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By Root 607 0

Stewart quickly shot back with, “Yeah. He gets our coffee.” [big audience laugh] Fu. Cking. BALLS. I had just gotten called out on one of my favorite shows for being a loser. And the worst part was, he was right. The rush of embarrassment and self-awareness forced me out of my body for a minute, giving me a CRYSTAL CLEAR view of my surroundings: I was holding a beer, which was about to join its several empty compatriots on the table in front of me. There was a pizza box. I was in my underwear. With no shirt (it was on the floor nearby). The only thing that could have made it sadder was if the cops from Cops kicked down my door for some reason and pinned me to the ground while upbeat reggae music played. I would be surprised if Jon Stewart had any recollection of his off-handed flèche, but I owe him a debt of gratitude because it was the first time I actually said to myself, “Uh . . . this may not be the best way to be living, young man . . .” I had hopes! Dreams! Desires! And they were CERTAINLY not fail-y crapsack desires. I knew there were two pathways I was staring at: One choice allowed me to continue drinking every day and eating pizza every night until 4:00 a.m., but I would probably turn into a blob who never worked again and became that sad story of the guy who used to be on TV before he got all boozy and gross (which was already happening). The OTHER choice held a lot of mystery, but it was an intriguing mystery that at the very least could give me a fighting chance.

The first thing I noticed about sobriety? I lost about twenty pounds within a couple of months. I started getting compliments. This was HIGHLY motivating. Years later, and through much therapy, I would come to discover all of the REALLY bad things alcoholism caused, like anxiety, paranoia, and perpetual emotional infancy. But it all started with vanity. If you’re having trouble getting over something, try motivating yourself through this method. Find a reason to change that calls your vanity or ego into the mix. If you’re a thinker, you’re most likely a bit selfish and I don’t mean that in a negative way—but if you’re always in your own head about stuff, you can’t deny that you’re focusing on yourself a lot, and how the world sees you. It can be hard to connect to the “you should get over it just because” line of reasoning, or even a “do it for the kids” mentality. We are self-centered creatures and by nature will usually put our own happiness/ avoidance of pain first. Use it to your advantage. Altruism is challenging. Selfishness is innate.

The same lost souls who ask me how I quit also inquire as to how I was able to make it stick. It’s a daily choice I make, I suppose. Not in the sense that I think about it every day—I really don’t. But on some level, a choice is made to not pour many beers into my bloodstream. The first prong of this choice is in the acknowledgement to myself that I can’t drink responsibly. In 2003, the last year of my Olympic-grade booze consumption plan, I decided that I would try to “cut back” (mainly at the behest of others). This lasted a day. Then I moved on to, “I’m going to stop for thirty days just to prove that I don’t have a problem!” It is my belief that if this oft-uttered sentence leaves your mouth, you have a problem. The reason is, people who don’t have the drinking gene don’t think about drinking in quantifiable terms. Even if you DO quit for thirty days (which I had failed to do at the time), you’re still thinking about it the whole time and how much you’re going to “fuck shit up” on Day 31. It’s not in the activity of sucking down the booze that alcoholism lies, it’s in the mental fixation on it, usually as a means to a numb end. You see, fair and curious reader, I can’t say what it’s like for drugs, but with alcohol I always managed to find a way to weave it into every activity. I drank socially, I drank when I was depressed, I drank when I was happy. For me it was a way to never feel anything too much; this, I discovered, was the result of a much larger avoidance on my part of ANY responsibility, whether in