It Was Never a Sin

I was raised to believe drinking would send me to hell. Getting sober had nothing to do with God. My last drink was September 17, 2019.

This is one half of a pair. Rache Brand and I took the same question, who decided it was wrong, and answered it from two different windows. She takes the philosophy side. I am taking the ground. You can read her side here.

I was raised to believe drinking was a sin. Not a bad habit, not a health risk. A sin. The kind that sends you to hell. It was hammered into me young that alcohol and drugs were wrong, that God was watching, and that if I touched the stuff I was choosing the fire. So there is your first answer to who decided it was wrong. The church did, long before I was old enough to have a vote. The verdict was in before I ever took a sip.

I let those beliefs go as I got older. I stopped believing God was keeping a tally on me. And then I started drinking, and the sin story could not explain a single second of it, because it had nothing to do with right and wrong.

I could not sleep. I could not sit still inside my own skin. Things had happened to me that made being awake and being me feel like something I needed a break from. Then I found alcohol, and alcohol gave me the break. That is the most honest sentence I can write about any of this. The first time the noise in my head actually dropped, I felt my whole body unclench. Ahhhh. I had been reaching for that feeling without ever knowing it had a name.

The drink was never relief from the world. It was relief from myself.

From the outside I was doing everything right. Finishing school. Getting promoted. Looking like a man with his life handled. And every night I went home to my apartment, by myself, and drank vodka until I blacked out. Some nights I put Valium on top of it, and I did not even understand that the combination could have stopped my breathing in my sleep. That was the gap nobody saw. The resume said one thing. The floor of my apartment said another.

I tried to quit more times than I can count, and I relapsed every time. A few days. A couple of weeks. Back to it. Again and again and again.

When I finally stopped, it had nothing to do with sin, and I need to be clear about that, because the sin story loves to take credit for things it never did. I stopped because I was killing myself and I knew it. I felt like garbage every single day. And under all of it was the thing I could not stand for one more minute. I was being run by something, and I wanted my life back.

So here is where I actually land, and it is the opposite of where I started. It was never about sin, or right, or wrong, or God, or hell. I believe the science, and the science is clear. Addiction is a disease, and I developed one. People hear the word disease and think excuse, or think doom. For me it was neither. It was just true, and finally having the truth gave me something solid to stand on. There is no moderation for me. There is no version of this where I drink like a normal person, because I am not one, and the day I stopped fighting that fact was the day I started to get free.

I do not look down on a single person who drinks. This was never a verdict on them, and it was never even a verdict on the bottle. It was about me, about what I was using it to escape, and about what it was quietly charging me to keep escaping.

How I got out was not a miracle, and it is not a program I can hand you. I went to therapy and started dealing with the addiction head on. I read a book called This Naked Mind that pulled alcohol off the pedestal and let me see the thing for what it actually was. And then I did the slow, unglamorous work. I built a life I did not constantly want to run from, because you cannot quit needing an escape while the thing you are escaping is still everywhere you look. I traded the drinking for things that did not cost me anything. I made a plan for the cravings before they hit, because they always hit. And I got through the withdrawal.

I got through that part alone, and it is the one piece of this I will tell you flat out not to copy. Coming off alcohol when your body has leaned on it that hard is not just brutal, it can put you in a hospital or a grave. I got lucky. Do not bet your life on luck.

So if you are reading this and the drink has its hand around your throat, do not do the part I did alone. You do not have to, and you do not have to do any of it perfectly or purely either. Call the SAMHSA national helpline at 1-800-662-4357. It is free, it is confidential, and someone is there every hour of every day. There is no right way to get out. There is only out.

Who decided drinking was wrong? A church did, before I was old enough to argue. And I assumed, at first, that getting sober would just be that same story in reverse, some moral reckoning, me finally being good enough. It was nothing like that. I did not get sober by becoming good. I got sober by getting honest. By finally saying the plain thing and meaning it. I have an addiction. There is no moderation for me. And I would like my life back now.

September 17, 2019. That is the last day alcohol got to make a single decision for me.

—Cody

Kill The Silence