I started drinking at 13. Blacking out weekly by 15. Full blown alcoholic in 20s. The problem was, I was fairly successful so it was hard for me to admit I was truly fucked up. I managed a good career, family, friends, house, etc. I drank until blackout daily. In late 30s is when the true around the clock drinking started. Morning, noon, night and throughout the night. DT’s. Started taking Xanax to fight off the anxiety caused by around the clock drinking. That was it. That’s when I lost control. I had a moment of clarity after days of straight blackout during the first month of Covid quarantine. I asked a friend who had been sober for 15 years for help. Went to rehab. Took it seriously. Spend 2.5 months away from my family. Came back determined to live a life of sobriety and focus on family and career. I’ve got numerous promotions, my family is great and I’m 3.5 years sober and work daily to stay that way.
Tldr; lifelong drunk. Got sober at 40. Best decision I’ve ever made.
Also managed to be pretty functional while blacking out nearly daily (at my worst), and interestingly enough, the anxiety during the hangovers (which became pretty much any time in between) is also what finally caused me to turn the corner.
I was born into an impoverished extremist right wing family. I enlisted in the military back when DADT was a thing. I was disowned as an LGBT teenager, and medboarded out of the military after being committed to inpatient facilities multiple times. After that, i was homeless for a couple years, living out of a car and then a backpack.
I finally ended up in this little town in Georgia, got a job at a little retail store, and moved into a trailer with one of my coworkers. Her friends kind of adopted me and i felt accepted for the first time in my life. We were all broke kids, but i told them i was going to be a millionaire by age 30. I was still pretty emotionally unstable and eventually moved on from that friend group, but it gave me the hope i needed to rebuild my life.
I slowly built a career for myself after that, working 70-80 hours a week for a couple years, until i had my foot in the door. It got a lot easier after that. I didn’t quite hit my goal by age 30, but I’m close. I founded my first company at age 28, and raised a 10 million series A. My company is now worth 60 million on paper, but of course that’s meaningless until we IPO. But it’s profitable, and in the meantime, I’ve adopted a little family of people like me, and built a comfortable life for us. Life is good, and I’m content.
Now that you’re pretty wealthy has your family decided to become your best buddy now?
No, they refuse to speak to me to this day. My gf’s family called her to wish her a happy birthday last week, and i cried quietly wishing mine did that too.
Happy belated birthday girltwink! 🎊 🎉
The older I get and the more people I meet and lives I understand, the more I understand that true family are the ones you choose. You can’t help who you are born to. It’s nice to get their love and approval, but in the end, if they don’t accept your choices or even you, that’s not on you. That’s on them. If you’ve done your best to be a good person, then they should have no reason to turn you out but for their own selfish reasons. It may never stop hurting, but over time, I hope you can find that comfort from your chosen family that chose you back. I won’t soapbox too much about it though. I hope you had a great birthday. :) Big hugs from an internet stranger!
As a side note, talking to a therapist can really help you accept things if you ever want to give it a try.
Aww, thank you for your kind words JighlySackles 😝 I’m doing ok, all things considered. It still hurts a little, but yes therapy has helped.
I’m glad you’re feeling mostly alright. That’s a good place to be. Sometimes that’s the best we get to be for a very long time too.
I think some things will always hurt. But it gets less. And it’s not so crushing. It just takes time.
A great analogy I heard once is to imagine you have a box which represents a past source of grief, and in that box is a button and a ball. As we go about life, the box gets jostled and bumped by things that remind us of our grief. This moves the ball around and every time the ball hits the button it brings on the feelings of grief and sadness. The size of the ball shrinks with time though. When we first go through something traumatic our ball is very large, taking up most of the space in the box, so very small events bump the button, and it’s going to hit that grief button a lot at first. But over time as the ball shrinks. As it gets smaller, the jostling and bumping doesn’t make the ball hit the grief button so much. It might even graze it without pushing it. We may always have that box, and that’s ok. And that button may get to the point it gets hit once after 20 years. But that’s OK too. The grief gets less with time. 🙂
(Very?) Belated happy birthday! Your family are the people you’ve chosen to accompany you at this stage in your life, the other one, the one you simply happened to be born into, don’t deserve you. Lots of hugs!
Happy Birthday. Better late than never. We are here for you.
You are super cool, thanks for your story.
Around 23 I was jobless, I had no HS diploma, depressed, had recently gone through a bad breakup, and if I wasn’t able to move back in with my dad, I would have been homeless.
In the span of about four months, I got my HS equivalency diploma, applied to college, got a job, then quit that job to start college. ~5 years later, and significantly in debt, I had two additional pieces of paper that said I knew things, and I went on to struggle to find work in my local area.
I work in IT, there’s a ton of jobs, none of the good ones are local to me; so I’m now slowly working off my debts, at menial jobs that don’t challenge me, for menial pay that doesn’t nearly reflect the amount of skill and knowledge I have.
Don’t go to school kids. You’ll accrue debt and nobody cares.
Where I started
Where I ended up
Image descriptions
1st image: - A heavy set person who appears to be a man, in baggy jeans and a t-shirt, leaning against a wooden handrail, holding a laser skirmish gun
2nd image: A curly haired woman in makeup, wearing a teal coloured dress
Congratz!
I feel like I need to do more than just post a picture. In this case, the picture really does tell the story in a lot of ways, but still, there was a lot of pain and trauma that led me to this point.
I started off depressed and angry, lost in life, knowing what I needed to do, but feeling like it wasn’t something I could do. And when I finally accepted that I could do it, years went in to it. A quick photo makes it look like a magical transformation, but there was close to 10 years between those photos, and a lot of self discovery, self exploration and pain. As well as joy, and surprises.
Hey, I just want to say thanks for posting this. I’m just a random internet stranger, but I’m happy for you. I think Fred Rogers sums it up best, he is the epitome of kindness to me.
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself
It’s you.
It’s you I like.
Ohh I love this one! Perfectly summed it up with the pics for me ;)
Thank you for sharing this. I’m glad you were able to find your joy.
36yo, I’m in the middle of tunnel currently.
I’m a spoiled, privileged shit. I have a very nice family, good friends, money to live comfortably in a big city. But my life is miserable still: after a succession of failures, I hate my job and suffer painful lonelyness, and I’m too shy to do what most normal human beings do.
I’m almost out of depression but I’ve yet to go through the reinvent yourself part. I feel like I’m going backwards.
I feel like that’s the opposite of what the question asks. Ask me to delete if needed.
I started off being born and it appears that I will end up dead.
I started off in the late 1980’s in a mid-sized midwestern city… I was smoking cigarettes, a lot of pot, drinking and carousing with the same friends that I’d had since high school, but I was in my second year of college. I was getting decent grades, but I was really distracted and having some drama with bad girlfriends.
Two weeks after my 21st birthday, I left for Southern California - I had a parent out there, and I ended up staying for 16 years. I stopped smoking basically the minute I got there, spent a lot of time driving around a new city and thinking… and basically came to the realization that since nobody there knew who I had been before, I could approach social situations without the baggage of all those previous decisions that I’d made with my old circle of friends. I was less of a “pleaser”, less of a doormat, and less afraid to speak my mind - and my new friends responded positively to it, so I was encouraged to cultivate that. It helped me be more decisive and independent, and gave me a foundation for everything that followed.
I finished an associate’s degree, got a black belt in a martial art and taught for about six years, and met the woman who is now my wife. We got married, traveled to other countries together in Europe and Central America, quit our jobs to live on a horse ranch, and eventually moved BACK to that same midwestern city to start a family.
I wish I could say that since we moved back, I’ve never felt like the person I was before - but I have to confess that I feel like being back here HAS eroded some of that confidence, like I couldn’t hack it out West and ended up back here after all.
I know it’s not true, but San Diego is where I became the person I wanted to be. Back here is where I had been the person before that. They say “you can’t go home again” - I submit that you CAN, but that maybe you shouldn’t.
Accidental reinvention story.
I was an independent IT Management Consultant and in my free time I started a side project making a dark ride in virtual reality for the Meta Quest headset. Then Covid happened and my career paused suddenly giving my lots of free time so I focused on the title. It ended up being the 5th highest rated app on the Meta Quest App Lab store out of many thousands for the past year and a bit. I have not gone back to my old career, as well, this is my new career now. The insane part is that I always wanted to be an Imagineer since I was 6 years old, but my life really did not provide those sorts of opportunities. Then one day, when my title was released and the reviews started to come in, I realized suddenlythat I am now an Imagineer. Been 3 years and I still cannot believe it. Love what I do way more than my old career and with AI assistants, I am imagineering faster and faster which is nice as the only complaint I get is where is the rest of the theme park. Currently I am just about to update the single dark ride and add to it an open world theme park around (small today), the first bit of the second dark ride, and the ability to ride with loved ones and friends which is surprisingly magical. Like looking over at someone you know sitting with you on the omnimover and going through a highly detailed dark ride together is so much fun, especially for non gamers who want to try VR.
I am 50 years young.
