First of all I’d like to apologize to Craig Tapscott and the people at Card Player who I annoyed endlessly to link this blog to their website. I originally made a commitment to post at least bi-weekly this summer to keep my followers updated on my progress, successes and failures at this year’s WSOP. This is only the second post I have written this summer, and regrettably, will be my last of the summer as well.
My ego and my pride don’t want me writing this blog. They want me to pretend that everything is ok. They don’t want me to admit defeat or failure. They don’t want me to talk about the way I feel right now. Every post that I have written since this blog started has had an uplifting positive tone, and has been geared to inspire hope in anyone reading that may have been able to identify with any of the feelings or struggles that I have written about. I wanted this blog to be flawless and ever growing and improving, as my sobriety and mental health grew and improved. So often in the life of someone like me, someone who struggles with drug and alcohol use, there are underlying issues that cause the road to recovery to be hard, painful, and sometimes demoralizing. I am unfortunately in one of those places now.
I considered not even attempting to write another entry until I had gotten over the struggles I am currently experiencing. I am quite possibly in the darkest period I have ever experienced in my life, and I had very little desire to share any of the horrible experiences I have had over the last few months with anyone other than people in my closest circle. Someone who I respect very much who has been sober for a long time told me; “Don’t write when everything is all better…write while you’re in pain. Write when you’re in so much pain that you can be brutally honest and your ego cannot control what comes out. Don’t sugar coat it…there may be one person who’s life this honesty will save. There may be one person who this message reaches that may spare themselves the pain, embarrassment and hopelessness that you are feeling right now. That one person is more important than your pride. Stop being selfish…write a post.”
There will be people who read this and judge me. There always are. There will be some people who hate on me and think me to be a hopelessly sick person. There always have been. There will be some people whos hearts break for me and my loved ones when they read this, and wish me the best. There always have been. I’m not too concerned about any of that at this point. Right now I’m not sure if I will ever set foot in a casino or play one more hand in a poker tournament again. I have no reason to save face at this point. This post will be the most raw honest and hopefully beneficial that I have ever written. It may be lengthy, but the people who this message is truly meant for will read this in its entirety and hopefully learn a lesson that will save them some pain. That was the whole point of this blog in the first place, and honestly those readers are the only ones I give a shit about at this point. So here goes…
Let’s rewind to before my last post…because my last post was complete bullshit. When Craig finally got back to me and let me know that the people at CardPlayer were willing to post my blog, I had already begun my decline and was not sober. When I returned to poker in the winter, I had a lot of hope for myself. I had never felt better in my life, and I really believed that I was on the path to a happy and fulfilled life. Maybe I was at that point, if I had continued doing the next right thing and continued to do hard work on myself. That has never been my M.O. before, and it wasn’t this time either. The beginning was great. My return seemed to be going flawlessly at first, and I was handling the game of poker and the game of life very well. Nothing was really bothering me too much in the beginning. As time wore on however, I started seeing myself slipping back into that angry negative man that I had once been. I had several outburst of anger in the first three months of my return, behind closed doors, that really terrified myself as well as those closest to me. The more these outbursts happened, the more and more I began to question whether or not my recovery was really going as well as I thought it was. I started to believe that maybe I needed more help than just A.A. On some level I knew that I was time bomb waiting to explode in a bad way if these issues were not addressed. I did not address them. I tried to pretend that if I kept doing what I was doing RE: my recovery from drugs and alcohol, this anger and depression problem would go away. It didn’t. As someone just recently told me, “If you have a tooth ache, you don’t go to A.A…if you have a broken bone, you don’t go to A.A. If you have any mental issues outside of a drug and alcohol problem, you need to seek assistance outside of A.A.” That makes sense to me now.
I have to briefly mention that during my deep run in the L.A.P.C. Main Event in February, I was informed that my Father was diagnosed with several different conditions that are painful and ultimately life-threatening and terminal. My father and I have a messy past, and this news brought about a lot of feelings of sadness and anger in regards to my relationship with him that I had never addressed. For the sake of his privacy, I will leave the details of our relationship out of this post…but this news did stir up many feelings that I could not identify or process. These feelings ultimately began to come out in anger more and more frequently. By the time I got back home and spent some time with him, the whole situation had taken a pretty hard toll on me.
Then the day finally came that changed everything for me. The day came where I stopped having a choice, and began being a slave to mind altering substances again. I say “stopped having a choice” because for alcoholics, there is always a choice until we put something in our bodies…then all bets are off. I had a huge argument with someone very close to me where I ended up out of control. I was screaming and slamming and carrying on, and I could see the terror in the eyes of everyone in the room. I left the house finally and drove myself to Borgata because they were having their Spring Open, and I figured I could calm down and get my mind off of things by absorbing myself in my career. Within 10 minutes of being there I found myself outside in the parking lot in a car with 3 people who were smoking weed. For a split second, it seemed like that was the answer to all of my problems. I made the CHOICE to take a hit of that first joint…and that was the last choice I had for quite some time. I could have decided after that to come clean, to come home to reset and to address all of these issues, but my pride and ego would not let me admit failure. After all, I had this Blog, and everyone knew my business already. My family and friends were all so proud of me, and the thought of disappointing them was unbearable. For a long time I pondered whether or not I could just smoke pot regularly like all of my friends who didn’t have hard drug problems. I saw them smoking on breaks or after an event, and I always deluded myself on some level to think that someday I could use just pot safely as well, like a “normal” person. The scariest thing about the entire situation was that at first, I was right. Smoking completely calmed me down and made me more compassionate, kind and selfless. I would buy my mom flowers for no reason, help anyone who needed help with anything and my relationships for that first month that I was smoking had never been better.
There was one huge problem however…my entire life was a lie, and that really began to weigh on me. The more and more my deceptions started to bother me, the more and more I needed to smoke. I was smoking a bowl, going into an A.A. meeting, sitting quietly for an hour, watching the clock every minute till I could get out of there to smoke again. By the time I was ready to leave for the W.S.O.P. I had a ¼ ounce a day weed habit that I was sustaining completely behind everyone’s back. Anyone out there who has never been a drug addict or an alcoholic and needed to hide it doesn’t understand what a full time job this really is. Every second of every day all of a sudden revolved around when and how I could successfully buy, pick up, steal or ingest weed without getting caught. Like a good drug addict I got away with this for the entire time, until I decided to come clean.
I got out to Vegas and it was more of the same. I was playing extremely well in the beginning of the series, and I wasn’t taking the beats too hard, but my mental health was declining in other areas tremendously. I finally had Amanda back in my life to some capacity and the guilt and shame of lying to her was unbearable. The guilt and shame of lying to my parents and my sponsor and the people in my sober network was becoming unbearable. The guilt and shame of lying in my blog was becoming unbearable. All of this guilt weighed on me so tremendously that now the weed use was becoming more of a burden then a relief. It wasn’t working anymore. I was beginning to break. I needed more relief than just weed was giving me, and I was doing no real honest work on myself to get better…so what happened? I got worse. Way worse. I won’t go into great detail about just how insane I was the last two weeks I was in Vegas, but I will say that everyone close to me in my life was absolutely terrified for me and of me by the time I got on a plane to go home. I got into a huge argument one morning with Amanda, and after having a complete meltdown via text message, where I said some of the most horrendous shit I have ever said to anyone, I informed her that she and everyone else close to me in my life were a bunch of idiots and that I had been using for 1.5 months without any of them noticing. Word spread somewhat quickly and it didn’t take long to get back to my concerned parents who began begging me to come home.
For two weeks I stayed out in Las Vegas Las Vegas
From that night on, I literally put every mind altering substance in my body that I could find. Five days into this bender, I had a moment of clarity and managed to call my mom and have her book my flight home. The problem was that I had two days to wait until my flight, and Vegas isn’t the safest place for an unsupervised active addict. I must say that I had a lot of good friends in Vegas begging me to go home and get help, and begging me not to drink or do any more hard drugs until I arrived home. I just didn’t want to listen until I was ready. By the time the night before my flight came, I had caused so much irreparable damage to the important relationships in my life that I just didn’t want to be here anymore. I never thought that I could find a bottom lower than the one I found last summer on July Fourth…but I managed to find one much worse. I had one goal that night…to not feel anything. I had a close friend who has known me for a lot of years offer to basically babysit me the last night of my stay. He knows me well enough to know that given 20 hours to myself in Sin City Rio for the last time, it occurred to me that I still had over 500 MG of Molly on me and that I could not get on the plane with it. I took a left turn away from my hotel room, straight to the bar. I bought an entire bottle of Patron and drank 90% of it, washing down my last 500 MG of Molly with my last few shots. I can’t speak on where my mind was, because I wasn’t at all thinking clearly, but I must assume I was just trying to die. My next conscious memory after walking away from that bar was my flight to J.F.K. descending and the Pilot informing us that we would be on the ground in 20 minutes. I literally couldn’t believe I had made the flight and that I was alive.
As detailed as this post is…I have left a lot of the grim details out. I am currently sitting in an airport in New York State
The first point is that there is no shortcut to a happy life. There are no cutting corners if you’re trying to be sober. The first and biggest mistake I made was forgetting where I came from and allowing myself to believe that I could use any mind altering substance safely. And I truly believed it for a while. For me, and people like me…it eventually isn’t enough. And when it isn’t enough anymore, I will always find the next hardest drug to take away my pain. The day I chose to pick up that joint was the day I took away my own ability to learn, change, grow or prosper. I went back to using a crutch outside of myself to address my problems, and that still doesn’t work for me. I need to have this in writing more for myself than anyone else, so that I never forget again where that first joint took me. And it was that first joint that took me here.
The second point is that there are outside issues besides my drinking and drug use, (probably the reasons why I drink and use) that must be addressed. The anger, the depression, the crazy way my brain operates, and the way I abuse, manipulate, and instill fear into the people that I love and who love me needs to be fixed. I have honestly never been so terrified in my life. I feel like a failure. I feel like I finally got back everything in my life that I ever thought I wanted and threw it all away again in one and a half months after working for almost a year to get it. I feel like a bad son and a bad friend. I am so sick of disappointing and hurting people. I always thought I wasn’t a fundamentally bad person, just a sick one. Now I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not sure what my issues are or if they can even be fixed. If they can I know it is going to take a lot of work, a lot of time, and probably a lot of money. I am willing to give all three things to the process of finding out and fixing everything that is wrong with me. This is the first time in my career I have left Vegas before the Main Event. I should have left last year, but I chose to stay. I knew that if I stayed this time it was only going to be a worse nightmare than last year…probably worse than I can even fathom. I don’t know when I’ll be playing poker again if ever, but I know it will be a very long time before I spend any significant time in a casino or working on my career. It is time to take as much time and effort as I need to figure out these solutions, if there are any.
So that’s where I’m at. My flight leaves in a few hours. I have never felt so alone in my life. I’m terrified of what diagnosis I’m going to get. I’m crawling out of my skin. All I still want to do is put something in me to make me feel numb, even though I know it won’t work. (I guess that’s cause I’m a drug addict) I feel like my entire life is over. The worst part about it is I did it to myself. I didn’t need to feel any of this. I could have sought out the help I needed before doing this much damage to myself, the people who love me and my career. If there is anyone out there who is sitting around thinking to themselves “I think I could just smoke weed safely” or “All my friends just smoke and it doesn’t affect their lives” I get it. All I can do is relay my experience. That first hit of that first joint took me to a hell I didn’t know existed. If you’re struggling and think that putting something in your body to change the way you feel will work, it will. It will change the way you feel from bad to unfathomably worse.
I suppose I’m lucky that I’m alive, even though it truly feels like more of a curse than a blessing at this point. I’m still paying the price for all the chemicals I put into my body last week. I have no serotonin or dopamine in my brain still. I can feel it missing. I haven’t ever been in this much pain, and I literally feel insane. Thank god I could give a fuck less what anyone thinks about me anymore. Hopefully this message will find one person who may use it to save their life or their sanity.
I don’t often quote A.A. literature in this blog, for this exact reason. I am not the face of that program. That program failed for me because I failed to work it, not because it didn’t work. But the following passage hits the nail right on the head for me…and explains why I took that first hit, and why the calamity that followed occurred the way it did. I will be unreachable for the next 28 days, and perhaps way longer. I may be able to check facebook messages intermittently, so feel free to contact me there if you care to. I hope something in this long rambling of a post helps someone. Good luck to all my friends in the W.S.O.P. main and in life…I didn’t get to say goodbye to most of you, but the ones I truly love know who they are.
“The idea that somehow, someday, he will regain control of his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death. We learned that we had to fully concede that we were alcoholics. That was the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed. We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals-- usually brief--were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced that alcoholics of our type are in the grips of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better”
~Alcoholics Anonymous Chapter 3
I wish I had read this a month and half ago before I gave my power of choice away.
Say a prayer for me.
I love you Ryan, get better...im so sad about how you feel. Know that nothing is ever too big to overcome and death is not an option. With my heart, I beg you to realize how much your Mother and Father love you and would be devastated if anything happens to you. I'm gay, I had demons to overcome from childhood sex abuse, but look at the life I have now, you can do this Ryan...you have to, for you, for me and your Mom, Dad and family. You're right, you need medical treatment and that is nothing to be ashamed of. We fix things every day and I know that you are fixable too. Do this Buddy, c'mon....I love you to the moon and back...Im on the sidelines cheering for you. Xoxo Uncle Ed
ReplyDeleteRyan, I have so much respect for you! You hit rock buttom and you realize you have to do this for you.
ReplyDeleteTake one day at a time and you'll get there, be strong! I'll say a prayer for you.
A doctor treats broken bones but who treats the mind if it's broken? Living life is an everyday job and without failure there is no success. Keep living brother!
ReplyDelete