People ask me all the time why I quit drinking.

The look on their face is usually the same.

Curious. Almost waiting for me to tell them that some massive event happened that changed my life forever.

For years, I thought I knew the answer.

And for years, I gave people the same one.

I quit because I wanted to become a better father.

A better realtor.

A better man.

I don't think any of those answers were wrong.

I just don't think they were the whole truth.

The truth is, quitting alcohol was one of the smallest decisions I made.

It just happened to change everything.

Most of us don't wake up one morning and decide to live someone else's life.

It happens slowly.

You make the sensible decisions.

The ones your parents genuinely believe will give you a better life than they had.

You get the education.

Build the career.

Find the partner.

Get married.

Have kids.

Buy the house.

Take the vacations.

From the outside, it looks like you're building a life.

Sometimes... you're just getting better at surviving one that doesn't fit.

I know that feeling because I lived it for years.

At the time, I couldn't have explained what felt wrong.

I just knew there was a quiet dissatisfaction that followed me everywhere.

Not loud enough to change my life.

Just loud enough that I was always looking for something to quiet it.

For me... that something was alcohol.

I don't remember the first time I saw people drink.

I just remember it always being there.

Family parties.

Weddings.

Birthdays.

The men would eventually find another room.

The cards came out.

The bottles appeared.

Most nights ended with laughter.

Every now and then... they didn't.

As a kid, I didn't think much of it.

Why would I?

It was normal.

Children don't learn only from what they're told.

They learn from what they repeatedly see.

And they're always listening.

During those gatherings, or anytime the boys were out of line, we'd hear the same phrase.

Bundaa baan ja.

Be a man.

I heard that a lot as a kid.

Fall off your bike?

Be a man.

Get hurt?

Be a man.

Cry?

Be a man.

I don't think anyone was trying to teach me not to feel.

I think they were trying to prepare me for a hard life the only way they knew how.

My parents loved me.

They wanted me to become resilient.

Somewhere along the way... I confused resilience with emotional silence.

Nobody ever taught me what to do with pain.

They taught me not to show it.

Those aren't the same thing.

Emotions don't disappear just because we refuse to express them.

Sometimes they wait.

Sometimes they become anger.

Sometimes they become arrogance.

Sometimes they become the loudest guy at the party.

Sometimes... they come out after a few drinks.

I still remember my first drink.

A friend was throwing a party at a place called The Bronx.

A few of us climbed into the back seat of a car with some coolers.

I didn't get hammered.

I just got introduced to a feeling I'd spend the next thirty years chasing.

I felt looser.

Funnier.

More alive.

When I got home, I remember trying to act completely normal around my mom.

I was probably talking twice as loud and smiling twice as much, completely convinced I was fooling her.

I thought I'd discovered confidence.

I hadn't.

I'd discovered an escape.

For years, I thought alcohol made me more confident.

It didn't.

I was already confident.

I had built a successful career.

I could lead people.

I could speak in front of a room.

Confidence was never the problem.

Alcohol did something much more dangerous.

It slowly turned confidence into arrogance.

It gave my ego a microphone.

The version of me that emerged after a few drinks wasn't more authentic.

He just cared less.

Less about consequences.

Less about how his words landed.

Less about the people around him.

He mistook volume for strength.

Dominance for confidence.

Being intimidating for being respected.

The scary part is... I admired him.

I thought that's who I wanted to become.

I thought he was the fun guy.

The life of the party.

The rebel.

The rule breaker.

The guy who took shit from no one.

The centre of attention.

I thought being him meant I was happy.

It didn't.

That guy wasn't free.

That guy was a dick.

There was one night that stayed with me long after the hangover disappeared.

Not because it was the worst thing I ever did.

Because it was the first time I couldn't pretend that the man I became after drinking was someone I admired.

We had my ex-wife's family over for dinner.

It started the way so many nights had before.

Good food.

Good conversation.

Lots of laughter.

At some point, I decided to bring out a bottle of twelve-year-old El Dorado rum.

One bottle became two.

Like it always seemed to.

By the time everyone left, it was close to midnight.

I stumbled into the bathroom feeling like the room was spinning.

Then I started throwing up.

My ex-wife was furious.

She had every right to be.

When I tried to stand up, I grabbed the towel bar to steady myself.

One side pulled out of the wall.

I remember lying on the cold tile floor because I felt too sick to move.

I remember yelling at my wife.

I remember believing she was the problem.

She wasn't.

And then... I remember my daughters.

I don't remember what they said.

I don't even remember if they said anything.

I just remember they saw me.

Not the dad who tucked them into bed.

Not the dad who told them they could become anything they wanted.

They met someone else.

For years, I'd convinced myself that alcohol revealed the real me.

Lying on that bathroom floor... there was nowhere left to hide.

That wasn't confidence.

That wasn't authenticity.

That was a grown man completely out of control while the two people he loved most in the world stood there watching.

I eventually moved the towel bar higher.

I patched the holes.

I just never sanded them.

I never repainted the wall.

Even today... they're still there.

I didn't quit drinking after that night.

I negotiated.

I told myself I'd never let it get that bad again.

And I believed myself.

I had always been introspective.

I had always believed I could adapt.

Change.

Correct course.

Besides, something like this had happened once before, when my oldest daughter was still a toddler.

Years had passed between those two nights.

That became evidence in my defence.

See?

I could control it.

I just had to make sure I never let myself get to that point again.

It sounded responsible.

It was also a lie.

If I could convince myself the problem was drinking too much... I didn't have to ask whether drinking still belonged in my life at all.

That was a much scarier question.

One I wasn't ready to answer.

I thought alcohol was the thing I needed to change.

It was just the first thing I became willing to question.

When people hear that I quit drinking, they usually assume the hard part was giving up alcohol.

It wasn't.

The hard part was giving up the person I thought I was.

For thirty years, alcohol had quietly become part of my identity.

Not because I couldn't function without it.

Because I couldn't imagine socializing without it.

Celebrating without it.

Relaxing without it.

Every wedding.

Every vacation.

Every birthday.

Every dinner.

Every night out.

For years, I had the same wingman.

He was louder than me.

Funnier than me.

More impulsive than me.

He never second-guessed himself.

Or at least that's what I believed.

Then one day... he didn't show up.

It was just me.

The first few times I went out sober felt awkward as hell.

I'd stand in conversations wondering if I was talking enough.

I'd leave parties early and wonder if people thought something was wrong.

The places I'd once loved suddenly felt strangely empty.

The conversations I could once have until two in the morning started sounding like the same stories on repeat.

It wasn't because everyone else had changed.

I had.

Or maybe... for the first time in years... I had stopped pretending not to notice.

I wasn't craving a drink.

I was craving familiarity.

That was uncomfortable.

Because I was grieving an identity.

One I'd spent thirty years building.

One I genuinely believed people liked.

One I genuinely believed made me interesting.

One I genuinely believed was me.

It wasn't.

It was a performance.

And performances are exhausting.

Nobody tells you that when you let go of an identity, there's a season where you don't know who you are anymore.

You're no longer the old version of yourself.

You haven't grown into the new one yet.

You're just... in between.

Every week I stayed sober, something unexpected started happening.

The silence I'd spent years trying to outrun stopped feeling threatening.

It started feeling honest.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't reaching for something outside myself every time I felt uncomfortable.

I was finally sitting with myself long enough to ask a different question.

Not...

"How do I stop feeling this?"

But...

"What is this feeling trying to tell me?"

That question changed my life.

Not because it gave me answers.

Because it changed the kinds of questions I was willing to ask.

What else had I accepted simply because it had become familiar?

That's a dangerous question.

Because once you ask it honestly... it rarely stays in one area of your life.

It started showing up everywhere.

In my marriage.

In my career.

In the way I defined success.

Even in the way I thought about myself.

Every major decision I'd made had followed a familiar script.

Get the education.

Find the stable career.

Get married.

Buy the house.

Build the pension.

Work hard.

Retire comfortably.

None of those things are wrong.

For many people, they're exactly right.

The problem wasn't the script.

The problem was that somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether it was mine.

My parents didn't hand me a map that had worked perfectly for them.

They had endured hardships of their own.

They genuinely believed education, a good career and financial security would spare their children from some of the struggles they'd lived through.

They gave me the best map they had.

And I followed it.

For years, I'd been living a life that looked successful from the outside.

Inside... there was a quiet melancholy I couldn't explain.

I kept thinking the next promotion would fix it.

The next raise.

The next vacation.

The next accomplishment.

Every milestone gave me a brief sense that I'd finally arrived.

Then the feeling returned.

There has to be more than this.

For a long time, I thought I stayed in my marriage because of my daughters.

That was part of the truth.

It just wasn't all of it.

I stayed because it was easier than going.

I stayed because it was familiar.

I stayed because it was comfortable.

I stayed because going meant jumping into the abyss and not knowing if I'd emerge.

And I stayed because of something else I'd heard my entire life.

Lokhee kee kaan ghey.

What will people say?

When I finally told my dad that my marriage was ending, he didn't ask me why.

He didn't ask if I was okay.

He said the phrase.

The same one I'd heard growing up.

What will people say?

I don't tell that story to blame my father.

I tell it because sometimes the voices that keep us somewhere long after we know we need to leave aren't even our own.

Eventually, they become so familiar... we stop noticing who's speaking.

I stayed longer than I wanted to because I didn't have the courage to change.

The same thing happened in my career.

Long before I left the corporate world, something inside me knew I was done.

An eight-hour day felt like a forty-hour week.

I was nine years away from earning my full pension, and the thought of living the same routine for nine more years filled me with dread.

I stopped laughing at my bosses' dumb jokes.

Not that I had ever been a brown-nosing kiss-ass.

I just stopped caring how they perceived me.

I would get knots in my stomach, especially when I had to interact with the leadership team.

I felt like many of them were phonies.

I believed you put people first because if you take care of people, the results will follow.

They seemed to believe the results came first.

Maybe neither side was entirely right.

But I knew the values no longer fit.

And still... I stayed.

Another year.

Another pension contribution.

Another reason not to jump.

I knew I was living someone else's script.

I just didn't know what to do about it.

And I wasn't about to risk everything I'd built to find out.

I believe the universe gives us gentle nudges when we're moving in a direction that isn't right for us.

I also believe it's up to us whether we listen.

I didn't.

The nudges became shoves.

People I believed were less capable were promoted while I was passed over.

My opinions were increasingly ignored.

The knots in my stomach got tighter.

Still... I stayed.

Until one day, the decision was made for me.

I got fired.

I was devastated.

Not only because I'd lost my job.

Because of the shame.

How could someone who had been rated a key contributor, in the top five percent, for eleven of seventeen years... be cast aside like a degenerate?

But underneath the shame was something even more terrifying.

Now I had no excuse.

For the first time in my adult life, I was being forced to step into a version of myself I hadn't met yet.

Over the next few months, I searched for IT jobs.

Every time I opened a job description, my stomach would knot.

My body seemed to be telling me something my mind still wasn't ready to accept.

That wasn't my path anymore.

The problem was... I had no idea what was.

For years, I thought the story of my life was about alcohol.

I don't think it was.

Alcohol was the first thing that stopped working.

The first thing I became willing to question.

And once I started questioning one part of my life... the questions didn't stop.

Why am I drinking?

Why am I staying?

Why am I afraid?

Whose definition of success am I chasing?

How much of my life am I actually choosing... and how much of it am I simply continuing because it's familiar?

I don't pretend to have all the answers.

I don't want to.

I'm not a sage.

I'm not a guru.

I'm a man trying to understand his own life out loud.

And maybe that's why I wanted to write this.

Because when I went through the hardest years of my life, I often felt like I was walking alone.

Not because nobody cared.

I think a lot of people simply didn't know how to help.

My therapist listened.

Others tried in the ways they knew how.

But much of the journey was mine to walk.

Maybe there are parts of your life nobody else can walk for you.

But that doesn't mean you have to believe you're the only person who has ever been there.

I don't want to stand above anyone and tell them how to live.

I'd rather walk beside them.

People still ask me why I quit drinking.

I don't mind the question anymore.

I just don't answer it the way I used to.

Yes, alcohol had become destructive in my life.

Yes, my daughters deserved a better version of their father.

Yes, quitting changed everything.

But quitting drinking wasn't the bravest thing I've ever done.

The bravest thing was becoming willing to question the life I'd spent decades building.

Not because it was a bad life.

Because somewhere along the way... parts of it had stopped feeling like mine.

I don't feel anger toward the man lying on that bathroom floor anymore.

I don't even feel the same shame.

Mostly... I feel compassion.

He wasn't trying to destroy his life.

He was trying to survive it.

He was using the tools he had.

Some of them were hurting him.

Some of them were hurting the people he loved.

But he didn't know how to put them down yet.

I understand why he negotiated.

Why he stayed.

Why he kept believing he could control it.

Why he convinced himself one more year might somehow feel different.

He wasn't weak.

He was afraid.

And fear has an incredible ability to disguise itself as responsibility.

Sometimes it sounds like...

Stay for the kids.

Sometimes...

What will people say?

Sometimes...

You're only nine years from your pension.

Sometimes...

Just don't drink that much next time.

Different words.

Same negotiation.

I don't know whether you'll call what finally changed intuition.

Your subconscious.

Life.

God.

Or the universe.

I only know what I've observed in my own life.

Something inside me had been whispering for years.

Sometimes I listened.

Often I didn't.

Sometimes the whispers became shoves.

Sometimes heartbreak.

Sometimes consequences.

Eventually... I started listening sooner.

The holes where that towel bar once sat have never completely disappeared.

I moved it higher.

I patched the wall.

I just never got around to sanding it and repainting it.

Maybe one day I will.

Or maybe I won't.

Every time I walk into that bathroom, they're still there.

A reminder of a man I spent years being ashamed of.

A man I understand differently now.

I used to look at those holes and remember one of the worst nights of my life.

Now... I see the beginning of a question.

One I wasn't ready to answer that night.

One that would eventually follow me everywhere.

What if there's another way to live?

With love,
Rick