The Road Back to Myself

Seven years ago, I stopped drinking.

Even today, writing that sentence feels strange.

Life has allowed me to take on many challenges over the years. I have dealt with business pressures, difficult decisions, financial setbacks, personal losses, and responsibilities that at times felt heavier than I wanted to admit. But of all the battles I have fought, none tested me quite like walking away from alcohol.

Not because quitting was physically impossible.

But because somewhere along the journey, alcohol had quietly stopped being something I consumed and had started becoming part of how I lived.

My relationship with alcohol began sometime in the mid-1990s.

Like many things in life, it started innocently.

No one begins drinking while imagining the ending. Nobody sits with friends holding their first drink and says, "One day this may become the thing that slowly takes pieces of my life away."

Life rarely introduces trouble wearing a warning sign.

At first, there was Sangria wine. Then Bud Light entered the picture. Later came Corona. Somewhere along the way I apparently developed what I thought was a more "mature palate," which is simply a sophisticated way of saying I moved into hard liquor.

Eventually my preferences settled comfortably around vodka—Cîroc and Tito's—and whisky, mainly Crown Royal and Jameson.

Looking back now, I sometimes joke that I drank enough alcohol to keep a small bar in Isiolo fully stocked for an entire year.

But truthfully, there was nothing funny about where the story was heading.

Because alcohol has a quiet way of negotiating with you.

It rarely demands everything all at once.

Instead, it asks for small things.

A little money here.

A little time there.

A few broken routines.

A few postponed responsibilities.

A few promises delayed.

Until one day you look around and realize the small things added up to something much larger.

My quality of life slowly declined.

Relationships became shallow and short-lived. Financially, I was bleeding in ways I refused to acknowledge. I surrounded myself with the wrong company and somehow found a reason to drink for nearly every occasion.

Good news?

Celebrate.

Bad news?

Relieve stress.

Weekend?

Relax.

Holiday?

Of course.

Tuesday afternoon?

Why not?

Human beings are remarkably creative when we are trying to justify things we do not want to question.

And I became very creative.

I blamed genetics.

I blamed friends.

I blamed circumstances.

I blamed stress.

I blamed neighbors.

I blamed relationships.

I blamed almost everyone except the one person looking back at me in the mirror.

Denial is a strange place.

You can be standing in the middle of a storm while convincing yourself that the weather is perfectly fine.

Then my body began sending messages I could no longer ignore.

My hands started trembling so badly that simple things became difficult. Signing my name or writing a check felt like tasks requiring concentration.

My appetite disappeared.

My temper worsened.

I could barely function without alcohol in my system.

I was neglecting responsibilities.

Breaking promises.

Avoiding people.

Financial problems were growing.

Trouble with government agencies followed.

At one point, I found myself dangerously close to losing nearly everything, including a place to live.

Deep down, I already knew what was happening.

I was in free fall.

And somewhere inside, I understood that the road ahead had narrowed into two painful choices.

Quit.

Or keep falling.

Then one Monday morning something happened.

Actually, nothing dramatic happened.

There was no emotional movie scene.

No music playing in the background.

No lightning from heaven.

No life-changing speech from a stranger.

After drinking a 1.75-liter bottle of Crown Royal through the night and into the following day, I simply made a decision.

I was done.

I told my partner and close friends that I was taking a break from alcohol.

No one believed me.

To be fair, I cannot blame them.

I had spent nearly a decade proving the opposite.

Honestly, even I was not entirely convinced.

When I told my daughter, she looked at me and asked:

"For how long?"

Children have an interesting relationship with truth.

They somehow manage to ask the questions adults politely avoid.

And her question stayed with me.

Because I realized I did not have an answer.

I only had hope.

What surprised me later was discovering that quitting itself was not actually the hardest part.

Staying sober was.

The moment I stopped drinking, it felt as though alcohol suddenly became the most advertised product on earth.

Everywhere I looked, there it was.

Television.

Billboards.

Restaurants.

Social gatherings.

Even my own refrigerator seemed confused about the new arrangement.

Alcohol had quietly built itself into the structure of my life.

Then came something I had not expected.

The emptiness.

The days suddenly felt longer.

My calendar became strangely quiet.

Time that had once disappeared into drinking and everything surrounding it now sat in front of me waiting to be filled.

And I think I finally understood something.

People do not only become attached to alcohol.

They become attached to what alcohol was doing for them.

The routines.

The company.

The escape.

The distraction.

The temporary silence.

Removing alcohol without replacing what it occupied can feel like removing walls from a house and expecting the roof to somehow remain floating in the air.

Nature dislikes empty spaces.

Life does too.

If we do not intentionally fill those spaces, something else eventually moves in.

Sometimes the very thing we were trying to leave behind.

So I started filling mine.

I read more.

I took long drives.

I slowed down enough to notice things.

And eventually I started writing.

Funny enough, writing taught me something I had forgotten.

I discovered that I did not actually need alcohol to escape life.

What I needed was to reconnect with it.

Today I can say something I once thought impossible:

I no longer miss alcohol.

I do not say that with pride or certainty.

I say it with gratitude.

Because I know there are many people still fighting battles nobody sees.

And perhaps that is why I take it one day at a time.

Not one year.

Not seven years.

Just today.

Tomorrow can wait for tomorrow.

Life rarely changes because of one giant decision.

Sometimes it changes because of one small choice repeated quietly over time.

And sometimes the road back to yourself begins with something as simple as deciding not to take the next drink.