I got to sit down with Kevin Lanning on his Rise Above podcast recently and lay the whole thing out: what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. Everyone assumes there is one terrible night that flips the switch. I had that night, and then I got out of jail and bought two 40s.
I got to spend an hour and fifteen minutes with Kevin Lanning on his Rise Above podcast recently, and it was a genuine gift to have the room to lay the whole thing out properly: what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now. The full episode is up top if you'd rather watch than read.
People hear that story and assume it's what got me sober.
Did the crash get me sober?
No. And I'm embarrassed to say that out loud.
End of October 2006. I'm 21. I've got a minor in possession behind me and a DUI at 20, so this is offense number three. My younger brother Danny is living with me and he wants a cheeseburger from Jack in the Box. That's it. That's the whole reason we're in the car.
I'm drinking, and I'm also on prescribed Klonopin for my anxiety at this point. I didn't realize how dangerous that combination was, even though it says on every bottle not to mix alcohol with medications. Truthfully, I'd decided that was simply for other people.
I black out driving. I had blacked out plenty of times by then (that part felt almost normal), but never once behind the wheel.
All I remember is the car flipping and dirt in my mouth, trying to spit it out, and not understanding what's happening while it's happening. We went off the side, rolled up a hill and came back down onto the road, and somehow the car landed upright. The door came off, the rims were gone, there were sparks everywhere, and somehow I'm holding the door on and still driving, still trying to get away.
Meanwhile, my brother Danny is telling me his neck hurts.
I made it to a gas station and called a buddy to come and get me. Then I told my brother we had to go, in my selfish mind, because I didn't want to go back to jail. Meanwhile, his response was that he couldn't move.
There's a moment sitting next to the dumpsters, which ironically felt like exactly where I belonged, where I had to pick: run and save myself, or stay with my brother.
For whatever reason, I chose to stay. Honestly, I think I was just tired of running at that point. I laid down next to him on the asphalt and held him while we waited for the police. I'd like to tell you that was character, but truth be told I think it was just the one decent instinct I had left.
I blew a 0.08 and Danny blew a 0.30, which almost certainly saved his life, because alcohol levels that high meant his body was completely loose on impact instead of braced against it. He fractured his C1 and C2, the same two vertebrae Christopher Reeve broke. Reeve severed his spinal cord. My brother came within millimeters of severing his. Best case, had his spinal cord been severed, was the remainder of his life in full paralysis or potentially a "vegetable." Worst case could have been death.
Thankfully, by some miracle, he was in a neck brace for about three months and made a full recovery. He's got a daughter now, and around eleven years sober himself.
Back to the story of the crash, though. Two weeks after that incident I got out of jail, and the first thing I did was buy two 40s.
What does rock bottom actually mean?
I was standing outside a gas station in ripped clothes drinking malt liquor with a guy who had more DUIs than me. Some stranger felt so sorry for me that he gave me the jacket off his back. He must have thought I was homeless.
Crazy to think, straight out of jail two weeks after breaking my brother's neck, and this is where my instincts took me. Does that sound like someone who had hit rock bottom?
So if you're sat there waiting for the event that fixes you? I'd stop waiting. I had the event. It was as bad as events get without somebody dying, and it did not do the job.
In the rooms they'll tell you there are three ways out of active addiction: jails, institutions, and death. I had already collected the first one, and I came within millimeters of handing my brother and myself the third. What nobody warns you is that you can always dig the hole deeper. There's no floor that stops you. Which is exactly why walking out the other side into recovery is worth more than I know how to put in a sentence.
What it did do was different, and I think more useful. It changed my family. It became the thing I still measure myself against. And it started the slow work of admitting I couldn't keep living in a state where I believed I was a good person while my actions said otherwise.
None of that is a bottom, though. It's a beginning, and I still had a long way left to fall before I understood which one I was standing on.
Where it actually started
Long before any of this. I was taking, or sneaking, my first drinks at or around the age of thirteen, and access only got easier as the years went on, particularly once I hit a driving age. So, predictably, did my consumption.
Somewhere in all of that I was throwing up before school, out the window of my truck on the way to my girlfriend's house, into the trash can walking down the hallway, convinced the whole time that I had an ulcer or that something else was physically wrong with me. Ultimately, nobody could tell me what "it" was.
Turns out it was anxiety. It just took years before anybody put that word on it, and by then I had already found something that worked faster than any word ever could.
Because when I found alcohol, for the first time in my life the noise in my head went quiet. That's the whole story, really. Everything after that is just tolerance doing what tolerance does. One drink stops working, so it's two, then three, then eight, then drinking on an empty stomach so it hits faster. And then come the blackouts. You probably know the pattern, or you know someone living in it.
As is the case with most things, I don't really have anyone to point the blame at other than myself.
Because honestly, my folks are good people. My dad's a heart surgeon and my mom's an artist, which is a pretty great balance of left brain and right brain, and they've been married over forty years. A couple of siblings. Arguably a nice household, albeit with our own layers of chaos and anxiety for sure.
They put me in treatment at sixteen when they found bottles in my truck. There's no trauma to necessarily point at here. It was honestly just what was happening inside my own head.
Addiction doesn't check your background first, and it never has.
What actually worked
My last drink was one beer on a flight to Los Angeles, November 27th, 2006. (If I'd known it was the last one, believe me, I'd have had considerably more.) My sobriety date is the 28th.
Treatment ended up being the best part of a full calendar year: 60 days inpatient with no phone and no contact with the outside world, then six months of outpatient, then ninety days of house arrest on top. That first stretch, I got woken up and walked straight into groups. I was sick as hell, probably detoxing, though nobody thought to explain that part to me at the time.
What I had was a couch, a lot of time, and a copy of the Big Book, which they gave to me (and I'm not much of a reader, despite being a writer. Just ask anyone who knows me). I read the first 64 pages anyway, and somehow they made sense, so I continued on.
Then came the meetings. There was this one at 26th and Broadway in Los Angeles that I wasn't sure of at first, but ultimately really clicked for me. I don't think there was anything special about that room necessarily (although I could still draw you the street corner). I just stopped arguing long enough to actually listen.
I was told to listen for the similarities rather than the differences, which sounds simple until you try it. That instruction changed everything, because I'd spent years certain that nobody understood the specific chaos in my head. Then people started describing my exact thoughts out loud, and it turned out I wasn't unique at all.
Nowhere in the Big Book of AA does it actually tell you how to stop drinking. Coming up on twenty years later, that one still gets me. There's no instruction anywhere in it. The whole thing assumes you're already done, and then shows you how to live now that you are.
What I needed was a solution for living, and alcohol had been exactly that until the day it stopped working.
It doesn't stop being hard
So does it get easy? I'm coming up on twenty years now, and life still happens.
A few years back I blew my eardrum while diving on my birthday, of all days, doing the thing I love most in this world. Three years later, half my hearing on that side is still gone, presumably from the pressure damage. I never saw it coming, the doctors still can't tell me exactly what's wrong, and I live with daily pain from it.
It ended deep diving for me, and I don't scuba at all anymore. I only recently got back into free diving, which I do shallow now and with plugs, and honestly at this point I'm just grateful to be back in the water at all.
And later came a variety of other physical pains that persisted in my body, some of which are still very present and bothersome, and seemingly without resolution or proper diagnoses. That was some of the most depressing time of my life.
Then a relationship I thought would last the rest of my life went belly up relatively quickly, roughly nine months later. After that, fresh lines of work I was moving into collapsed, and my former work projects closed out and were completed. The money I had worked years to accumulate went into a bad investment that ultimately I was stuck in and couldn't find a way out of.
I got super depressed, at times with regular suicidal ideation. I wasn't actively trying to end things, but most days I was thinking that my 38 years of life had been a good run and that it was clear to me my best years were behind me, which is its own quiet way of giving up.
What moved it for me was a change of lens, rather than any kind of breakthrough. Some of that came from bumping into a man I'd followed for years, someone who has grown through tremendous challenges and difficulties. His name is Nick Santonastasso, and by pure chance, while I was sitting in a corner writing my book Love Unlocked, I happened to meet him in a random place in Bali where I live. This man has one arm, one finger and no legs, and he has built a life most of us have never dreamed of, and he continues on. It's hard to hold onto a list of grievances and marinate in your own struggles when you're standing in front of that. Honestly, it was a godshot, and it arrived at one of the times I needed one most.
Beyond that is the idea of service. Giving back. Gratitude lists, inventory in the morning, going out and being useful to someone else. Another fast way out of your own head: go get into someone else's day.
Listen to the whole thing
If any of this is grabbing your attention and you find yourself relating to it, please reach out to me. There is help available, and there are a lot of us out here who have walked it.
I'd also encourage you to listen to the whole conversation. Kevin is in recovery himself, a former Google executive, and he knows how to ask amazing questions while carrying a tremendous amount of humility with him. We covered all of it: the childhood, the anxiety, the crash, jail, the Big Book, the hard years since, what I'm going through presently, and hopefully some ways you can find your way out of it too.
The full episode is embedded at the top of this post, or you can find Rise Above with Kevin Lanning wherever you listen.
And if you're curious to know more about me, or about the other conversations I've had on various podcasts, they're all collected on my press page.
Again, if any of this sounds like where you are right now, please reach out to me. You don't have to do this alone. And I promise you, you don't have to wait for your own version of that night to find you, or for something worse.
What would it take for you to stop waiting?
Somewhere in this story sound like you?
Whether you're still out there and quietly doing the math on your own drinking, or you're sober and finding that life on life's terms keeps arriving anyway, I've been in both of those rooms.
Email me directly about 1:1 Clinical Coaching, or start the conversation here. You can also read more about the inner work at Love Unlocked.