Planning your own death doesn’t always look like you’d expect it to. You might not even realize what you did.

What I was like

It’s probably a Saturday in March, but it may as well have been a Friday in February. It’s not a Sunday because we would be at Mzoli’s, and it’s not Monday-Thursday because it’s too early in the semester to skip classes. It’s probably Saturday. Which means last night was Friday and we probably went to Long Street, spending most of the time at Beer House. If we went to Beer House, that means I had 4-5 goblets of Devil’s Peak IPAs for 45 Rand each. It’s the most expensive draft they sell, allowing me to pretend I’m drinking it for the seemingly sophisticated hops – mostly it tastes like if you mopped the floor of hot yoga, aged it for some reason, and then added mango. Of course, I’m drinking it because it has the highest alcohol content.

No matter, it was a fun day during my 2014 semester abroad that started with the daily ritual of a happy hangover as the day’s excitement provided the inspiration to get going. Today, we’re taking the train to Muizenberg, Cape Town’s best surfing beach. I don’t remember many details about the day other than that I enjoyed swimming in the warm water, I didn’t surf, I went for a sort of half run because I thought that would be a cool thing to do in front of the girls I had crushes on, and I had some delicious falafel. It wasn’t a forgettable day. But, for the most part, the details rest in a hazy fog with all other above average days.

Except for those few sentences of conversation at the train station, which are etched in my mind as the formalization of a plan that was already in motion, and one that stayed very fun for very long until it wasn’t. And by then, it felt like it couldn’t be stopped. Until it was.

🙂🙃🙂

The conversation didn’t have much to it. The way it started – I think – is that Jake had noticed that for the two months we’d lived together I drank every day and he was rightly concerned. “Do you think you’re addicted?” “Yeah probably,” I said, before adding “but I would be addicted to anything.” “Even sex?” he laughed. “Yeah if anyone would agree to do that with me, probably.”

And with that the conversation ended. Make a joke, move on.

But privately, I understood what I had admitted. My new study abroad friends were more accepting of my obvious problem than my friends at USC who had staged at least two interventions the semester earlier to try to get me stop. My parents felt powerless to control what they saw. I’d done the online self assessments about alcoholism and at first rejected the answer, as if it were a Buzzfeed quiz telling me that if I were a pasta shape I would be farfalle. But ultimately I accepted the obvious reality, then decided I had no intention of changing.

As every good 21-year old narcissist does, I began planning the title and chapters of my memoire: Table for one; drying myself with a wet towel. Table for one felt self explanatory. Self-deprecating, but realistic for someone who loved to go to restaurants alone. I’m not sure where “drying myself with a wet towel” came from, but I think it did literally come to me when I was drying myself with a wet towel because I never did laundry. It also served as a metaphor for a life of drinking every day, in which you never really get “dry,” as you just endlessly transition from hungover to drunk, and then eventually from drunk to drunk to drunk.

But then I also added in a final chapter: Dead at 28.

Again, a silly joke that I wasn’t cool enough to die at 27 and that the most pathetic thing would be to die just past that age. Unfortunately, within a few years the joke became a mission statement.

😐🤥😐

The last time I went to a doctor for bloodwork was when I was 22, received news that my liver enzyme numbers were a bit off and that I should come back in. It was summer 2015 and I had an internship at The New Republic, but the $1,000/month stipend didn’t give me much of a path to moving to New York, which I didn’t want to do anyway.

Rather than following up with the doctor, I responded to a Facebook ad for a tour guide job and moved back to Cape Town. I had more friends there and less responsibility, and for the next year I had the best time of my life. Being in Cape Town as the Rhodes Must Fall movement turned to Fees Must Fall to Everything Must Fall brought genuine excitement. And even though I continued to live hedonistically, it came with living in a communal house with 40+ incredible people from South Africa, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Sweden, Uganda, Botswana, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Togo, Norway, Kenya, Gabon, Finland, Denmark, Mauritius, Mozambique, Jordan, Romania, Madagascar, Canada, Burundi, DRC, Ireland, Australia, Zambia, USA, and almost certainly some more I have forgotten.

But the $400 a month I was meant to receive never came, as my boss, a sexual harasser, wannabe entrepreneur billionaire boy from Uganda’s third richest family spent, the company money on Mercedes-Benz busses and apartments for himself rather than paying his employees. Plus my brother was getting married and I wanted to go. So in June 2016 I came back to America. For the next few months I followed the Hillary, Trump debacle and convinced myself that drinking beers while reading Twitter counted as being a journalist. Eventually, I did get a standard NYC marketing job, and when an apartment opened up with an old Cape Town friend in NYC I jumped at the chance to move in.

New York is expensive. I could not afford to go to bars to drink the way I wanted to drink. Rather than drink normally, I decided to go back to what I did in college when I also had no money – buy gallons of cheap rum and drink that alone. So every night, I walked home from work, got one or two slices of pizza and a bottle of seltzer, and then drank in my bed until I fell asleep. Sometimes I’d also eat Pringles.

After a year, the people in my apartment were moving to Brooklyn. My company had just moved our office to the Financial District and I decided to try living on my own in Jersey City for cheaper living and easy commute. I found a big studio with a washer and dryer in the unit. I had never had my own place, and was so excited. Things got worse from there.

I liked work and my coworkers, and it was easy enough to meet up with friends in New York. I was lonely, but I had become used to and comfortable with that. But when Covid forced companies to send workers home, I was frightened of what I would do. I knew I was not capable of working from home without losing control. I wasn’t happy about moving back with my parents at 27, but it likely saved my life. 27 became 28 and 28 became 29.

My 29th birthday was surreal because it marked the missing of my self manifested death date. Up until that day, I had strung together about three weeks of not drinking – by far the longest to that point. But then I broke it by having two beers, and there wasn’t really sadness or joy or much of anything.

I kept paying for my apartment in Jersey City through Covid, hopeful that the ever shifting return-to-normal timeline would come and we would go back to office happy hours and whatever. And in November 2021, we finally got word that the office would reopen.

What happened

I spent the weekend of November 5-7 with my family in Washington DC, where my brother lives. I was doing better than ever, having put together more than 40 consecutive sober days. I even met up with an old friend to watch a morning soccer match and when he bought me a beer I politely declined and explained the situation.

Yet as we prepared to drive home to New Jersey on November 7, I encouraged my parents to leave early. We wouldn’t want to drive home in the dark! As I remember, we got to their home by around 4PM, and I encouraged them to quickly take me to Jersey City so I could make sure the apartment was clean and in order and then get a good night’s rest before commuting back to the office on Monday. Really, my subconscious drove me to ensure I was there before the liquor store closed at 8 on Sunday. Sure enough, within a few minutes I was walking that way, picking up a gallon of rum, some yellow Gatorade, and some chips. Then for about an hour or so I returned to that familiar, pathetic bliss of overwhelming warmth while watching something stupid like BattleBots on the computer. The show is just ambiance – I know I won’t remember it anyway – as I let the self destructive poison flow through me.

The next day I excitedly, thirstily wake up, drink 2-3 glasses of water, shower, and am on my way to the office. There’s like four people where there used to be 200, most of it is closed off to save some money on taxes, and the few people there aren’t really sure if we’re meant to wear masks or not. I have one hungover meeting and then go to the bathroom and throw up. I go home at around noon. Fuck this. I get some pizza and drink a bit, have a meeting at 4 and for the most part hold it together. But then it’s off to the races. I’d given up.

On November 9, I wake to my alarm, pleased I am sleeping in my bed. I decide today I’ll work in the kitchen next to the fridge. Rather than water, I just start with the leftover cup of rum and seltzer in the fridge. I have a meeting from 9-9:30, and then blackness.

Next I remember, I am standing in my kitchen and my dad is rummaging through my cabinets. I think he’s getting rid of the tens and tens of empty bottles while I stand frozen in shame. Luckily, he distrusted me enough that he had made a spare key to my apartment in case something like this were to happen. Earlier in the day, my colleague had realized something was wrong on a Zoom call and contacted other colleagues, who eventually were able to contact my dad, who was able to come and save me from doing whatever I was trying to do. I do not think I was earnestly trying to kill myself, but I also think I was doing my best to feel nothing. Despite drinking nearly every day for about 11 years, this one was different.

😔😶😔

What I am like now

I almost certainly should have gone to rehab, but I didn’t. But by talking to friends I was able to figure out where to go and how to take the steps to fix what I’d done. Nine months later, I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time.

The only interesting thing about a death incorrectly foretold is that when you stumble through the finish line and it dissipates into a mirage, you open your hungover eyes to the fuzzy branches of every possibility ahead of you. Some of those branches are scary, and most lead back to where you were (the success rate for staying clean/sober is only something like 5% 😕).

But some of these branches go in exciting directions, and with enough work you start to move towards the right ones. You start to help people, you make tiny improvements to the world, and you smile. Rather than get overwhelmed by the complexity of the world, you realize you can do anything because everyone is just as overwhelmed as you are. Be nice, work hard, and work hard at being nice and everything falls into place.

I had to learn that my narcissism and self-pity had convinced me that the only solution to my unique problem was suicidal destruction. That was wrong. The truth is that I have some of the world’s most common maladies and there are straightforward – though certainly difficult – ways to control them.

I’d lived with the false belief that everyone else had answers for how to live when in fact we are all synchronously grasping for order and meaning in a life that has no intent on spelling it out for us. But not having an answer does not mean you should turn to nihilism and destruction. That is childish and foolish, and the one thing I am certain of is that there’s far too much intrigue, kindness, and good in the world for that type of thinking to hold any weight.

Then, I had to learn that there isn’t anything wrong with me, and that addiction is not inherently bad. I prefer the term extremist to describe my personality and the people like me. For 11 years, my extremism manifested itself most clearly and directly through a constant desire to drink alcohol and the inability to stop once I started. But it also came through in other ways: eating the spiciest food possible until I got to pure extracts, working 16 hour days without pausing, not eating for multiple days at a time, skydiving, bungee jumping, getting a rush out of standing up to AK-47-wielding police officers in Mozambique, riding a scooter with no face shield through Cape Town rain, and various other stupid, fun, thrilling things.

The word “alcoholic” carries a stigma in the wider population, but I have 0 shame in the term. My favorite people are alcoholics – mostly the ones who have stopped drinking, but often the ones who still do. It’s just a thing like any other thing, and once you learn that it is a description and not a scarlet letter it becomes liberating. We don’t get to design our genetics, but we do get to work to be the best people we can be.

What’s fun is that once you understand extremism, you can try to point it in positive directions. For now, that means being the good friend and family member I couldn’t fully be over the past 11 years. It means standing up against bullshit at work and being funny and interesting at dinners rather than falling asleep. It means listening and remembering rather than staring and forgetting. Eventually, it will mean more things, and I’ll be happy to look back at this point in time as one great moment of many. Not drinking can definitely be a bummer sometimes – drinking is fun! But by not doing it, I’ve been able to reach more happiness in 9 months than I had in the previous 5 years, and that feels great.

😌😋😌

So why did I write this? And why did I share it in this way?

I wrote it because I’ve wanted to tell people what’s going on and this seemed like an easy enough way to do it. For anyone who I may not know that well or who thinks this is oversharing – sorry! And thanks for still reading this far! I’ll end probably end up deleting it in a few hours, but maybe not. And going forward, I hope to write and share more – hopefully not so much long-winded, narcissistic depression writing like this, but perhaps some travel stories, photo dumps, maybe some short stories? We’ll see!

Love you all. In the next month or two I hope to move back to Jersey City and I want you to all come over so I can make you breakfast tacos, go swimming, and listen to the Baha Men and Ying Yang Twins. Thank you for reading and talk to you soon =).