I’m fifty-one years old and I live in Southern California. I am a husband, father, son, uncle, executive, artist, and, now, blogger. I grew up in an alcoholic household and have seen the ravages of addiction up close and personal.
I was inspired to start ReturnOnSobriety after struggling with alcohol and cannabis addiction most of my adult life. By this I mean that for over twenty-five years, I smoked weed virtually everyday, and on most of those days, I washed my bong hits down with a couple of beers. As time went on, a “couple of beers” often meant 8, 9, 10, or more. When my wife would ask me how much I had to drink, I’d slur, “A couple beers.” That’s what happens when “one is too many, and a hundred is never enough”.
And these weren’t light beers either, they were most often 7-9% IPAs or Double IPAs and pints or 22 ouncers at that! I’d have a bong hit, toss back a few, and follow that up with another bong hit or two, and then drink a few more. Mix and repeat. Day in, day out.
Somehow, through all of this use and abuse, I managed to hold down high ranking executive jobs such as vice president, president, COO, and the like. While in the thick of it, I credited my ability to pull this insanity off as a result of relegating my addiction to evenings and weekends. But I was on a collision course.
Things were humming right along until Covid 19 came crashing into our lives. Hunkered down for months on end, my drinking and drugging rose to new levels. I gained 38 pounds. I experienced sleepless nights and chronic inflammation. I became socially introverted. My relationships and productivity suffered. My creativity and drive vanished.
Unable to curb my addictive urges, I saw the looming spectre of Alcoholics Anonymous, and turned to meditation in hopes it might help me overcome my use disorder without forcing me to quit using altogether. An addict’s wet dream, right?
The question I was, and am still, trying to answer is: Can one use meditation to tame addiction? In other words, will I be able to enjoy a couple of beers with my buddies without going overboard and devolving back into a daily drinker? As I launch this blog, I can definitively say that meditation has completely alleviated my marijuana addiction. I haven’t touched pot in over fifteen months, despite being exposed to it on a regular basis. As a guy who’s been smoking pot since the mid 1980’s and daily since the late nineties, that’s no small feat!
Can I rewire my brain and rebuild my body using meditation? If you click the preceding link, you’ll discover that after just one year, the answer is 100% yes! This blog will continue to track and measure the my ongoing results – good, bad, or indifferent.
Having declared my intentions, I need to point something out. If addiction is negatively impacting your life or the lives of those around you, I strongly encourage you to seek professional help. Who knows, I may very well end up doing that myself if my best laid plans go awry. I’ve included an Alcoholism and Addiction Resources page on my blog expressly for this purpose. There are many excellent organizations represented here that will be able to assist you better and more professionally than me. Please check them out.
There are no magic bullets lurking in this blog. No shortcuts. No clear or proven path. And I expect to continue to hit rough patches as I go. This blog constitutes a journal of the thoughts of a guy trying to pave a new way for himself. Take what you like, leave the rest.
What is ReturnOnSobriety? It’s an exploration of what might happen if we rebuild our bodies and rewire our brains away from addictive tendencies and habits. The idea of this blog is loosely based on the concept of an ROI (return on investment) except the investment is me. A soberer me. Maybe even a sober me. Certainly seems to be heading squarely in that direction after a year of meditation. But I still have a long way to go. And there are no guarantees.
The Returns on Sobriety I’ll be measuring falls into several distinct buckets:
Health, Wellbeing, Productivity, Knowledge, Wisdom, and Philanthropy.
There will even be a textbook ROI: A stock portfolio built from my sobriety savings (you know, from the money I’m not spending on getting lit, drunk, high, or tying one on).
This is my journey and these blogs are my journal. Let’s see what we can discover together.