Today is the first blog post for Your Sober Life! My name is Bryan and I’ve been sober now for just over 4 months. I always struggled with alcohol and some drugs (marijuana) but in mid 2024 my functional alcoholic life turned into 100% addiction. I will go into why this happened in mid 2024 in separate posts as its unfortunately a large part of my life. In mid 2024, I started drinking when I’d wake up before starting work at 7:15am and many times, I would stay up all night (or multiple nights).

The job I had at the time was 100% remote in the IT field. So, it was relatively easy to attend meetings via Microsoft Teams and just keep quiet. If I needed to talk, I would limit my responses to one or two words (I.E Yes/No). I also never had to join online meetings with the camera turned on, only once a month and the meeting time was known way ahead of time (so I would be sober to that meeting). In addition to drinking, I started using delta 8 and other synthetic brands as in the state I live in (WI), marijuana was not legal, but delta 8 and others were available at smoke shops across the state. For synthetic marijuana, I would either buy gummies or what I call weed juice, which is delta 8 in a can or juice bottle with a heavy concentration of delta 8 (IE 400mg for 8 ounces).

After months of abusing both alcohol, synthetic marijuana and not sleeping for 2-3 days at a time, my mind started to get injured. I started to hear voices, see things (hallucinations) and started behaving in a very odd manner. One night I burned a lot of electronics in a camp fire, such as laptops, cable modem, phone, etc because I was certain someone was trying to hack into the house. After that, my now ex-wife convinced me to be assessed (voluntarily) at a mental hospital. I reluctantly went after a mini intervention at our house and was there for 1 night. Since I went voluntarily, I could leave (after a few delay tactics by the doctors), but I left and my wife reluctantly picked me up and we went home.

I’m going to skip ahead a little (story for another day), but I ended up in another mental ward after going to the hospital (Regions in MD) and the doctor asked me if I would like to be discharged or to go to the mental ward. I opted for the mental ward as I had a pretty serious injury on my foot and they talked about all the follow-up appointments. So I was in the mental ward at Regions for about 1.5 weeks before I voluntarily checked out. When I was their they first diagnosed me with schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. After being there a week, they changed the diagnosis to psychosis. Looking back, I should have stayed in the Regions mental ward for quite a lot longer as what happened next was much worse.

I’m going to end todays block post here. I plan to make a new posting everyday, but I might miss a day here and there. Thank you for reading this post. Eventually, I hope to enable the ability for you to leave comments if you’d like. Thanks, Bryan