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Addiction

Antihero

March 1, 2026
Addiction
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I drank for ten years, though the first ones shone with false brilliance. In college, alcohol was the point. Everything worth doing happened with a drink. Everything worth remembering blurred into nights that were never fully remembered at all.

For me, the point was never the buzz. I wasn’t interested in getting ‘tipsy,’ or laughter, or surface-level fun, the things that ‘happen.’ I drank to black out. It was always the destination. The apotheosis of the evening wasn’t the joke I told or the girl I kissed or the party I stumbled through, it was the moment when memory failed.

People like to call alcohol “liquid courage” but I never experienced it that way. Courage implies stepping more fully into your life, doing the thing you were afraid to do. I wasn’t looking for that. I wasn’t interested in being bolder or more present. What I wanted was absence. Blackout was about vacancy, not bravery. It was a release from the untreated depression and anxiety that made ordinary existence feel unbearable.

And for a while, it worked. Obliteration felt like mercy. The night would dissolve into static, and for a few precious hours I didn’t have to be myself. It was more than being drunk. Drunk meant dulled but still tethered. Blackout meant severed. The tether was gone, the loop was cut, silence at last.

But the myth or glamour of it couldn’t survive with time. The first blackouts felt shocking, almost profound. Later they were just math. If you keep drinking, eventually you black out. What I once romanticized as antihero self-destruction was really just the structure doing what it was designed to do. The system wrote the script, and I just followed it.

By the later years, alcohol wasn’t giving me anything. It wasn’t a gateway to transcendence. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t fun. It was just a cure for the hangover it had caused the day before. I woke up sick and reached for the one thing that could help, even as it guaranteed it would return again tomorrow. The lie had long since revealed itself, but by then I was stuck in a closed loop.

Eventually, I quit. Not in a blaze of insight or a heroic moment of willpower. Not with a speech or a vow or an ultimatum. I quit because there was no other option left. My body was crumbling, my mind unraveling, my life was unlivable. Quitting wasn’t a choice. The decision had been made for me long before I claimed it.

That’s all there is to it: I drank for relief, and I quit for survival. The rest is details. The blackout-as-apotheosis, the antihero romance, the grand narrative of drinking as destiny; that was merely cover I laid over a decade of erosion.

I kept drinking until I couldn’t anymore.

Then, I stopped.

The Last Straw

February 1, 2026
Addiction
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For years I told the story like it was a deliberate arc of redemption.

The “last straw” wasn’t some spectacular unraveling of my life. I didn’t get a DUI. No partner staged an intervention. My friends and family weren’t delivering ultimatums. I had a good job, a strong work ethic, the appearance of stability. I was what they call a “high functioning alcoholic,” though I wasn’t functioning highly in any other area of my life.

In my version, the turning point was simple: I missed my coworker’s Fourth of July barbecue, someone I respected, someone I wanted to network with, a relationship I wanted to build. Out of all the things I had skipped or sabotaged because of drinking, this one was minor. But for whatever reason, that was the moment I decided to stop. I tell people that, and it happened in July 2017.

Only, that’s not what happened.

The barbecue was real. The thought, I don’t want to miss things like this anymore, was real. But nothing changed. Two months later, in September, I was sitting in a doctor’s office for something completely unrelated when the appointment took a hard left turn. Somehow the staff knew I was an alcoholic. Instead of running through the standard checklist, they brought in a social worker. No warning. She picked up the phone, called an outpatient clinic, and handed it to me. That was it. I was too hungover to argue.

It is a curious example of how memory reshapes itself. I carried the shame of being caught, of being “forced,” but wanted the dignity of self-selection, the cleaner narrative of redemption. So over time, the timeline shifted. The barbecue became the moment. The ambush at the clinic faded away.

I was already at Amazon then, working as a contractor. At the time, it was my foothold, the one piece of my life that still looked stable from the outside. I could feel everything else slipping, but if I could turn that contract into a full-time role, I could convince myself I was not really in free fall.

That is why I really went to rehab. Not because I had hit bottom, but because I thought it might save my job. In my head, the equation was simple: fix the drinking, nail the interview, land the FTE. Rehab was not about healing; it was about salvaging the only thing I still valued, my work.

When the interview came, I was sober, but too fragmented to perform. The whole thing was a trainwreck from the first question. I watched myself blow it in real time. When the rejection email came, it merely confirmed: rehab did not work, and neither did I.

I quit the program before finishing. And then I drank for another two years.

Gravity

December 21, 2025
Addiction
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I woke up in my apartment with no phone or wallet. Apparently, I had driven home blackout drunk over a span of ninety miles. With dread, I realized I had to go back to Bremerton, because my phone and wallet were still over there. But more than that, there was an understood social contract stating that I had to be present for Geoff’s bachelor party no matter what. I grabbed a jar of quarters and my checkbook and drove back without GPS.

Of course, everything planned that day cost money. I had canceled my cards the night before, and so I had none. I offered to pay for the arcade with quarters, but everyone refused. Allowing me that small dignity would amount to grace I did not deserve. I had to be present because of the social contract, but that same rulebook dictates that everyone should pull their own weight.

So, George paid for things because someone had to, and nobody else wanted to be responsible for me. I could feel it every time his card came out. It wasn’t generosity. He wasn’t willing. He was just the unlucky one on whom that responsibility had fallen.

At the end of the night, I wrote George a check out of desperation to do something. I had the money in my account. That was irrelevant. He refused it, because it was unambiguously pathetic. I did not earn the privilege of his redemption. It wasn’t about the money. It was about humiliation. I needed to feel it. I deserved it. I needed to learn a lesson.

Ten years later, quite unexpectedly, George joined Geoff and me for coffee. He had asked Geoff for my permission to join us, which showed he remembered something of the rift. But once together, we became the same old friends we always were. He didn’t remember a thing about me from that day. He remembered the bachelor party fondly. He wasn’t making a statement. He genuinely didn’t give a fuck.

Apparently, the worst night of my life didn’t exist for anyone else. I had fixated on it for years, believing earnestly that it mattered. I am not sure it is relief that it didn’t. These days, I write off my alcoholic years as sunken costs. But it turns out their meaninglessness has a gravity of its own. It is heavier than the shame I thought I was carrying.

Cocaine

December 7, 2025
Addiction
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The night began as nothing, though I was in a reckless and cocky mood. I decided we were going to get cocaine. None of us had real experience. None of us had connections. None of us even cared that much about cocaine itself. I had just decided that this was the scaffolding I would build a night on, and I committed.

I recruited Noah and James. We met on Capitol Hill over pitchers and tried to act like we knew what we were doing, but the truth was that we had no plan. The only lead I had was a man I met at some party a few weeks earlier. He was magnetic and strange in a way that made you think he had lived everywhere and survived everything. His name was something sharp that I have forgotten. Job or Axe or something like that. Whatever it was, he picked up when I called. He was cool and casual, yet abundantly willing to help.

When he met us later, he told us he had already gotten a dealer’s permission to share his number with us. Pierre. He said Pierre knew who we were and approved. When I contacted him, he sounded warm and professional and almost too understanding for what we were asking. We met him, and our inexperience was obvious. We did not know quantities or prices or etiquette. Yet Pierre did not take advantage of us. He gave us what we could afford and told us to remember the framing so we would not be taken advantage of in the future.

Inside the restroom of a nearby club, Axe showed us how to do it correctly. You do not pinch a nostril shut like the movies. You dip the end of the straw into the bag and breathe in through both nostrils at once and let it hit clean. Simple and unceremonious. We watched him do it and copied him like kids learning something we should not know. We offered him a share. He accepted with real gratitude, thanked us, and then disappeared into his own night.

By then Morgan had arrived. Noah’s girlfriend of two weeks. We drifted through a few bars before ending up at Noah’s place. James dropped off somewhere along the way. Once we were inside, we stayed up until sunrise playing Kings Cup with cocaine, dealing out lines like they were part of the rules. Every card meant another hit. Every rule kept us going.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Morgan and I fell into a rhythm. Innocent but unmistakable. She laughed at everything I said. I told her stories I rarely shared. Half formed theories about myself. Vulnerabilities I had not articulated before. I watched her soak it in. Not seductively. Not romantically. More like a witness who had stumbled into my interior world and found it interesting enough to stay. The room kept shrinking until it felt like only the two of us were awake inside it.

Noah had tapped out first. His body simply gave up before ours did. He lay down in the other room and the night kept going without him. Morgan and I talked and laughed and kept doing lines until nothing was left. When the sun finally cut through the blinds, I left feeling triumphant and weightless. At some point she had given me her number in front of him. None of us reacted. It did not mean anything at the time.

The next day I texted Noah that I had left my shirt at his place. No answer. I assumed he was asleep. I tried again the next day. Nothing. I tried the next week. Still nothing. I kept sending these small, pointless messages into the void, convinced each time that he must be busy or distracted or hungover. It took weeks before I noticed he had blocked me on Facebook. That was the first real clue, but even then I did not understand what I had actually done.

Weeks later I walked into the convenience store in Union Square where I bought cigarettes. Morgan worked there. She had told me that during the cocaine night and it had felt like some kind of cosmic coincidence. I had avoided the store since then, but now she was behind the counter. She lit up when she saw me. Too warm. Too pleased. Her body tilted toward me like she already knew I would respond. It made the air feel unstable. I paid and practically ran out of the store.

That was when everything locked into place. She had left him, and he blamed me. Not for stealing her, because nothing happened. He blamed me for creating the conditions where something could shift. For building a night where he disappeared from his own life and someone else stepped into the space he was supposed to fill.

I never did cocaine again.

Cordy

September 21, 2025
Addiction, Work
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In college I took whatever work paid. I repaired laptops, installed software, convinced elderly clients that the internet would not eat them. One of those clients was Cordy. He was a psychologist by training and a hobby photographer by habit. He and his wife Cindy lived on a property in Skagit County in a house he had drawn and built himself. It was the kind of place that collects things: carved masks from Indonesia, a faded map with thumbtack holes, framed Polaroids stacked like proof that the world was larger than my dorm room.

Cordy spoke like someone who had learned how to listen. He trusted simple pleasures. He trusted music, and he trusted the slow work of developing a photograph. He trusted people enough to let them be imperfect. I liked him because he was generous and because he made generosity look ordinary. Cindy had the same ease. Together they were warm in the way people are who have not given up on being tender.

I became their tech person. I showed up once or twice a month and sat at their kitchen table while Cordy fed images into his Mac that I had never used before. I taught him how to organize folders and back up drives and which buttons did which little useful things. The work was small and practical and it kept me connected in a way the campus job could not. It felt like belonging that did not demand performance. I liked going out there.

One afternoon Cindy asked me to do something that felt bigger than a tech job. She wanted a birthday poster for Cordy. She described an old western wanted poster except instead of criminal charges it would be praise. Wanted: More Men Like Cordy. A list of virtues where crimes should be. She imagined it pinned by his closet light so he would see it often. She did not ask for perfection. She asked for tenderness disguised as humor. I am not a designer. I made the poster anyway. The typography was clumsy. The margins did not align. The bullets were awkward. It was amateur hour and it still landed. Cindy loved it. Cordy loved it. Later he tacked it inside his closet where morning light might catch the paper and remind him he was seen.

Then I started buying Adderall from people who did not ask questions. Prescriptions were a gate I could not be bothered with. Street supply was easier. The pills were small and steady and they made it possible to stay up and feel useful. I told myself I was optimizing. It made everything efficient. It made me feel sharp in a way that felt like survival. But survival became excess. I did not measure my intake. My supplier cut me off when I looked like I was breaking. Mercy and refusal come in the same breath from people who know when a person is losing the map. My dealer stopped too.

Withdrawal is a slow erasure. Days become a fog of wanting. I lay in bed and practiced dying. I wrote mental scripts in which everything ended cleanly. The body has a brutal way of teaching you the boundary between useful pain and ruin. I slept badly. I pressed my face into the pillow and wondered how to keep the world far enough away that it would not hurt me.

During those weeks Cordy sent an email. His project was finished. He was showing the work in a downtown gallery, practically in my neighborhood. He extended the exhibit and sent another note. He wanted to celebrate. The messages had the patient tone of someone who expected you to be there. They were invitations wrapped in the trust of friendship.

I did not go. I imagined walking into the gallery and listening to polite people talk about exposure and frame sizes and I imagined my hands shaking. I imagined all the small signs that would reveal I was falling apart, and I chose not to let anyone see the ruin. So I stayed in bed.

Once the withdrawal had subsided somewhat, I called him and the line dropped. I called again and the phone went to voicemail. Just a missed call and then silence.

That was the end. There are things you cannot fix after you let them go. I think now about the poster inside a closet. I imagine Cordy seeing it each morning and thinking the world was kinder than it can be. I imagine how small acts of attention matter.

I never told them how grateful I was. I never explained why I could not come. They would have understood. When I think of Cordy it is with the weight of that unreturned invitation and the memory of a man who pinned a piece of paper to his closet.

The Office Alcoholic

August 17, 2025
Addiction, Work
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I don’t know what fucking genius in management thought putting a fully stocked liquor fridge in the office kitchen was a good idea. This was 2016, peak startup culture, where “work hard, play hard” meant having beer on tap and calling alcoholism “company culture.”

The fridge appeared one Monday morning like some kind of corporate honey trap. Vodka, the good stuff, not bottom-shelf swill. Ostensibly for “company events” and “team building.” In reality, it was like putting a loaded gun in a room full of depressed people.

I wasn’t the only one with a drinking problem at that company. But I was the known quantity. The guy who reeked of booze at 9 AM meetings. The one who got a little too animated at happy hours and stayed too late at company parties.

So when I started taking little sips here and there. Just a shot of vodka to get through the afternoon slump, I thought I was being discrete.

But apparently everyone was doing it. The bottles emptied faster than management expected. The vodka simply disappeared. It became obvious that employees were treating the company liquor like their personal stash.

The difference was, when management started having meetings about the missing alcohol, only one name came up. Mine.

I wasn’t invited to these meetings, obviously. But I could read the room. The way conversations stopped when I walked by. The knowing looks. The careful avoidance of eye contact. I could piece together exactly what was being discussed in those closed-door sessions with everyone who wasn’t me.

Everyone thought it was me. Every missing bottle. The office alcoholic had struck again.

The reality was probably that I’d taken maybe twenty percent of what disappeared. But once you’re labeled “the person with the drinking problem,” every missing drop gets attributed to you.

That’s when I realized how visible my drinking had become. I thought it was a secret, but actually I’d become a workplace character: the guy with the problem. Everyone knew.

I went to my first AA meeting that week.

Not because I was ready to get sober. Even though the humiliation of being the office alcoholic felt unbearable, I continued to drink myself to sleep every night.

The liquor fridge disappeared shortly after that. Management probably realized it wasn’t the brilliant culture-building move they’d imagined.

But the damage was done. I was the alcoholic. And once that label sticks, it follows you into every interaction, every meeting, every performance review.

The worst part is, they weren’t wrong.

How Jamie Died

August 10, 2025
Addiction, Grief
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When they prescribed me Adderall again, I wasn’t addicted anymore. That part of my life was over, or at least it felt that way. I didn’t think about how I’d quit or what it had taken, because I wasn’t ready to pick that apart yet. But taking it again forced me into a question I couldn’t avoid: how do you reconcile needing something you were once addicted to.

Life without it had been worse than I wanted to admit. I could go to work, have conversations, finish some things, but never without friction. Focus slipped away constantly. Everything felt slower. It was the kind of constant, low-grade difficulty that wears you down. When I went back on Adderall, it wasn’t a dramatic choice. It was quiet, deliberate, and I decided from the start I would take it exactly as prescribed. I have kept that promise ever since.

My brother never got that chance. His doctors refused to prescribe him Adderall because of his history with opioids, as if they were the same drug or the same danger. He needed it. If we’re being honest, he needed the opioids too, for his pain. It was the same problem I had faced, needing the thing you were once addicted to, except in his case he was denied.

That denial sent him looking for something else. He found propylhexedrine, an over-the-counter stimulant that is harsh, dirty, and incredibly dangerous. He took it for years. In 2016, at twenty-eight years old, his heart gave out.

I still have my prescription. I still take it every day. And I’m still here.

The Walk to Kirkland

August 3, 2025
Addiction, Grief
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It was one of those days where the sky feels fake. Blue in a way that seems digitally retouched. My roommates and I didn’t have plans, just inertia, so we decided to walk from Bellevue to Kirkland. No destination, just movement. The kind of aimless day that makes you feel young and whole and not important.

We laughed a lot. Talked about nothing. Walked too far. It felt good. I felt good.

I don’t remember walking back, but we must have. I was back in the apartment when my phone rang. My dad’s name on the screen. I answered with some joke ready to go. I don’t remember what it was. Doesn’t matter. He cut me off mid-sentence.

“Andy. Andy, this is serious. Jamie died.”

There was a pause. My body heard it before I did. Then I said “I have to go” and hung up. Not out of rudeness. Just because the world went offline.

I got in my car and drove to the store. I bought a fifth of liquor. Came home. I don’t remember anything after that.

It wasn’t even to mourn him. I drank because I didn’t know what else to do. Because grief didn’t have a shape yet but alcohol did. Alcohol had always had its job, and this was its moment.

He was dead. I was gone. And the day, bright and pointless and full of nothing, was over.