Learn from my mistakes.
A typical day in my life in the year 2000
- 14:00 I get up. I ate spaghetti for breakfast from the night before. I accompany it with coffee and a joint.
- 15:00 I go down a couple of rabbit holes on the internet. I watch conspiracy videos. I go to adult video sites. I chat with strangers on Irc Chat.
- 17:00 I play poker online. I smoke cigarette after cigarette.
- 18:00 My girlfriend comes home, and I pretend everything is ok. She gets mad. She leaves.
- 20:00 I open the bar. I take the first shot of whiskey.
- 22:00 I order take-out. I have dinner while attending to the customers filling the place.
- 24:00 Stand-up show starts. I serve drinks; people invite me for shots and drinks. I accept all the invitations: I drink all that alcohol.
- 3:00 I lower the bar gate and the music volume to pretend to close the bar so I don’t get fined. You can only enter with a password. The remaining customers inside take advantage and start smoking cocaine.
- 8:00, I finish kicking the penultimate drunk out of the bar. The last one is me.
- 8:30 I throw up before going to bed.
- 9:00, I get into bed. It smells terrible; I last changed the sheets a few weeks ago. I look around. It doesn’t look like a student apartment; it looks like a crack house. I cry. I fall asleep.
I used to open the bar every day of the week, so that kind of day would repeat itself for almost a decade.
Whenever I think about it, I get sad (not proud).
But I remember that time often because people who are going through situations similar to what I went through ask me how to get out of hell.
And I always answer the same thing: if your life sucks as much as mine, start by doing these three things.
1. End the party before the party ends with you.
There comes a point when you look at your face and see how bad you are. At that moment of clarity, you have to decide to stop.
I stopped very late, almost at the age of 33.
I was the oldest at all the parties I went to. And because I felt ridiculous, I drank more so I wouldn’t notice.
But I would still notice and watch as people pretended to socialize with me to play jokes on the old drunk at the bar.
After many embarrassing situations, I realized that the real problem was that I had not matured. I had not closed the cycle of youth. I was Peter Pan and didn’t want to face the reality that there is a time under the sun for everything.
And my time of being a child was over.
2. Clean your social media
A girl from Buenos Aires wrote me a few weeks ago.
“I don’t have money to buy your books. But I want to change, which is an important step,” she told me.
It is. I replied. And I offered to help her. The first thing I did was stalk her on social media.
And I saw that her Instagram feed was a mix of a porn star’s feed and that of a devoted single mother.
On her profile was a succession of pictures showing herself scantily clad in suggestive positions. And photos with her young son playing in the park.
I don’t judge her.
I know firsthand that when you live a life bordering on manic depression, your image can be so fragmented that you don’t see the contradictions.
You can’t see the elephant in the room because the elephant is you.
So my first advice to her will be to clean up her social networks — like the one who cleans his house of alcohol bottles — and take out every selfie where she exposes herself as what she is not: a sexual object.
And in this way, she regains her dignity so that she can raise her self-esteem and, above all, so that she doesn’t project an image of herself to the world that attracts all kinds of predators.
3. Clean your eyes.
I always give this advice because it marked a before and after in my life. And it is something so subtle that most people overlook it.
In my case, I kept looking for things or people to relieve me with my eyes: attractive people, alcohol, fast food, and ice cream.
And that desire-laden stare ended up getting me into trouble.
So, I started to repress those looks.
I stopped leering at people who aroused my interest. My relationship with others improved because I no longer saw them as a means to obtain pleasure but as human beings.
(It’s hard, but most people don’t look at others as people but as objects or means to obtain things).
Then, I stopped looking at the fast food offers on bus shelters and billboards. And that eventually made me lose interest in sugary drinks and junk food.
I also stopped going to bars and parties.
Thanks to that, my health improved, I lost weight, and my self-esteem recovered.
When you understand that the compulsive craving for things that make you feel good in the short term is medicating you. Your mind changes.
Because you understand that you are not okay, you wouldn’t self-medicate with short-term rewards if you were.
Once you are aware of the problem, you can find a solution to it.
I hope these three tips help you.
A virtual hug
AG