Life Story

As part of my intensive outpatient program, I have homework. My most recent homework was to write my "life story". This was to contain my childhood and major influences as well as my experiences with alcohol. It had to be 5-7 pages long. I'm sharing it here without edits. You are welcomed to read it, but it's a little raw from my perspective. Life Story Daniel Grossman I am the 5th child in a family of 6. My father was a farmer and he and my mother struggled to make ends meet with all the hungry mouths to feed. When I was too young to really know what was going on, my mother became very ill with Lupus. Years later my Dad would say he thought he was going to lose her. I don’t have much memory of this, except that at one point she had a hospital bed in the living room that I always wanted to climb up onto, but couldn’t. It was decided that I would be taken care of by my grandmother and aunt while my mom was sick. My little sister (14 months younger than I am and a perpetually sunny fop of blonde hair with a huge smile) went with them everywhere. We had our own bedroom in their house, although sometimes we slept in our own home. My aunt and my grandmother were our caretakers for many years. At some point, my mother’s health improved- although being a kid I don’t really know when- but she never really re-engaged with us. She could have been too ill to cope with small children for years, I really don’t know- but she was cleaning the house, going to church, going shopping, etc… It was my aunt and grandmother who took us to all the kids movies at the theaters, took us to the library, to carnivals, etc…. My relationship with my mother still remains distant. We are polite and I know she loves me, but she never really acted like my mother. Somehow, we didn’t quite bond. At any rate, my father was about the same. I don’t think the poor man knew what to do with a seriously ill wife and six hungry children. He was up before everyone else every morning and always came in from work after dark. He usually came in for dinner after 9 PM. Like my mother, my dad was kind, but distant. We didn’t have any experiences of playing catch, shooting baskets, etc… We had small outings but they were rare. As I became older and reached middle school, my aunt caretaker lost interest in me. She often regarded me with something that bordered on disgust. I was fat, unconfident, and I got bad grades in school. She was a career elementary teacher and I think she couldn’t stand older kids anyway. I remember feeling very lost, with the exception of my grandmother. I was a pretty popular kid in elementary school, but that changed in Junior High and I began to feel very, very lonely. My parents and aunts were very disinterested in what I was doing, something really continued for the rest of my life. I played basketball (badly), did public speaking, plays, and lots of music, but they almost had to be dragged along if at all. It was at this time that I met the first real mentor in my life. His name was Kevin and he taught 8th grade English. He had a quirky sense of humor and knew that I played piano and would tease me about it during class. Eventually, he took me and other boys in my class to the Fort Wayne Philharmonic several times, and out to nice restaurants. He was a big force in my life. My next mentor and major life influence was a worse choice. His name was James and he was my Speech Coach. I found out I was really good at Speech and James took me under his wing. James was snarky and looked down on people and things in a way that really appealed to a lonely High School Sophomore. I found out later that James had affairs with multiple female students. Later, he adopted and subsequently abandoned four orphaned children. Not kidding. I was good at music and public speaking so this became my social group and it was there that I had my first experience with alcohol. One of my friends was Wes and his parents had a house on a lake. I would go out on the lake with him and other friends and we would play Trivial Pursuit and drink Bartles and James Coolers. This was pretty harmless, but one night Wes had gotten into beer and was pretty drunk. He was also the only one that knew how to drive the boat. A big storm started to form up over the lake and Wes tore off driving the boat at high speed in the darkness toward his house. I don’t know how we didn’t kill someone or ourselves. We thought it was great fun. My later experiences with alcohol were in college, but it was all small stuff. I remember getting “drunk” to watch The Wall. I think I had two beers. We sometimes went to house parties and got “drunk” but it was very minor. I rarely drank for most of my early adulthood. When I was about 30 and we had two small children, we went to a Baptist Church and I stopped drinking at the time completely. This was easy for me- Neither of my parents drank. Then I started going to China. My company was starting a new site in China and I went there often to help. Beer drinking is a big thing in China. Nevertheless, on my first several trips I never drank despite many many attempts to get me to drink beer. After a year of traveling back and forth, I moved to China is 2005 with my wife and four children. At that point I decided I wasn’t a member of the Baptist Church anymore and I was going to drink beer. It turns out I was very good at it. The China drinking culture is huge. You drink beer from small cups, but many small cups. The procedure is to call the name of someone else at the table, hold up your cup, and say “Gan Bei”. This means “Dry Glass”. You tap cups, holding it lower than the other person when you tap to show respect, then drink all of the contents as quickly as you can. It’s best if you do this faster than your partner. You hold up your arm with cup in hand until your partner is done, then turn the cup over to show you have both consumed every drop. As you could imagine, this production become more involved and more of a struggle as the evening goes on and more and more beer is consumed. I got a lot of face by basically drinking groups of people under that table. I was considered very cool because of this, along with the fact that I was a foreigner, hung around with Chinese and spoke a little Chinese. My wife, an excellent drinker herself, became a good team. Her blonde hair, beauty and sparkling personality made us a power couple. Drinking in China was all fun and games until it started to fall apart. I would drink 10 “pings” or large bottles, of beer at dinners with friends doing this “Gan Bei” thing (a ping is about 32 ounces- no kidding), and we’d do it in about an hour and a half. Sometimes we’d forget to eat. Eventually, I started to black out and my wife would tend to me and make sure I got home. Business occasions were the same, and my Assistant was under standing orders to make sure she wasn’t as drunk as me to make sure I got back to my room. I spent 3 years in China blacking out during these social occasions, all with the support of my wife or my assistant in the name of meeting Chinese social expectations. I used to say I was the most famous beer drinker in Guangdong Province, but there’s no way that’s actually true. I am pretty sure I was the most famous beer drinker in FengGang Town in Guangdong, which doesn’t sound like much until you found out FengGang Town has about 600,000 residents. My last year in China, I became very depressed. We had built a very successful business from scratch with a close knit team, and I had the task of hiring my replacement then turning things over to him. Turning things over to the new guy, Joe, made me feel like I was dying. I had an apartment in the town where our factory was located (Zhongshan) and my family was in the city where the English-speaking school was located (Shenzhen). I was alone every night in Zhongshan and started to spend my evenings at the Irish Bar down the street drinking 3 pint glasses of Guiness. I used to count until I had 6. Eventually I quit counting. I was usually capable of getting a taxi back to my hotel (eventually the same driver took to waiting outside the bar to take me home every night for an exhorbitant fee). We loved living in China. My boss said I could stay there and write my own ticket for whatever I wanted to do. I was torn. I loved it there, but I knew it was killing me. I had a deadline of 3 months to tell my boss what we wanted to do and my wife and I had many agonizing conversations about it. At the end of three months, we told my boss we wanted to stay, and were answered with silence. The Great Recession was approaching and the company would move us back to the USA. For the last year in China, I drank more than any person should ever drink. We moved from China to South Texas and I worked running a factory in Mexico. Remarkably, I stopped drinking. Well, almost. I would still enjoy the occasional tall can, especially on the beach, but my drinking was very limited. After two years in Texas, we moved to Indiana, then Pennsylvania. As the stress of my job increased my drinking increased in PA. Sometimes I drank to much , but it wasn’t such a chronic thing. I lost my job in Pennsylvania in a corporate cutback and we relocated to Cincinnati. The job stress followed me and my drinking patterns stayed the same- probably unhealthy, but not crazy out of control. The Cincinnati job turned weird when the mentally unstable CEO (really, I am not kidding) cleaned house and fired all the good people right and left. He decided to keep me, but I could read the handwriting on the wall. I took a job in South Carolina with the agreement with my wife that we would relocate there after my son finished his last year in High School. I got off to a good start in South Carolina, but it immediately became clear that my wife and family would not be visiting me very frequently, contrary to our original plans. It was hard to manage with responsibilities and jobs back in Cincinnati. To save money I rented the cheapest place I could find- a $450 a month half of an old house. It didn’t seem so bad at first but I later figured out the neighborhood was visited by local law enforcement almost every night. I grew accustomed to waking up and seeing blue lights flash outside my window. Shortly thereafter, it became very clear that my wife and family wouldn’t be moving down to South Carolina after graduation. Logically, I knew this was for many solid reasons and our original plan was ill-conceived but I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me. I became very depressed. I felt unloved and abandoned, and feelings from my mother leaving me to someone else and my aunt dropping me as an adolescent came rushing back. I became deeply depressed and drank to try to make it going away. I never drank every day, but when I did drink it would go out of control very quickly. I attribute this to brain damage from heavy bingeing in China and learned habits of drinking very quickly. One of the first times this got way out of control, I was bringing luggage down stairs in preparation to drive my daughter back to college. I had been drinking from my wife’s box of cheap wine and fell down the stairs and smashed my head into the drywall, leaving a dent that is still there today. My family talked me into going to the ER and, while the side of my face turned black and blue, there was no real damage. I missed a day of work, used make up to hide the bruises and made up a story about being in a car accident. On another occasion, I started drinking (again my wife’s box of cheap wine) while doing taxes and ended up terrorizing my family, screaming up and down the street and scaring my youngest daughter so bad she went to the Dollar General to hide. The kids hid the car keys from me that day. One weekend I was going to meet my wife at a campground in Virginia, and I drank the whole way from South Carolina to Viriginia. At one point I drove through a sobriety check point, but they didn’t stop me. Later I got confused about where I was going and turned around and drove through the same checkpoint a second time. I blacked out on some off the main path mountain road in Virginia. My wife managed to find me, but to this day I don’t really know how. One of the worst nights came when I was flying back from a business meeting in Panama. I had a beer in Panama, and two glasses of wine at the United Lounge in Orlando. Somehow, I was woken at about 2 AM by the Chicago Police banging on my door. I eventually figured out that I blacked out at the airport, missed my flight, rebooked for the next day, booked a hotel and somehow (not sure how) got to the hotel 2 miles from the airport. Once at the hotel, I wandered around for two hours inside, unable to find my room. I would learn that the only thing that kept me from leaving the hotel and wandering into a very bad part of Chicago was a kind hearted overnight desk clerk who kept me from leaving the hotel. All this time, my wife and kids were following me on Life360, desperately trying to contact me to make sure I was safe. I really, really scarred my family with this one, especially my wife. My final episode I was camping while working in South Carolina to save money and on a rainy, lonely night decided to drink in my tent. I’m not so how, but I ended up driving around and couldn’t find my campsite. I had some kind of confrontation with another camper and an unpleasant encounter with a ranger. I don’t know why he didn’t call the police but he told me to get back to my tent and stay there. I drove home the next day but on impulse bought a tall can which I drank as I drove. I was drunk by the time I got home and failed a breathalyzer by a long shot. There many more stories than these. I really horrified my kids and traumatized my wife more times than I can recount here. I often wish there was a way to make all of the past go away but there isn’t. My recovery has come in phases. Several months ago, I saw a Doctor for my depression and was prescribed Lexapro. This really helped and I felt much better, but I still couldn’t quit drinking to manage my feelings. After the Chicago airport incident, I went to AA for the first time in Walhalla, South Carolina, and said for the first time “My name is Daniel and I’m an alcoholic.” Until that point, I was in denial that I was an alcoholic. Although there was a huge amount of evidence to the contrary, I couldn’t admit to myself that I was an alcoholic. After the Chicago Airport fiasco, even I couldn’t deny it. AA helped and I stayed sober for 32 days, but the 32 days were a terrible struggle. I was working through my Moral Inventory (AA Step 3) when I relapsed on day 33. I didn’t have the skills to cope with my feeling and issues inside my brain. I continued to try AA but relapsed again. After the drunken drive home from South Carolina, I spent the night in prayer, desperately crying for a solution to help me. God answers the prayers of a crushed spirit and he helped me. It was after this that, after figuring our financially we couldn’t afford and in-patient program, that something like Lionrock existed. I travel frequently and it would be almost impossible for me to attend a physical location on a regular basis. I thank God for having me run the Google search that found Lionrock. Lionrock has helped a lot. I’ve begun to use more meditation, which really helps me to manage emotions and situations. I use HALT to understand triggers or stressors in my life and to manage them. In AA they say you have to just go 24 hours at a time, but sometimes it’s 10 minutes at a time or even 1 minute at a time. I’ve used the principles I learned in Lionrock to form my own strategy if faced with an urge to drink- wait 10 minutes, say a prayer, and eat a sandwich. It sounds goofy but it works really well. I started with Lionrock 44 days ago. I feel confident about the future and positive, but I have no illusions about the work I have do to recover.