This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
So I went to personal training. And of course, while I was there, I couldn’t make a decision. I desperately wanted the relief I thought drinking would give me, but I also didn’t want to destroy myself, ruin my life, hurt everyone around me, and confirm that I was an idiot and a liar. Those two realities just slammed into each other over and over in my head. When the session ended, I sat in the parking lot afterward and felt completely overwhelmed. My first clear thought was, I have to go to the liquor store right now. I can’t take this anymore. Immediately after that came the counterpunch: I can’t go to the liquor store. That is the most insane thing I could possibly do.
Up to that point, I’d been praying to God constantly, but it felt like it wasn’t working anymore. I don’t actually think it matters who you pray to, as long as you genuinely believe it will work. If you believe praying to Jesus works, that will work. If you believe praying to God works, that will work. If you frame it as setting an intention or talking to your subconscious, the same principle applies. Whatever you can wholeheartedly believe will help you—that’s what has the best chance of working. Out of desperation, I decided to try praying to Jesus instead, partly because I figured God didn’t seem to be doing the trick. My logic was simple and warped: if I had prayed this much and still wanted to drink this badly, then something wasn’t working.
I tried praying to Jesus for about a day, asking him to help me stay sober, but I didn’t really believe it would work. I wasn’t a devout Christian, not even close. In my head, I imagined some massive spiritual priority list, and I was convinced I was way down at the bottom. I thought, this guy died two thousand years ago, and now there are billions of people around the planet praying to him. What the fuck are the odds that he’s going to stop what he’s doing to help me not drink today? Basically zero. So I stopped praying to Jesus, feeling just as desperate and uncertain as before.
At that point, I thought, you know what, I’m going to pray to my dad. He had died about six months earlier, and in my desperation, that idea suddenly made sense to me. I remember thinking, this poor bastard doesn’t have anything better to do for all of eternity than listen to me beg to stay sober. I had just finished personal training and was sitting in my car, completely spent. I felt certain I was about to go to the liquor store. I was exhausted from fighting. I felt so thirsty—not physically, but spiritually and mentally. I was just done struggling. So I started praying to my dad. I said, “Dad, please, I’ll do anything to stay sober. You drive this car home. I know you wouldn’t go to the liquor store. You drive.”
I consciously surrendered my body in that moment. It felt like I slid over into the passenger seat and let my dad take the wheel. I started sobbing as I drove, feeling his presence so strongly it was almost physical. The car just glided past the liquor store effortlessly, a place I genuinely believed I couldn’t drive past at that point. That relief was overwhelming. It felt so good. I remember thinking, I made it past the liquor store today. Maybe I actually have a chance. That night, once again, I felt some peace.
The next day, I woke up miserable all over again. I was anxious, stressed, and felt like absolute shit. I knew I had to think in terms of solutions. I couldn’t keep living like this. I was so wound up that I couldn’t think straight. I remembered a woman in one of the meetings talking about how she stayed sober by getting massages. She said she used to drink to relax, and now she got massages instead. At the time she shared that, I remember thinking something incredibly crude and dismissive about her and about why she really went to the massage place. I shut the idea down immediately when I first heard it. It had never crossed my mind that massage could be something I’d want or need.
The reason I even had that association was ridiculous. The only context I had for massage in my head came from Sex and the City. I remembered Samantha talking about a therapist who gave certain clients sexual extras but not her, and she felt left out. That was it. That was my entire mental framework. Still, I was so desperate that the idea came back. I thought, maybe I should try what that woman suggested. Maybe I should get a massage. I needed to relax desperately, and I believed that if I could relax, maybe things would calm down enough for me to survive this. I couldn’t keep living in this constant state of internal warfare.
The part of me that wanted to drink agreed with that plan, too. Sure, let’s get out of the house. Go look for a massage place. So I drove to one place and walked in, only to find out they didn’t have any appointments available. I left and went to the next place, which happened to be a Massage Envy located right next to the liquor store I used to go to. The second I pulled into that parking lot, every part of me felt like we were exactly where we were supposed to be—and not in a good way. I stared at the liquor store and thought, God, I could walk in there and get some relief right now. At the same time, I was absolutely terrified of it. Going into that liquor store felt like certain death. Guaranteed destruction.
I sat there in my car, staring back and forth between the liquor store and Massage Envy. I realized something strange: I felt terrified of going into Massage Envy, too. That didn’t make sense. I understood perfectly why the liquor store scared me. But why was I scared of a massage place? This is where being conscious and spiritually awake actually helped. I slowed down and analyzed it. The thought that surfaced was, well, they’re probably going to offer me something sexual in there, right? That’s what massage places do. I immediately followed that thought with another one: I don’t know if I could say no if they did. I’m married. I can’t do that.
Then the next thought cut through all of it: that’s fucking stupid. That is absolutely ridiculous. Massage Envy is not some underground brothel where every therapist is offering sexual services to every guy who gets on the table. That’s insane. I could hear how warped my thinking was when I actually laid it out like that. And once I saw it clearly, the decision became obvious. Go inside. Get a massage.
I walked in terrified to get this massage, every nerve in my body on edge. To my surprise, they had someone available immediately. They told me to get undressed to my level of comfort, and I kept my boxers on because, in my mind, that was a clear signal that I was not looking for anything sexual. The massage therapist gave me what I now understand was a completely normal, professional massage. At the time, though, I had never had a real massage before, so everything about it felt unfamiliar. She did a standard Swedish massage—long strokes up and down my legs, my feet, my back—and then something unexpected happened.
At some point during the massage, I relaxed. Not just physically, but mentally. For months, my mind had been a nonstop barrage of racing thoughts: should I drink, I’ll do anything to stay sober, fuck it let’s drink, please stay sober, I’ll go to an AA meeting, I’ll drink right after. It never stopped. Thought after thought after thought, day and night. During this massage, my mind simply shut off. For maybe ten minutes, I didn’t think at all. There was no internal argument, no obsession, no fear. Just quiet. It was peaceful in a way I hadn’t experienced in a very long time sober.
When my thoughts finally came back, they came back differently. I had three very clear thoughts, one after another. At the time, they felt like they came from God. Looking back, I see other explanations just as clearly. This could have been a relaxed nervous system finally able to function properly. It could have been my subconscious, no longer hijacked by panic, able to think straight. You could call it a higher self, a spirit guide, ancestors, guardian angels—there are plenty of ways to describe it. Back then, my language for it was God. What mattered wasn’t the label but the clarity and authority of the thoughts themselves.
The first thought was simple and direct: you are going to ask a particular man from the meetings to be your sponsor—the man who became my first sponsor. He is dead now, which in AA gives someone a kind of legendary status, almost like Fight Club—once someone dies, their name carries weight. He was not the kind of guy I ever would have expected to ask to be my sponsor. He was a construction worker, and a construction accident had left him with a serious brain injury. He didn’t exactly operate with a full six-pack, so to speak. On paper, he was the last person I would have chosen. And yet, that thought landed with total certainty.
The second thought followed immediately: you will go to five meetings a week. Not two. Not when you feel like it. Five.
The third thought was just as blunt: you will read that book—the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. This hit me especially hard because, despite how much I had been suffering, despite reading all kinds of random shit online, watching movies, distracting myself with games, and doing everything except the obvious, I still had not finished the Big Book. I took that thought to mean not just finishing it, but reading it seriously, along with the rest of the AA literature.
When the massage ended, I walked out feeling restored to sanity. I felt clear. I felt calm. I felt like myself again. I remember thinking, wow, that actually worked. The effect of that massage was as powerful as having a couple of drinks—but without the destruction. Even more surprising, the relief didn’t disappear an hour later. It lasted for days.
I went to meet my ex-wife at a birthday party with her friends that night, and later she told me it felt like she got me back. After that massage, she said the man she fell in love with showed up again. In early sobriety, what she had been living with was this restless, irritable, discontent, half-crazy version of me that barely resembled her husband. That’s exactly how it felt to me, too. It was like I got myself back for the first time in a long while. The obsession quieted down enough that my personality could surface again. That didn’t mean I was fixed or done—far from it—but it was the first real relief I’d had that didn’t come from alcohol.
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