This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
Meanwhile, going home, things were not getting better at home. There was one weekend my girlfriend had come over and I was playing "Rise of Nations" and drinking, which when I was not at the police academy at the time, all I wanted to do was play "Rise of Nations" and drink.
The way I had started drinking again, I had got a one-liter bottle of vodka and I had told myself this time that I could pace myself and just drink as much as I needed without going over.
That's how in June I had originally relapsed. I remember thinking I knew I shouldn't do this, but I wanted to drink so bad, talking to myself saying, "Look, it would be insane to drink as much as I drank before. If I can just buy a little bottle of vodka and I can put little marks on it. I'll just have a couple of shots this time. I'll just have three or four shots out of it. I'll drink it slow. I won't get so crazy."
That's how I had started back on it and that's what I wanted to do. I just wanted to drink and relax a little bit and play some video games. A very understandable thing to want to do, to want to relax a little bit and play video games.
And yet, if you gave it a month or so, then the craziness I told you going out downtown with my friends, and then another month after that into the police academy, I would get drunk and get the big handles of vodka again.
I used to try to do it so that if my girlfriend wanted to come over, I would stay sober so I could really be myself around her, but with the police academy, I couldn't even be bothered to try to stay sober for her.
After the big excitement of passing the driving test and everything, I got to playing "Rise of Nations."
I was in a game and she wanted to come over, and I probably had told her I didn't want her to come over, but she was really pushy. So, I figured I could have sex or something if she could come over, and then whatever.
She came over and I was in the middle of this "Rise of Nations" game and she really wanted me to quit.
I said, "No. I can't let my team down like that," even though these were random people I was playing online with. I knew some of them because I had played so many games with them.
She ended up waiting there for me, trying to convince me to give her my attention, and I remember looking over and saying, "Hold on. I need to finish this game. I'll be right with you as soon as I finish this game."
I did finish the game, and again another one of those little things, leaving her just not feeling very good about herself.
Another sign that if you are in a relationship where you are not bringing out the best in the other person, I think that's not a relationship worth being in, and that obviously was not my best.
Then the next weekend, I remember I had played another drunk night of "Rise of Nations" by myself after the police academy and I thought this was great. After we got from the police academy, I really wanted to just go home and relax because I couldn't drink any of the nights there.
It is not that people didn't find ways to sneak out and go drink. There were some of the other officers there that had alcoholism just as bad as I did and they were finding ways to sneak out and go drink. There were officers who were married at the police academy or were engaged. They were going out and getting drunk, having sex with each other and cheating
on their spouses or their fiancées.
There were some amazing stuff going on at the police academy.
Now, I behaved while I was there during the five nights of the week because I figured, "Look, I got the weekend. I can get as crazy as I want to and I'm not going to risk losing my spot in the academy or my job over it."
Some of the officers coming in drunk got caught and they got sent home for that. As you can imagine getting caught sneaking back into the police academy after drinking all night, obviously that was not something they were really excited about there.
I let it all out on the weekends, and therefore, I had my main priority, which was getting home and drinking, and playing some video games. One Friday night while I was drinking and playing "Rise of Nations," I guess my girlfriend was at a party where she found another guy and hooked up with him.
I remember then she wasn't answering my phone calls at all. I was having dreams about her being with other guys before this, and then she came over the next night and dumped me. She would not take no for an answer no matter how much I begged and pleaded and desperately wanted her.
I remember it was some kind of Alabama football game that day I was excited about watching. I had a god-awful hangover from getting really drunk and playing a ton of video games the night before, and then she came over as was my usual method of operation. My day would be highlighted by her coming over and hanging out with me and having sex, loving me and helping me feel a little bit better, like I wasn't such a hangover piece of shit.
She came over and stayed. I knew something was wrong right away. She said she wanted to break up. She didn't tell me at the time that she had already been with someone else, and then we spent this really awkward long night of breaking up.
I remember how sick and dark my mind had gotten at that bottom, the kind of frightening thoughts that showed me just how far my addiction and despair had taken me. Thank God I had enough sense left to know that none of it was the answer, and that it would have been the worst thing in the world I could do.
The strange thing was that we were even intimate one last time that night, even though she had already been with someone else the night before, as I later found out from her. I think she figured it might help me relax a little before she left. Right after that, she left, and it was a long, painful week in my head.
Thank God I was in the police academy at the time because there was so much to do in there that thankfully most of the day my mind was busy. But at night, my mind was just obsessed. I had the feeling that she had cheated on me, which was kind of ridiculous looking back at it. She tried to break up with me and I wouldn't let her.
The whole idea of cheating on someone is ridiculous like you can possess a person and they are yours, and then they cheated.
Now sure, you could say she didn't honor our agreement of monogamy or whatnot, but she cut me loose right afterward.
So, I'm very grateful today that this all went down just how it did. An incredible thing happened for the first time in my adult life, I actually lost my appetite, which was a miracle for my overweight body.
I had been eating double plates and you may think, "Why didn't you tell us how much you were eating in the police academy before?"
That's because I was leading up to this.
The first few weeks in the police academy I was piling double plates full of massive amounts of food and putting them all down. After my girlfriend dumped me, I could barely eat like a third or half of a plate at a time and it was awesome. I dropped 10 or 15 pounds by the end of the police academy just from cutting down on what I was eating.
It was a great and awesome weight loss plan, which I then got to experience with the dispatcher at USCPD a couple of years later. That cut me down 15 or 20 pounds from that again, which left me by the time I moved home and moved out with my parents, I was down 200 pounds which was the lowest weight I had been at since high school.
After all that today, I'm very grateful to be at 170 pounds. As you can see, I was very distraught over my girlfriend breaking up with me, which kind of was ridiculous. If you look at my behavior, I wasn't trying to do a good job as a boyfriend. I wasn't trying to be there. I wasn't thinking about her. I didn't care about her. All I cared about was her function in my life.
"What am I going to do for sex now?"
It turned out I found plenty of things to do for sex after that, which I'm sure you will enjoy hearing about.
The highlight of this a week after she dumped me on another weekend away from the police academy where I knew I needed to stay sober again through this. I knew that I was looking at a recipe for disaster if I drank because I remembered those crazy thoughts I had while I was hungover and getting broken up with.
I remembered how dark and dangerous my thinking had gotten, and I thought, "Okay, we definitely better not get drunk with that kind of sick thinking going on."
Then, after a week of being upset, really hating the breakup, wondering what happened, thinking she must have cheated on me. She didn't tell me at the time, but she ended up telling me later what happened.
I had tried to apologize to her, of course. I got her a huge bouquet of flowers, even though I hadn't got her any flowers in the two years of our relationship, she cheated on me and dumped me, and I said, "Here's a full thing of flowers for you."
Better to do this good stuff beforehand instead of after, it turned out. She agreed to let me see her one more time and talk about things with her during which I took a drive to her apartment which was across town from where I lived.
On the interstate, I had what I today recognize as a spiritual experience, but at the time just seemed a little weird. I was driving down the interstate and my mind was racing and racing with thoughts.
"How could she do this to me? What's going to happen? What am I
going to say? How is she going to be? She's going to do this and I'm going to do that."
I had just one thought after another.
All of a sudden, it was as if after a week of these thoughts, my mind just got tired for a minute.
For a minute it ran out of thoughts. Now, imagine that.
I was driving on the interstate with racing thoughts and for about a minute, no thoughts came out. Maybe one or two, but like the thoughts just stopped. It was as if time slowed down because I was expecting another thought to come and I was looking around, the road, everything was literally just like you hear one of those moments in a movie that the bass drops and all of a sudden time slows down.
This was exactly like that.
All of a sudden, the cars next to me were moving really slowly and driving was exceptionally easy. There was just driving to focus on. I remember I was going over the Broad River Bridge. I could see the water flowing. I could see each line moving by on the road.
It was crazy and I remember one thought crossed my mind, "What is this?"
I felt so peaceful like everything in the world was okay, and then the thoughts, after a brief moment of rest, got rolling again.
I look back and I see that it was a spiritual experience right there. For one moment, my mind stopped and I looked around and experienced the eternal joy of the present moment without thinking about it or judging it. I
simply looked around and experienced now.
"The Power of Now," if you have read the book by Eckhart Tolle, it is really good.
I dropped into now out of all these thoughts and it was wonderful. Then, I got led out of now into all the thoughts again and returned to my general misery.
What I loved out of drinking was that often drinking helped me drop back into the moment. I could just focus on playing the video game and enjoying life without getting caught up in all these thoughts.
Now, you can see the amount of relief that provides, which is why I liked drinking so much, but the problem is, it comes with a whole lot of consequences. It is returning more to a state of animal consciousness, a lower consciousness, instead of a higher consciousness.
We can transcend the mind with higher consciousness, not by going back to an animal, lower consciousness, where we don't even have the ability to think and properly function anymore, but we are in the present moment.
On the way to her apartment, I had that experience which I paid little attention to at the time, but it really stood out to me once I got sober and started looking back through my life at all the spiritual experiences I didn't realize at the time.
I had a lot of spiritual experiences drinking as well, feeling very connected with God, especially after I was drunk and got what I wanted, like the night the dispatcher and I were first together. I was feeling like God was right there in the room with me.
I had lots of spiritual experiences drinking and a part of learning to stay
sober has been to have those experiences sober like I did on the way to my ex-girlfriend's apartment that day. I got there and it was obvious she was giving her heart to another guy at that point, that I was no longer number one, I was now not in her primary picture.
I tried to have sex with her, and we made out a little bit, but she ended up just encouraging me to go home and that would be it.
We were done.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.