In my first post on this site I mentioned a job at Boeing and called it a story for another day. That was twenty-nine posts ago. This is the day. It ends with me being walked out of the building after failing a test I knew I was going to fail, with a month off work and two months of daily outpatient classes behind me and nothing in front of me at all. I want to tell you how I got there, because the how is the part that took me twenty years to understand.
I got that job about a year sober. Being sober let me apply myself, get through a couple of weeks of classes at a community college that were the gate to an interview, pass them, and get the shot. I thought Boeing was going to open doors.
It was stressful. The workplace culture problems were real. I brought it home with me. Nightmares about it. Unsettled sleep at best. Home was heavy in that stretch too.
That is the weather I was standing in when the old pattern came looking for me, and none of it is an excuse.
Wanted Again
Somewhere past a year into the job I fell. Two and a half years sober, gone. I was depressed and lonely. I used to feel wanted. People had desired me, and I had believed I could have a relationship. By then it felt like no one could find me worth loving.
That is what took me back to drinking. I wanted to be out around people. I wanted to feel wanted again. I did not want to go do that without a drink in my hand. I fell right back into the same situation I had climbed out of.
You may know that version. The thing you quit comes back the first time you are lonely enough, because it is the only door you still know how to open.
The Parking Lot
I was coming in hungover. I was not working at the level I could have sober. That hurt my soul, because being sober is what had earned me the job in the first place. I knew the difference. I could feel the gap between the man who had walked in and the man showing up.
At least once I never went home at all. I stayed out all night, drove straight to Boeing, and slept in the parking lot before my shift.
I also knew how the company worked. Burn through the attendance allowance and they offer help before they fire you. I knew there was a second chance sitting there, so I used it loosely. I did not care enough to protect it. It was still embarrassing to end up in discipline. It is the only time in my working life that has happened.
I asked for inpatient. I wanted them to send me somewhere. They did not think I was that far gone, so they gave me outpatient instead. A month off work, then daily classes for two months. I should have told them how bad it really was. I was the model participant. I did the work they put in front of me.
It did not hold. I slid back into partying. Then I missed a day of work because I was out partying, and I could not miss the next one without it looking obvious. Post-program testing caught me. I failed the test.
After the Building
Unemployment. Then a couple of years, maybe more, of not working at all. In the rut I fell in with the wrong crowd. I lost my car. I used my 401(k) from Boeing to pay off the note on a car I did not get to keep.
That stretch was my bottom, and it went past drinking. The drinking turned into stronger drugs, and I started stealing. I am not going to itemize it. It was the opposite of the man I wanted to be.
Most people pick up demons they are not proud of when they are caught up in depression and debauchery.
Eventually I took a custodian job at the same high school where I had been a star athlete nearly two decades earlier. Cleaning the building I used to run drills in. Mopping where the trophy case was. It was the next available step, and it put a line in front of me every night: one day, or day one.
The Distance
I am three years sober as of this spring. The first attempt collapsed after two and a half years because I quit without replacing. I removed the thing and put nothing in its place. The hole filled with loneliness, stress, and wheel-spinning.
The second attempt held because I finally put something in it. Areté, the Greek word for excellence that the Stoics built on, and the deliberate daily work that goes with it. Then this blog. Then the build. Something to aim at when the loneliness came looking for a door.
If you have stopped something and found nothing waiting on the other side, you already know the shape of that hole. The quit is not the whole job. The empty space is.
I am building the thing I did not have the first time. If you are standing in that hole right now, tell me where you are stuck. I read every one. What I work out, I will send back.
The man who slept in that parking lot and the man writing this are the same man. I am proud of the distance between them. I am not ashamed of the first one.