WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU'VE KILLED THE OLD YOU?

There’s a strange emptiness that comes when you stop living a life built almost entirely around madness and chaos.

Nobody really tells you about that part.

They tell you about getting sober. Withdrawal. Meetings. Triggers. Gratitude. Making amends. They tell you how much better your life can become.

Nobody tells you about Tuesday night.

No football on TV. Your ex-wife has the kids. Nobody needs anything from you. Your phone isn’t blowing up. There’s no emergency. No crisis. No fire to put out.

Mostly because the pyromaniac in your brain has finally been locked away.

It’s just you.

No drugs. No booze. No emergencies. No gala events.

Just you and maybe the dog, if you’re lucky.

Sitting on the couch with the person you spent years simultaneously trying to escape from while also making the center of your entire fucking universe:

yourself.

And now you’re supposed to experience a perfectly normal Tuesday evening without trying to turn it into Apocalypse Now.

And believe me, I loved the smell of napalm in the morning—as long as the napalm was cocaine, and it was early enough to pretend my life wasn’t collapsing but late enough to start texting normal people who were waking up for work.

That was a surprisingly difficult adjustment.

Because for a very long time, boredom wasn’t something I experienced.

Boredom was something I attacked.

There was always a way to make the night more interesting.

Sometimes drugs.

Sometimes alcohol.

Sometimes ripping bongs and writing the “best thing you’ve ever written” in the music studio.

Sometimes it actually was the best thing I’d ever written.

Let’s call that one out of every hundred times.

(There were a lot of bong rips in my life.)

Sometimes trying to jump from a balcony onto a window-washing platform 36 stories above River North because apparently gravity was just another rule I found unnecessarily restrictive.

Luckily, I had good friends who pulled me back.

I still managed to toss three bottles of their spaghetti sauce onto the street below like mortar rounds, narrowly missing cars, humans and the like.

Dead or in jail, guys.

Dead or in jail.

Sometimes smashing car windshields with a baseball bat because—and I wish there were a more sophisticated explanation for this—

the sound of breaking glass was funny when I was drunk.

The list goes on.

And on.

And unfortunately, on.

Chaos becomes its own drug after a while. Even when you remove the actual drugs, part of your brain still expects something to happen.

Where’s the emergency?

Who are we fighting?

Where are we going?

What did I lose?

Who did I piss off?

Why is everyone mad at me?

Why is my nose so stuffy?

Wait.

I did ketamine?

Then you get sober and the answer to all of those questions is:

Nobody.

Nowhere.

Nothing.

You’re home.

It’s 8:17 p.m.

Everything is fine.

And somehow, at first, “everything is fine” feels fucking terrifying.

And boring.

So what do you do when you’ve killed the old you?

First, you bury that motherfucker six feet deep.

Then you check the grave every day to make sure he hasn’t started digging his way back out.

Because he will.

That’s the thing about the old version of yourself.

He doesn’t disappear.

He waits.

And the bad guy is always coming back for the sequel if you don’t protect your sobriety.

Every horror movie has already explained this to us.

Think about the basic slasher formula:

Teenagers.

Drugs and alcohol.

Promiscuity.

Partying.

Naïveté.

Then somebody says, “I’ll be right back.”

And they are absolutely not right back.

Now apply that formula to adulthood.

Drugs and alcohol.

Promiscuity.

Partying.

Naïveté.

Except now, instead of a teenager getting murdered in a lake house, you’re a grown man potentially destroying your family, your career, your freedom or your life.

That’s the movie.

There isn’t some secret fourth act where everybody realizes cocaine was actually helping.

There’s no inspirational ending where the 55-year-old alcoholic finally figures out the perfect amount of vodka.

Nobody gets an Academy Award for successfully managing their crack habit.

The endings are remarkably predictable.

Death.

Jail.

Institutions.

Or, if you’re lucky enough to survive long enough:

sobriety.

That’s why I think of addiction like Freddy Krueger.

You don’t actually beat Freddy.

You survive him.

And the second you start sleeping on your sobriety, that motherfucker starts sharpening the glove.

You start thinking:

Maybe I overreacted.

Maybe it wasn’t actually that bad.

Maybe I could drink normally now.

Maybe NA beers?

Maybe I could do something recreationally.

Maybe enough time has passed.

That’s Freddy scratching the pipes.

Don’t go downstairs.

I learned this very early in rehab.

For me, there couldn’t be loopholes.

If I was going to stop using cocaine but spend the rest of my life looking for other ways to alter my consciousness, I might as well have never stopped doing cocaine.

Because eventually that bitch was going to find me again.

Maybe not that night.

Maybe not that month.

Maybe not that year.

Maybe not even this decade.

But eventually I’d convince myself that I’d changed enough, matured enough, healed enough, become spiritually enlightened enough—or simply had a bad fucking day, or a good fucking day—to try controlling something that had already repeatedly demonstrated that it controlled me.

And I know how that movie ends.

I’ve seen it.

I fucking starred in it.

It’s a Lifetime movie.

Cast Eric Roberts as me when I’m an old man.

I fucking love Eric Roberts.

So I don’t spend much time trying to figure out how to defeat addiction forever.

That sounds exhausting.

I just don’t let Freddy out of the boiler room today.

People ask me sometimes:

“How do you stay sober?”

I wish I had some profound answer.

Something spiritual enough to put on a coffee mug.

Even though I only drink cold brew.

I don’t.

My answer is basically:

I don’t know. I just do.

Because I know the alternative.

If I go back to that life, I’m not getting the fun parts back without everything else attached.

I don’t get to order chaos à la carte.

I can’t request the funny stories, insane nights, music, adrenaline and complete absence of inhibition while politely declining the addiction, humiliation, destruction, fear, damaged relationships and possibility of death.

It comes as a package.

And I already told the postman to return that shit to sender.

So instead of writing another inspirational list about the Top Ten Ways to Stay Sober, I decided to approach this from a direction that makes considerably more sense to my brain.

THE TOP TEN WAYS TO RELAPSE

Coming soon...