"Maybe I should stop drinking?"

is not just a thought...

What starts as just a thought is not just a thought. It’s a thread of memories both past and lost… where you had a bit too much to drink. Where you forgot what you did last night… or you said something you regret… or worse, you did something you regret.

I used to black out every once in a while when I drank. It was normalized though… in college we would joke and call it “time traveling.” We would say, “last night I threw my hard drive off a cliff.” We’d call each other or rally over brunch trying to put the pieces back together of our evenings.

And while laughter was present and there was some humour to it, it was also accompanied by a silent sadness. I won’t speak for my friends, but I will speak to my own exploration in hindsight — Did I have such little regard for my mind and body that I would poison it to the point where it was on autopilot?

I managed to avoid this at work events for the most part… but every once in a while I would have a littttttle too much. But I wasn’t alone in this, and I think it was the culture of partying and drinking that insulated me from the career risks.

It would take a lot of “maybe I should stop drinking” thoughts over a lot of years before I actually stopped drinking. And my problem with alcohol wasn’t like what would be thought of as a traditional alcoholic… I wasn’t waking up in the wrong places… I wasn’t doing drugs… I wasn’t destroying my life on an explicit level… I wasn’t at what you would call a rock bottom.

Sure, I would sometimes have casual sex. I would sometimes put my body in places it shouldn’t be… but again, that was part of drinking culture. That was part of going to bars and being single. That was part of… how I numbed.

When I go back to the origins of my relationship to alcohol I can trace it back to high school. I had social anxiety with girls. Below my shyness was a deep fear that I wasn’t “enough.” I had been slightly overweight when I was 10, 11, and 12. And while the social hierarchy started to form as it does in middle school, I found myself staying at the bottom of this hierarchy. I saw that the solution to this was to get fit. To get status in sports… To get status with my body’s performance and good looks. It was almost like a perfect storm of social fear met high fructose corn syrup + which soothed my pain + which made me chubbier + which fuelled social exile and a lack of belonging. Let me eat more sugar… and on and on we go.

A slippery slope and probably familiar recipe for so many of us as processed foods infiltrated our lives in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Insert all the metabolic challenges that we suffer from today.

Between the summer of grade eight and nine I mostly starved myself and rode my mountain bike religiously. I lost weight, had developed a pretty significant level of fitness, and came back to school with a pep in my step. The girls noticed, I made sports teams, rose up the social ladder… etc.

BUT, what lived below my newfound sense of social peace and power was the fear it could all be taken from me at any moment. I had not resolved the pain of being rejected when I was the same person in a slightly different body. The truth of evolutionary social value weighed heavily on my soul.

To deal with this anxiety with girls I would often drink in highschool to “take the edge off.” I was extremely social and outgoing and learned that comedy could bring solace to most things. I smiled as I went through my days… but what lived below my smile was a lack of connection to both my anger because of how I’d been treated when I was 10-12, and also sadness for the ways in which I had treated my body that summer to gain access to social capital.

In relationships I lacked access to boundaries because I wasn’t connected to healthy anger. I didn’t want to be “like other guys,” and add to that the messaging around men and toxic masculinity, and most sensitive boys become men who become doormats and operate in relationship as “nice guys”… aka… codependency.

As Robert Glover so famously said… “nice guys are anything but nice.” Because what lives below our need to please, is the need to be liked… because being “liked” is correlated to being “safe.” If you see how “good” I am, you won’t leave me… or so the unconscious belief goes… we all know the story, whether you’re a man or woman, we all know that the reality plays out much differently… being a people-pleaser often leads to being abandoned/rejected/left… and of course, when we put on masks to try to keep relationships together, we are abandoning ourselves. So the fear of pain occurring outside of us, lives perpetually inside of us. 🤯

I know this article started about alcohol, and it will come full circle to that… but I tell this story to point to how our relationship to alcohol doesn’t just start out as a relationship to alcohol. There are social and cultural factors at play… like drinking culture in college, etc.

But what lives below the dysfunctional relationship to ANY substance or behaviour that impacts your state, is the desire to feel differently than you feel.

I didn’t have the tools to navigate what was going on for me socially in elementary, and junior high. I didn’t know how to share the suffering I silently held in for the majority of my childhood until my late twenties.

The interesting thing about pain is that it demands to be felt. And whatever we bury, just reroutes and gets stronger. Alcohol was a mechanism that I used to not feel what was desperate to be felt… because I thought the feelings would consume me. Little did I know it was the alcohol that would…

I didn’t know how to hold grief and anger… I didn’t realize that holding it would be what allowed me to hold it.

Do you hear that? Do you understand that? As in, in the act of being with my pain, I could hold my pain. In the act of being with my suffering, the suffering would move through me. If someone could hold my hand as I held it, I would be able to explore it without feeling dragged down into the underworld…

It would take years of thinking “Maybe I should try quitting drinking” before I did. And I tell you that because no matter where you are in the process, I want to point out that there is brilliance to that thought… Your soul is telling you to get sober so you can get clarity and direction. And when you’re ready, you’ll listen.

For me the choice came from 4 things:

1. My now wife quit drinking for a year in 2017. She was never really a drinker, but I was inspired by her choice. She showed me it was possible to hold a line and have those around her fully respect that line. And, she also said to me, courageously and lovingly, “have you ever thought about exploring your relationship with alcohol?” I got a bit defensive. And then I got real. She saw what I felt. I had… and I needed to.

2. I was walking in SOHO in Manhattan listening to a book from Paul Selig - and it said, “Your body can only alchemize the lowest level of truth you’re willing to hold.” What? Okay… there was something in that sentence. It went on to say, “What is something you know to be true that you don’t live?” Instantly I heard a voice, “I need alcohol to connect.” Oh damn. I knew that in order to move to a higher level of consciousness I need to live the truth I knew.

3. I was speaking to my good friend Traver Boehm when I met him at a bachelor party… he wasn’t drinking and he was cool and he was having the best time. I asked him, “When did you quit drinking?” To which he replied, “I quit the day my ex wife left me, and it was the best decision I ever made.” Okay… evidence is really building up. The universe/God is delivering me ALL THE THINGS.

4. I wondered to myself… why hadn’t I stopped yet? Oh, I have a bachelor party coming up. I have a guys trip. I have a birthday party. I have a wedding I’m MC'ing. I always had something. And then I realized that my resistance to quiting drinking was my fear of the resistance it might create in social settings and with the people I drank with… WHOA. What would it bring up in them? What would they say to me? I realized that me not drinking anymore had a lot to do with how OTHERS would feel, and then how their feelings would impact mine. OH MY LORD. HELLO codependency.

So I quit the moment I realized that. I was letting social agreements and the imagined response of those people around me determine my life, my choices, and my health!

Do you see that the seed of needing to belong, the fear of standing in my power, and the desire to be chosen… all from my younger years, still lived in my choices as it related to alcohol and others?

The truth is I quit drinking not just because I felt I needed to, I quit because the way I felt in my body, the work I was doing in the world, and the relationships I had in my life… they all mattered WAY MORE to me than anything. I never wanted to not be conscious of what I was choosing again. It was this numbing which was allowing me to create a life that didn’t align that I needed to feel the pain of so I could create an aligned life with choice that matched and reinforced my values.

There’s a saying that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection. And while that connection is to others… it’s really the connection to ourselves, and bringing that fully alive, fully feeling version of us to life and love.

You won’t need or desire to numb when you love who you are and what you choose.

None of this is saying everyone needs to get sober. But, it is saying that if you have thought about it, your soul likely wants you to follow that up with action. Trusting that feeling, is trusting yourself and your inner guidance system. It’s part of the journey back home to yourself.

I also recently recorded a solo podcast episode on this topic. If you want to dive a little deeper with me, click the button below to tune in.

With love,

Mark