I’m talking to Sam and I appreciate your sharing. First, would you just give a description of your ongoing struggle with anxiety? Yeah, I’d probably say since I was about 15 years old, I’ve struggled with anxiety. Just became very anxious and pretty much any classroom situation where I was singled out, sort of put on the spot presentation, or going around the room and introducing yourself or things of that nature. And I knew that it went above and beyond what was normal, because I wasn’t like this at an earlier age. But it really just grew from there, and it became a bigger problem when I got into college and high school I could always deal with it somewhat, but in college it became almost debilitating to the point where I would actually skip the first day of school, because I knew that we would have introductions and go around the room, say something about yourself, and that always made me terrified.
And by the time it got to me, I was then just an all-out panicked. So that’s when my avoidance began. And really, I started to learn how to deal with it with medication. But eventually that becomes a crutch that you feel like you can’t do anything without the medication, that you’re completely relying upon it. And I used to keep a Xanax in my pocket in case we got called into a meeting which is something where maybe at work I had to give an account review or something to that effect. And anything that was going to put me in the spotlight for any period of time would just be very threatening to me. If I was sent a meeting notice, it would always come with an agenda, and I would open that thing up, and I would analyze that agenda to look and see, okay, we’ve got a meeting starting at this time.
Today, probably going to be some introductory sessions at that time, and then we’ve got breakout sessions maybe later on in the day. So I would actually analyze what are the possible scenarios where I could be put on the spot in these meetings. So I got good at sort of anticipating what was about to happen. And that’s the way I battled it. I would always take my medication maybe an hour and a half before when you’re self-medicating to the point where I was. I mean, I was literally using a combination of a beta blocker and a Xanax. So it’s a lot of medication, and you can’t really think straight when you’re that drugged up, but I wanted to hide every possible symptom that I could. In the last few years, you have had a very interesting relationship with alcohol.
Could you please describe that? Yeah, about… I probably started drinking beer about age 17, and my senior year in high school, and I had a group of friends, and that was sort of the common theme. We were beer drinkers, and for whatever reason, it was a partying lifestyle that really appealed to me. That sort of broke off into the wind and just had fun and lived for the moment. But I think what I was basically doing was medicating myself to where I didn’t feel any of the issues of being an insecure 17-year-old kid. So alcohol was a great escape for me. I would drink before… I would actually drink before going to a party, because that was a way to calm my nerves, but it was nothing.
Now, back then, I could drink a 12-pack of beer in high school and obviously in college, and once you start to drink that way, what I call power drinking, you literally… I mean, your tolerance goes up. So me throwing back 18-20 beers on a Friday or Saturday watching football games or whatever with friends, that was an every weekend occurrence. And I did that for 20 years. And, you know, at the time, I justified it in thinking that I really didn’t have an alcohol problem, because, well, I’m just a weekend drinker, and I have a good job, and I take care of my family, and I’m responsible. I just like to drink beer, so that was my justification for believing that I was not an alcoholic, because I didn’t wake up craving it.
It was my reasoning. But, you know, every Friday, when you get off a work and you go home and you head straight to the beer store to begin your binge drinking for the weekend, obviously there’s a serious problem there, and I didn’t recognize that until, you know, this past year. And I had a huge, you know, a huge part of my life was just rock. And when I got arrested for driving while intoxicated, and, you know, it was sort of one of those positions where four months earlier, I had just gotten a promotion. I was building a house. You know, my kids were moving back to my wife’s hometown. Everything was going great. And that just happened, but I was still dealing with anxiety very much so.
But that was sort of a defining moment to where I realized I’ve got to get my life straight. This is way beyond, you know, what a 40-year-old should be doing. I was 39 at the time. But, you know, obviously it was humiliating. And to know that my kids were, you know, their father had just gotten a DWI, and I obviously had to hide it from them as best I could. But, you know, it was an eye-opener for me, and I knew I had to make changes. Now I’m going to ask you the punchline question of this interview. So you’ve had a little journey of discovery since this DWI. What have you discovered in your new relationship with alcohol? What are you finding out? Well, basically I found out that alcohol was poisoning my brain and screwing up my brain chemistry.
And I would really say that my anxiety issues were no less than 50%, probably more, just caused by, you know, altering my brain chemistry through binge-drinking. Because I would, you know, it would honestly take me about two days, Monday and Tuesday, to get rid of the shake, to think clearly, to be able to, you know, really work effectively. And, but, you know, I had grown accustomed to that, and I just didn’t realize what it had done to me until it was taken away by the law.
