Blackout Artist

Picture taken: 2008
​
“I don’t remember”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said this line. When I didn’t use this line, I nodded my head and pretended like I remembered.. when I didn’t. I didn’t lie because I was a liar, I lied because I was ashamed of myself. I didn’t want everyone to know how big of a drinking problem I really had.

I had people around me that were coke heads, junkies and pill fiends. Although I was all these things at one point or another too, what I truly was was a blackout artist. When I drank alcohol, I was guaranteed to drink until I blacked out. There was no question about it, and there was no amount of alcohol that was too much. I didn’t get the spins anymore, I never threw up, I just blacked out and continued to drink. Every morning I woke up with the shakes, needing to consume alcohol to make them go away, repeating the blackout drinking cycle on a daily basis.

This is where I used uppers as a tool to help with my blackout problem. Coke, ecstasy and molly kept me from blacking out and still allowed me to drink more... the logic seems fucked up, but it made sense to me at the time.

I remember writing a paper about my blackouts and sharing it with my group while I was in rehab. I was stuck in this blackout cycle for at least the last year and a half of my drinking. The major theme of my paper was that of all that time I spent out there drinking, the fact that I blacked out so often equated to so much of my life wasted in a state where alcohol was the driver. Like... not remembering all of that time for a year and a half? That’s insane!

Every day now I get to experience, feel and remember everything I do. The feeling I get from simply being present in every moment is a high in itself. My mind is always clear, I see and perceive the world through eyes that are backed by a positive mind, so the world I see is a beautiful place with endless possibilities. I’m doing everything in my power today to never go back to that life.