’t have any negative reactions I could observe, so that was good enough for me to feel safe with the combination.

I did notice that my anxiety seemed to be much worse the day after drinking, especially when fully hungover. I typically didn’t leave my house unless I had to, and if I did go out in public, I would experience anxiety about having a panic attack. This was especially true if it was somewhere with a lot of people where I didn’t feel safe, like the grocery. I would worry about what would happen if I had a heart attack or seizure right there around all of these people who didn’t know me. Nobody would save me.

I didn’t realize until years later in psychotherapy that I most likely had agoraphobia, which at its most basic definition is fear of having a panic attack.

Agoraphobia patients can experience sudden panic attacks when traveling to places where they fear they are out of control, help would be difficult to obtain, or they could be embarrassed. During a panic attack, epinephrine is released in large amounts, triggering the body’s natural fight-or-flight response. A panic attack typically has an abrupt onset, building to maximum intensity within 10 to 15 minutes, and rarely lasts longer than 30 minutes. Symptoms of a panic attack include palpitations, rapid heartbeat, sweating, trembling, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, tightness in the throat, and shortness of breath. Many patients report a fear of dying, fear of losing control of emotions, or fear of losing control of behaviors. — Wikipedia

I never considered that my blackouts could have been caused by or correlated with the combination of alcohol and my antidepressant. Again, I thought everybody who drank in college binge drank and blacked out. I’m no different, right?

After I graduated, there were plenty of times I realized I couldn’t drink alcohol safely. I got a DUI when I was 23 and living in Columbus. I lost my license for a full year, went on probation, had to attend an alcohol education weekend program, and was required to attend a number of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I stopped drinking for almost two years after this while I went back to UD to get my MBA. Why did I start drinking again?

Well, after graduating with my MBA and moving to Cincinnati, I soon decided I would drink again, but not that much. After all, I wasn’t addicted to alcohol. I didn’t drink more than once or twice a week. I never drank in the morning. I wasn’t an alcoholic because I wasn’t regularly chugging a liter of cheap vodka in the shower. That’s what alcoholics do, right?

Wrong. People with alcohol use disorder can’t stop or control their alcohol use. They don’t have to have a physical dependence. That was me. I was soon back to blacking out most times I drank. Having a few beers quickly turned into having 10–15 beers. And might as well throw some shots in there, too.

The next day, I always felt terrible. I was hungover. Anxious. I felt ashamed. And alone. I didn’t want to leave the house. I found myself regularly wondering, “Why can’t I just have a couple of beers like my friends?” I was envious of those who said, “Sure, I’ll have a few,” and only drank a few. It seemed so easy. Why couldn’t I do that?

My drinking wasn’t only affecting me. It was also affecting my relationships, especially with girlfriends. It caused me to do and say things I would be embarrassed and ashamed of the next morning. I always begged for another chance and said I’d stop drinking. And it would always be a lie because I wasn’t yet ready to admit I had a problem. I wasn’t ready to admit my truth and make the decision to stop drinking once-and-for-all.

Fast-forward a few years to 2017 when I was 31. My father passed away at the age of 59. He was my idol and my inspiration. I had always admired his work ethic, intelligence, humor, athleticism, manliness, but most of all, his devotion to my mother and our family. He was a man’s man but he was also loving and kind.

My father was also a functioning alcoholic for the last few years of his life. We didn’t talk about it as a family except when it had gotten so bad a few times we had to sit him down and beg him to slow down. And he always apologized and told us he would stop. And then he didn’t because he wasn’t able to.

I consider myself extremely lucky because I was never physically dependent on alcohol. I didn’t have withdrawal symptoms when I didn’t drink. But my father was different. He had trouble sleeping, which I assume came from stress related to his job and his boss, both of which he hated.

He drank beer at night before bed to fall asleep. When I was young, he usually drank one or two a night. At the end of his life, he would drink 8–10 beers every night, seven days a week, to fall asleep because of his physical dependency. He also had issues with overdrinking on the weekends.

I saw a lot of my father in me and it terrified me both for him and my future. I drank way more throughout my teens and 20s than my father did. He didn’t go to college. He worked through his 20’s because he had a family. He was 59 at the time. I kept thinking, “If I keep this up, I might not make 40, let alone 59.” That was tough.

My mom told me shortly after he passed that he wished I had never started drinking. And that all he wanted for me in life was to stop drinking. He never told me that, but my mom eventually did, as she was increasingly worried about my drinking. Even after that devastating last wish from my father, I didn’t stop drinking.

After he passed, I remember feeling like a part of me had been ripped out. It felt like an empty void and I was worried that feeling would never go away. I started to have more nightmares of me getting arrested again for driving drunk. I woke up regularly thinking I had a court date I had to go to or I actually had gotten a DUI the previous night and now had to tell my loved ones.

I missed him so much, and felt so empty, that I started to cry routinely after I binge drank and a few of those times, I told people I wanted to die so I could see my dad again. I don’t remember saying these things, and I did not want to die, but it is pretty descriptive of the deep sadness I was feeling.

I wish I had some profound moment to point to and say, “That’s the day I stopped drinking.” I don’t. I had another embarrassing moment where I was drunk and called my girlfriend and said some mean things. I don’t remember talking to her on the phone. The things I said were certainly not true, and I’m glad she realized that but she told me I had to stop drinking or we were done.

The next morning, I can remember telling her I was done. Remember, I’ve said this many times before. And I was never actually done. Why was this any different? I finally hit my bottom. I felt broken. I was so tired. Tired of apologizing. Tired of feeling so sad and anxious the day after. I was in my 30’s and the hangovers felt 10x worse. It would take me days to recover after blacking out. If I drank on a Saturday night, I wouldn’t feel myself again until Tuesday or Wednesday. I’m assuming it’s because my antidepressant needed to build back up in my system.

Our relationship didn’t work out for other reasons, but she was the person I needed to stop drinking. I honestly believe she saved my life. Or at the very least helped me to save my own life. She was the only person who gave me tough love but also stuck with me. She didn’t simply walk away and wipe her hands of me like the others. For that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

I’ve been sober since September 9, 2019, and I’ve never once considered going back to my previous life. I know how lucky I am. I easily could have been one of the 95,000 people that die each year due to excessive alcohol use. I probably should’ve been one. But I’m not.

I’m here today to tell you that if you suffer from any of these issues, you’re not alone. You are not broken. Or unworthy. Or weak. Your issues and struggles don’t define you. You are much more. I am much more.

Here is the real me:

Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m genuine, passionate, empathetic, and funny. I’m a huge Dayton Flyers basketball fan, a pit bull owner and breed advocate, a voracious reader, a servant leader, a lover of technology, and a learning & development professional.

If you’re struggling with substance use or mental health issues, please get help. It can be a friend, family member, colleague, medical professional, or hotline. But please, take the first step and ask for help. Your future self will thank you.

Here are a few resources:

• mentalhealth.gov
• Mental Health is Health
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
• National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism

If you know of other helpful resources, please comment and I can add them.