Truth and Transparency: My Drunken College Years

Transcript

The following is a transcription of Truth and Transparency: My Drunken College Years, which is part of my practice of coming into full truth and transparency.

For the full series and depth to this practice visit: My Commitment to Truth and Transparency.

Hello Dear Friends,
Well, I thought that I had shared everything. I thought that there was nothing that was left in my past that I wanted to be transparent about and then I remembered, somehow I left out my drunken college years. And I’m grateful to share this with you because it really is a very different me. A very different human being was in operation during my drunken college years, from high school to college, so, let’s say, from when I was about 16 years old to 25 years old. So that’s what I’m going to be sharing: my drunken college years, many of the things that I did that just were not in integrity, that are not in alignment with the way that I am today and that I want to just share. As you know, what I’m doing in this series is sharing everything inside of me that I’ve been guarding and hiding. Anything that I haven’t wanted people to know. Anything that would harm an image. Just being fully open and transparent. I’d like to remind you that I’m not doing this from a place of guilt or shame, a place of ‘have to’ or ‘should,’ a place of duty or responsibility, a place of right or wrong. No. This is a practice of coming into full transparency, a place of deep truth and integrity and me being my most authentic and genuine self. I believe if I release it all, I share the truth that I can live the many decades ahead I have, or maybe not many, but the potential decades that I have ahead, in a place that I am of service, having opened my mind and being a human being that has nothing to guard and nothing to hide. So that’s what I’m going to be sharing today.

Now if you haven’t yet, before listening to this video, I really would encourage you to watch the introduction to this series, because that shares why I’m doing this. And the why is very, very important. So, if you haven’t watched that video, please do. I welcome you to. Let’s start by taking a deep breath together. Let’s do two more of those. Just let it out a little bit. I’m grateful to be on this journey with you.

I want to start by sharing that some of my drunken early days … well, I’m lucky to be alive, I would say. There were some moments where I definitely could have died and where I could have killed somebody else. And I did a lot of really, really … I want to say ‘stupid’ stuff, but you know what? I’m not going to say that because that would be me judging other college students who are doing the same thing today and I’m not going to call them stupid. I don’t think that’s the most productive thing to do. So, I did a lot of things that were damaging to my safety, to my health, that were detrimental to the people around me and that did not live up to a level of integrity that I match today. That’s the way that I’m going to put it. I started drinking alcohol in about 9th grade. And in ninth grade, or in my high school years, I pretty quickly got into the drinking culture where it was, you drank to get drunk. And from an early time, I was testing my physical body while being drunk. It was this environment of just trying to … I don’t know, we were experimenting and trying to be somebody. And one of the ways that we were doing that … finding ourselves, was through drinking. And through drinking heavily in a way that altered our minds and resulted in us doing things that we never would have done if we were sober.

I’m going to move right to my college years, because that’s when the drinking really started to get destructive. I went to University of Wisconsin La Crosse, and when we drank, a lot of us, … I’m going to try to speak in ‘I’ instead of ‘we.’ However, the culture that I was a part of was one where we drank with the intention of blacking out. Like, a lot of the times, we didn’t consider the night successful unless we blacked out. And this wasn’t just the guys. There was a lot of girls or women that were also drinking to black out. This was the culture that we were in. And I think there were even some drinks that we made that were called, like, ‘blackout.’ UW La Crosse is a party college and the town itself had one of the highest per capita bars, so more bars … per people of anywhere in the entire United States. So this was an extremely drinking culture. This is … I would say UW La Crosse and Lacrosse was up there in a state that’s already a very drinking culture state. I remember there being a lot of times where, as a man, if you weren’t drinking a beer, people would just be like, “Where’s your beer?” Whether it was fishing or watching football, it was very much a beer oriented state. A lot of alcoholism, a lot of people abusing alcohol, a lot of people blacking out and the culture that I was in was one of taking it to the extreme.

What I started to experience in university is that I had very little self-control when it came to how much that I would drink. We were influenced by some of the movies of that time, and a movie that I remember, for example, was “Old School,” and Will Ferrell … one of his alter egos was Frank the Tank and he would say … he said something like, “When it hits the lips,” you just … like it would transform him. And that was the same experience that I had. When the alcohol hit the lips, it went from zero to sometimes blacking out within a couple hours. It was something that many of us loved. We admired it, we respected it. The next day after getting blackout drunk, one of the things that I found the most joy in was talking to my roommates and my friends and finding out what I did last night. And I wasn’t the only one. Many of us enjoyed that. It was part of this attitude of being cool by not caring. And I took that to an extreme. I would say I was more extreme than the majority of my peers. I’ve always been a fairly extreme person and so I took alcohol to the extreme very much so.

Now freshman year I actually earned the nickname from a friend of “Dur,” I don’t want to use the word ‘earned’ actually. I started to be called “Dur” by one of my fellow peers who lived on the same floor as me in the dormitory hall that I lived in. And the reason he called me “Dur” is because I was doing stuff that was considered so incredibly stupid. Now part of that was because I enjoyed this game of coming across as stupid. I found it to be really fun. Again, it was kind of cool to be stupid. So I was … acting in a way that was one that resulted in one person calling me “Dur” and that becoming a nickname that I would say many of my peers called me for multiple years. You know, I mean to have the nickname “Dur,” that could be incredibly embarrassing for me to share with you. And one of the reasons that I’m okay with sharing that is showing where you can start from and where you can get to. I just think that’s an example that is worth sharing.

So I want to get into a little bit more of the details of what was going on. I remember keg stand being very much a thing, which is where you have people raise up your legs and then the keg is … hooked up to your mouth and you … people count: one, two, three … and the longer that you can stay up, the more revered you are. There was a … I remember even one night there being a duck bong which was a plastic ornamental lawn duck, where you took off one of the feet and then cut a hole in the beak and then you could fill that up with beer and doing a duck bong out in the streets. There was beer pong and jello shots and drinking games. We loved this stuff. One of my ‘go-tos’ was a 1.75 L bottle of Fleischmann’s vodka, which I think was around $15 or so, and could get you drunk many times for very little money. In fact, a lot of the bars would sell $1 drinks. So it was really designed around mass consumption and I really bit into it, or drank into it. I would buy a lot of … that probably started about sophomore year. I had a fake ID around that time and I would go to the store and buy kegs and I loved throwing keggers. It was like one of my favorite things to do. I would go to the library and just be talking to people and inviting them to the kegger over the weekend. I lived for that. I thrived on throwing parties and parties that were around binge drinking.

I would get so drunk that when I woke up to go to class the next day on Friday … because I didn’t drink Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Sunday. It was just Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Thursday was considered basically the weekend. It was called thirsty Thursday. So on the mornings when I would go to class after on Friday, I’d get so drunk the night before that I’d actually wake up and still be drunk and go to class drunk. I remember that there was lots of puking. Sometimes it would be like trying to drink so much that I would not be able to hold it down and then puke it up. I would do this thing where I’d have a stein of beer, which is, I think there’s like two-and-a-half beers in a stein, and I would slam one stein and then I would slam another stein, back to back, which is about five beers. There were times when I would do, like, five shots of hard alcohol right at once. And in the most extreme circumstances, I would sometimes drink, like, 30 beers and drink, you know, 10 shots of alcohol. That was the most extreme, but we’re talking about easily 10-20 plus drinks in an evening, in a night. And then there were times when … I would say a few times when I actually woke up having thrown up in my bed. There were numerous times when I woke up and I had actually peed myself in my sleep. So I was inebriating myself to the point where my bodily functions were not really existing and where my body was, like, “You have to get this out of you.” It was a very extreme level of inebriation.

Now one of the things that I would do when I was drunk is, I would get into this desire to test my body, or almost I would say, abuse my body. And I would actually, for the fun of it, for the joy of it, I would wind my fist all the way back and punch myself right in the forehead. It was like a party trick. I absolutely loved to do it. It got a lot of reaction out of people. Some people thought it was awesome and other people just thought it was the stupidest thing, but it was certainly enjoyable enough that I made a multiple year habit of that. And that is what led to two separate people in college actually punching me in the head, because I probably suggested it. And them actually breaking their hand right over my head. One of my friends actually broke both of his hands over my head in the same night, trying to knock me out by punching me right in the head. I remember at a party senior year, putting on a helmet and running full speed that I could into a fence and just torpedoing myself into the fence and smashing to the ground. I remember that same year, there was a toilet out on the curb and picking up that toilet and actually throwing it at a friend. Just for fun. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t mad. I considered that to be fun and that was one of those moments, … ceramic can really cut someone … that fortunately, he ducked. But that could have been really, really bad. So that’s what I’m saying: when I did some things that I’m really, really, really lucky that people didn’t get severely injured, which, there was some injuries, which I’ll talk about.

There was a whole lot of just pranks, like, what we would do is, we would mess with people. I remember one time picking up a plastic garbage can when we were walking down the street and just putting it right over the top of someone’s head and then just pushing them to the ground. And that was considered funny by a lot of people. To some people it was considered a nuisance, but to a lot of people it was funny. This was the stuff we were watching on the internet. There was … I’m taking full responsibility for all of my actions completely. I take responsibility. I’m sharing these because they are my actions and I take responsibility. At the same time, I’m sharing the culture in which I was learning from and taking a part of. And there was … in this college party scene, this was a pretty standard thing for a lot of people, even though I took it to a next limit. Somehow, there was this finding fun in breaking things and trashing things and I can’t say why it was, but I can just say that it was something that we were doing. I remember one time freshman year being drunk and, for some reason, just sort of trashing my own room. Sophomore year I remember getting an underage … and I went back to the house and I threw an ottoman at the wall and broke a big hole in the wall. It was never … to my recollection, it was never anger. It was just this way of expressing by breaking and throwing stuff.

Sophomore year I remember stealing some road signs with flashing lights. Me and a friend were coming home from a party and we had these under our hands. We were running, we were carrying them home and the police … they stopped and they got us, and it was just … we were just stealing these road signs. It was just something to do. One of the most extreme things that I … that, well, this wasn’t actually so much extreme in itself, but the potential repercussions were. I was in Madison and actually chose to take a fire extinguisher from one apartment building, I believe, and in another apartment building, I actually extinguished it in an elevator and there was actually … you know, the fire chief was seeking … this was a … I believe a highly illegal thing to do. And there was actually an attempt to find the people that did this and it was something that me and the people that I was with managed to evade at the time. I remember getting picked up and smashed through a beer bong table or beer pong table and all of the cups just coming up and landing upon me and it being hilarious. It was for … to me, it was just one of the most awesome things to reflect back on for multiple years after that.

I remember about junior year, I was in Spain when I was … and I was pretty drunk, and I was on a one-story building and I decided to run and jump off of it and try to clear over some concrete and I smashed my leg right onto a curb and really injured my foot. It wasn’t broken, but it was highly injured. Where I look back with remorse is not the things that I did to my own body, but when I potentially …when I came close to harming others, or when I did harm, or when I broke other people’s stuff. There were occasional times when coming home from a party or maybe the bar and there would be a bicycle, and I would just take the bicycle and ride it home and steal it basically. But there was this thing where, when you were drunk, your actions weren’t the same as when you were sober. It was like, if you’re drunk, it’s not stealing the bicycle. Only if you’re sober would it be stealing the bicycle. So there was just this incredible disconnect. Some sort of incredible moral disconnect that could be made when drunk, when drinking large amounts of alcohol.

I remember one time actually picking up a bicycle and smashing it onto the ground. It may have already been broken. I don’t remember, but I smashed it on the ground and I remember this big football player walking up to me, like, seeing me do it, and he just picked me up and he just smashed me onto the ground. The irony of me being someone who actually stole a bicycle or maybe multiple bicycles in my earlier years, I mean considering who I am now and my relationship to bicycles and how my bicycles have been stolen sometimes and how I’ve interacted with people. The irony that I drunkenly stole bicycles in my very early 20s … it’s just, I don’t know, ironic. I remember people having to carry me home from the bars and thinking that was fun. Reflecting on that is just such a great night when I had to be carried home from the bars. One night I … one morning, I actually woke up in a bed in a really nice home, which was not where I would usually be as a college student, and being so confused, and this one … this guy walked by … an older guy, and he said that I was walking home from the bars and I had my thumb out, but I was following my thumb and just like swaying. I was hitchhiking, but I was just following my thumb. He actually took me right by my house and we sat there for an hour-and-a-half, and apparently, I didn’t even recognize my own house sitting right outside of it. So the next morning, I woke up and just had no idea where I was at his house.

I remember one time on spring break being … just waking up on the dance floor in this packed dance floor, and just being pinned up inside of there and just just waking up standing up. I think one of the things that I remember in university where I was the most ashamed was, one time I must have been totally blacked out because I didn’t even know I was ever at this place. I must … I went there and they weren’t home and I ended up, I think, just passing out and sleeping in someone’s bed for a while or something. I don’t remember the details, but apparently I got up and, thinking I was going to the bathroom, I actually peed on their chair and they were gone for the weekend and they came back and had a smelly room full of pee and they were really, really unhappy with me. This dwindled from freshman, sophomore, junior year. By senior year, it had dwindled quite a bit, but I still found myself making some mistakes. It was senior year, or actually maybe the second half of my second senior year, me and a friend were just goofing around drinking in the living room and he was on top of me, kind of wrestling and I just grabbed at something and there was a blender … the top of a blender and I grabbed it and just smashed it over his head. Well, next thing you know, he’s dripping blood down upon me and he has to go … well, we end up taking him to the emergency room.

I, again, I take full responsibility for everything that I do. Everything that I’ve done. But, I think the fact that I grew up watching a lot of fake wrestling, the WWF, and there was all that fake blood and just smashing things on people, there’s no doubt in my mind that that played a role. We are our surroundings. That’s why it’s so important that we pay attention to the content that we’re viewing, the people that we’re spending time with. We … most of us … we are our surroundings. I know I was. If I had been at a university where nobody else was drinking, I wouldn’t have been drinking. If drinking wasn’t so incredibly cool, I certainly wouldn’t have been doing it. So again, I take full responsibility. But it’s a really important lesson to acknowledge that our surroundings are so important in who we are and who we become.

Now, one of the most dangerous things I ever did is, just a few times, I drank and drove. It’s not something I ever made a habit of, but there’s a time that I remember with horror in my chest and that was … I was at a party and the keg ran out, and so to … I think be cool, I said, “Well, I have a keg at my house.” So we walked back to my house, got the keg and then decided to throw it in the vehicle. We were under 21. I remember, I was pretty drunk and I remember speeding down the road when it was dark out and just waking up and realizing how lucky I was that another drunk kid didn’t walk out into the road in front of my vehicle and get hit. That was something that I, at the time, felt like, “Wow, you’re … that was a close call. You really could have messed that up pretty bad there.”

Another interesting thing that happened was, I did a study abroad trip through New Zealand and Australia junior year, and I brought my binge drinking habits to this small group of people. They came from around the country and, although they were all into drinking, most of them were not into the level of drinking that I was. I remember one night I, well, I got blackout drunk and I woke up in the morning in the common area having peed myself and my cell phone was in my pocket, so that was destroyed. Had … destroyed that with my own pee and I remember multiple of the people kind of coming to me and saying, you know, “We think you have a drinking problem.” And me saying, “No, I don’t have a drinking problem. This is just what we do at University of Wisconsin La Crosse.” But that was very obvious. Being in New Zealand at the bars and getting that level of blackout drunk, that was one of the first times where I was in a different context and you saw the problem that it was.

It was an interesting scenario though, because the things that we would do as college students, if you know adults would do it and act the same way out of that cultural norm, it would be clearly labeled as alcoholism. But because we were doing it and because the societal norms accepted it, it wasn’t alcoholism. It’s a really … it’s one of those examples of what, if enough people around you are doing it, if enough people are doing it, it’s considered normal, even though it’s not normal. There’s very few cultures around the world that act like that. But it was totally considered normal. To so many of my friends, it was considered normal, it was not considered a problem, it was not considered a drinking problem.

That being said, I really … I don’t think at any time then I was dealing with alcoholism. I never needed to drink. I never drank alone. It was purely a social thing Thursday, Friday and Saturday night with very few exceptions. During all of my summers, I was 100% sober, working 80 to 90 hours a week. So, it was just a Thursday, Friday, Saturday thing during university years and it did continue on after that, but nowhere near to that extent.

Now the thing that I felt the absolute worst about and that when I think of it, I feel a deep sense of pain around, was actually after university. I believe by maybe about a year. I was down in Indiana with my dad’s side of the family. It was one of the few times I’d ever spent with them and we were sharing a hotel room and it was my two cousins and my aunt and uncle, maybe actually there were three of us cousins there I believe, and my aunt and uncle, and we started drinking, which was … at the time, probably all … most all of them drank, and so it was relatively natural. But the next thing I knew, I woke up in a room alone in the hotel and I know that I had peed the whole pullout bed. But, if I recall, I had maybe puked in it as well. So, I had perhaps woken up in my puke and in my pee and I just woke up like, “What happened?” I had no recollection of it. Something happened where, again, where it just … the alcohol hit my lips and something happened. And my aunt and uncle … they were very, you know, timid to talk to me, of … telling me about the night before, but they told me that I picked up a full-size ottoman, I think, and just picked it up and my uncle came around the corner and I smashed it over his head.

And this was stuff that we would do as college students and was again considered pretty fun and normal in my circle, but somehow I just got out of control and I took that into this area where it just did not belong whatsoever. And they said that I was trying to convince them all to let me go to the alcohol store and buy more hard alcohol when I was already blacked out. And I just felt so ashamed, I think, so embarrassed, just so out of control. And they definitely thought maybe he has a problem. There’s definitely alcohol problems in my dad’s side of the family, plenty of it. So that was a pretty clear thing like, “Wow. He might have a problem.” And that was very embarrassing and very much a big hit to the ego and just … words aren’t really coming to me for how just horrible I felt about that. It was, I think, largely just the concern of what people thought about me and just the image, the embarrassment around it and the shame around it.

Let’s take another three deep breaths together my friends. I’ve got some hot herbal tea here. This wasn’t intentional, but I’m just realizing, this is one of my replacements for alcohol. I don’t think of it really as a replacement, but this is what I do: I drink hot herbal tea. So fortunately, all of this abuse of alcohol and this destructive relationship with myself and people around me really fizzled out at the end of university. It was already fizzling out during university and only continued to occasionally get blackout drunk maybe a handful of times after university, but not much. It phased out and I found a new way of connecting with myself, a new way of exploring.

I really deeply broke free from that probably about the age of 25, when I moved out to San Diego and started to find a whole different new way of relating with the Earth. Of course, the part that is … the area where I hold the most pain in the morning is what I’ve shared and that’s, you know, relationships that I had, sexual relationships that I had that were not consensual or not fully consensual. And that’s an area where I deeply, deeply mourn and where alcohol played a role. Again, I take responsibility even when alcohol was involved. I won’t go into that because I shared about that in depth in the video where I shared about my deep level of pain and mourning over some of my past sexual experiences.

So, it was about 2013 that, for the most part, I stopped drinking. I’ve drunk some in the years since then, and I wrote an article some years back called “Why I Quit Drinking Alcohol,” and I encourage you to read that. It shares in some depth why I decided to end this relationship with alcohol. I’m not going to dive into that. I just wanted to share my past and share who I was and how that’s a part of me today. I have a very healthy relationship with alcohol. I never ended up having an alcoholism problem. Fortunately, I was able to break free from it and end those habits at a fairly young age and I’m grateful for that. So, I’m grateful to have shared with all of you and to release this into the past and to be a part of this experience of healing with all of you. There’s so many of us that have a desire to heal our relationships with alcohol and I’m here with you to say that there are other ways that we can meet our needs for connection and belonging and growth and expansion. And we can do that through relationships with the Earth, with the plants and animals we share this Earth with, and with one another. We can have deeply, deeply fulfilling lives that don’t involve the abuse of alcohol whatsoever. And where, if we do drink alcohol, it’s something that we can make at home with honey from the bees that we have raised, perhaps.

So, I love you all very much and I’m grateful to be on this journey with you.

Articles referred to:

Why I Quit Drinking Alcohol
My Experience with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) / Compassionate Communication

The above is a transcription of Truth and Transparency: My Drunken College Years, which is part of my practice of coming into full truth and transparency.

For the full series and depth to this practice visit: My Commitment to Truth and Transparency.