Monthly Archives: December 2017

Day 350 snuck up on me. It is crazy how quickly ten days (or your life) can pass. I have been sober almost a year now. So young in my sobriety I am still experiencing many things for the first time.

The holidays have always had strange effect on me. I love the season. I (too) often break out (poorly) singing Christmas songs in the office (sorry) from I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas to Wham’s Last Christmas. However, as the Christmas spirit grows around me I begin feeling more and more like I don’t belong anywhere and feel very alone I in the world.

If you thought I drank a lot, I drank twice that during Christmas. Within minutes of arriving home, I would pour a glass of whiskey. I would sit, drink and go through the motions while ignoring both the past and the present. On Christmas Day, I would drive back, pick up a bottle and drink on the couch leading to crying for reasons I will never understand until I passed out.

I grew up with what would appear a storybook Southern Christmas. Most of my entire family lived in or near the small town of five hundred I grew up in. All the aunts, uncles and cousins would gather at my Granny Bootsie’s house. But holidays were always hard for me. I dreaded them. It seemed everyone had something to talk about but me. I felt like I had very little in common with the people around me. I was shy, nerdy and awkward. I didn’t want to play two hand touch in the backyard, and if I did or didn’t, I was made fun of. I didn’t hunt nor do I care to. I found myself just wishing I was at home playing with the Star Wars toys that Santa left under the tree. (Hint: Star Wars stuff is still favorite gift.) I just didn’t fit in.

Last Christmas was particularly impactful. As a drove home on Christmas Day I heard George Michael died. 54 was too young. Drunk, I texted mama and asked how old granddaddy was when he died. “57, heart attack, complications due to alcoholism” Six days later I stopped drinking.

For the first time in two decades I will be sober on Christmas Day. For 20 years, every year, I would show up but not be there. This year I will be there Mama. I love y’all.

This passage from The Gita makes me think of @taylorhuntyoga “What the outstanding person does, others will try to do. The standards such people create will be followed by the whole world.” 3.21

December 31st, 2016 was my last drink of whiskey. I wish I could say I committed to being sober the next day but I didn’t. I knew I was destroying my body and my relationships. I knew I needed to stop drinking for good, but I gave myself an out. I was going to “experiment” with not drinking for 120 days.
In March 2017, I traveled to St. John for vacation. This was my first sober vacation. The friends I was with were overwhelming supportive. I brought a book I bought at my shala, “A Way from Darkness” by Taylor Hunt. It is a book about his journey in life. Every morning I read his story over breakfast highlighting all the sentences that resonated with my experience.
On vacation, I joined the @trinifoundation yoga challenge. Now, I am the last person who should be doing this. On my best day I am an awkward unathletic Southern boy doing yoga and most days more like a sweaty walrus. But maybe if I could get on his radar it would push me to commit to being sober.

Holy shit, I am one of the winners. How in the fuck did that happen? I won a workshop with Taylor. There was no way I could go to this workshop and tell this man I had started drinking again.

Eight months later I met Taylor for the first time in Atlanta. I was still sober and sharing openly about my struggles and sobriety. It was my first Ashtanga workshop. I had lived in fear I was not “good enough” to do one. I did it.

Last week I went out of country for the first time. I traveled to Costa Rica to practice with Taylor and many other amazing humans. Taylor shared that he knew of me before the yoga challenge; that my teachers cared a lot about me and had reached out to him for advice on how to help me back when I was drinking. He selected me as a winner in the the yoga challenge so I would have to meet him at a workshop.
Why one man chose to help someone he didn’t know, I don’t know, but I do know I want to be more like that. Time to do the yoga!

Thank you, Taylor.