Bros & Shows - Hi. My name is Steel. I am an Alcoholic. Today I am 6 years sober (8/18/24)

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

What's up bros? Sunday 8/18/24 was my 6 years sobriety date. For this milestone I wanted to share some of my story again, and also hopefully shed some light on the topic of sobriety, addiction and recover. I do this not for sympathy or recognition, but in hopes to help erase the stigma that comes with this disease. As always, thank you all for your support. Love youse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, my name is Steele. I am a father. I'm a husband. I am a private chef. I am a podcaster, former professional baseball player, and I'm an alcoholic. And today is my six-year sobriety date, which is, that's a long time. And I didn't realize how long of the time it was, really, until my wife pointed it out to me. She just said, wow, six years. Like, that's a long time. I was like, damn, you know what, you're right. And I feel like in this journey, there's certain milestones that we look for. You know, the first year, obviously, is massive. Five years is the big one. People that get to five years tend to have more success with sobriety in the long run.

And then 10 years, 15, so on and so forth. And I feel like the in-between can get kind of lost. And I think that it's important to highlight these moments, whether you're comfortable speaking out about them, whether you're just going to celebrate with friends and family, whatever your version of that is, I think it's important to take time to have these moments. And for me, last year I had this great opportunity to come on here and make a video for my five year. And that was such a massive milestone for me and to be able to share that with such a large audience that this podcast has presented me with, which is incredible. And, you know,

that's never lost on me. And I'm always always grateful for this opportunity. But for this year, I wanted to take advantage of it again and come on here and share some more with you. And I'm going to get into my story again. I'm going to touch on parts that I touched on last year. I'm not going to get as in-depth. In years past, when I've made videos or discussed my sobriety dates, I've also wanted to share things that I've learned over the past year, things that have helped me move forward either in my journey or in my life,

things that maybe people don't understand. And I think that's a good talking point for this year, for my six years, is maybe helping some more people that are listening understand what this is, understand what addiction is, recovery, sobriety, the journey that a lot of us go on because there's a lot of question marks. And it's one of those topics that unless you've been through it or had somebody in your family going through it, you really don't know that much about it. You speculate, you assume, and those are the kinds of things that lead to a lot of misconceptions

when it comes to sobriety. So I thought this would be a great opportunity, especially given the state of Bravo over the past year and how they've addressed some things with recovery, with some of the castmates and things of those nature. So I wanted to take this opportunity to do just that, but I wanted to start it out sharing a little bit of my story just to either catch people up that haven't heard it or remind people of where I've been and how I got here. If you want to hear the in-depth version, exactly a year ago today, I dropped my five-year anniversary video, and that's my story at length. This will be an abridged version a little bit, but I want to start at the end again.

I was living in Florida by myself. My ex-wife and I had gotten separated, and I was in an apartment that at one point had three people living in it, one of them being my daughter, and all of a sudden I was by myself. It was my dog and I, and at that point in my life, I was drinking one to two-fifths of vodka a day. And what I would do is buy the pints behind the counter because they were cheaper. It was not high-quality alcohol, a lot of, you know, Shmirnoff was, that was like high quality. If I was getting Shmirnoff, it means I was breaking the bank, but normally it was stuff that you've never heard of. of like Kamchatka vodka or Crystal Palace, just rubbing alcohol, essentially.

And what I would do is I would drink all day. I would wake up and drink. I would drink during the day and I would get home to my apartment. And I would just drink until I passed out. And that was my life. Up until that point, being a professional athlete, being a professional baseball player, a lot of people want to think it's a glamorous lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that people covet. You know, you're a professional athlete. That's a big deal. And a lot of people think that comes

with all these bells and whistles. But in minor league baseball, it leads to a very lonely and isolating lifestyle. If you match that with the fact that you're surrounded by testosterone 24-7, you don't want to be a bitch. It leads to a lot of pushing things to the side, not addressing what's going on with your emotions, not addressing what's going on with problems. you may be having, not recognizing that you may be leaning on a substance to cope with things. And that's what I had started doing. At some point, my drinking went from drinking to have fun to drinking to self-medicate. Drinking to stop feeling was my big thing. I didn't want to hurt. I didn't want to be sad. I didn't want to be mad. And I realized that somewhere

along the way, if I drank enough, I simply didn't give a fuck anymore. And that's a really dangerous place to be for anybody, let alone somebody with a substance abuse problem. But towards the end, it was the summer of 2018, July, August. I would say it got really bad in probably April. April, May is when it started to get bad. And then June, July, August was just a very fast spiral. And again, I would wake up and whatever I had left in my bottle from the night before, I would drink it as much as I could of it before I threw up. And I would throw up once every day and then I'd be able to keep the rest down. And what a lot of people don't understand is that's how I got to neutral. So for people out there that don't have a

substance abuse problem, the best way I can describe it is how you feel sober, that's how I felt drunk. And if I wasn't drunk, I was sick. And at this point in my drinking, it was not only a substance abuse problem. I was having physical problems now as well. I drank so much that my body was beginning to shut down at 27 years old. My eyes had started turning yellow. I was carrying 20 pounds of fluid on my body.

you could see my stomach was distended I would wake up every single morning the same way I would wake up throw up drink throw up drink keep it down and once I was able to keep alcohol down I was good to go and I would continue drinking throughout the day to try to maintain that that fine line of being a functional alcoholic which anybody that's gone through this can tell you you're functional until you're not and when you're not it happens to so fast and everything just plummets. It's this waterfall, if you want to call it that. You're going down the stream. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. You get closer to that edge and things start to speed up. All of a sudden, you plummet. And that's what happened to me. And I'll never forget my breaking point, if you want to call it that, was one morning I woke up and, sorry to be explicit, but I'm not going to spare any details this time around. And the morning would start with me throwing up, as I said, but it would be blood and not a little bit of blood. It was only blood. I would either throw up blood or I'd go to the bathroom, and that would also be blood

because my insides were shutting down, again, at 27 years old. And I just remember one morning specifically. I woke up and I went to the bathroom and I was naked and I just looked in the mirror and I'll never forget seeing this man staring back at me and I didn't recognize him. And to this day I have this image in my head of this person and to this day I don't know who that is. And the craziest thing is a lot of my memories now of that time in my life are in the third person as though I'm standing in the room watching this happen to. me. And I just remember looking and my eyes were yellow. My stomach was out to hear. I was deformed. I was actually physically deformed. I didn't know who I was. And at that moment, I just

remember saying to myself, now there's no coming back from this. You cannot come back from this. There's no way. You've ruined your life. You've ruined your body. You're going to die. and that's the moment that we in sobriety or recovery like to call it the fuckets you know that was the moment that I said fuck it and what that meant for me was I would go to bed every single night and just pray that I wouldn't wake up you know just it would be so much easier for me to just die than to face all of the shit that I had caused to face the people I loved knowing that I was now this version of myself, that they wouldn't recognize who I was, that I would have to admit to them all of the things that had gone

wrong. And my entire life, I was a person that took care of everything. I could do whatever I wanted to do. If I had a goal, I achieved it. I was a hard worker. I was dedicated. If I had a problem, I fixed it. If my friends had a problem, they came to me, I helped them fix it. And my family, I would help my family fix things. That was my role. That's what I liked. That's what I craved. And all of a sudden, I was met with this impossible task of overcoming shrinking. And I didn't know how to do it. And the more it ate at me, the more I turned to the bottle, the more I started to surrender to it. And that's coming into the understanding of addiction, the understanding of substance abuse problems for people that don't go through it, for people that don't know

people that have gone through it. And this seems as good a time as any to try to shed some light on it because in that mindset, in that frame of mind that I was in, I was 100% okay with no longer being here. I wasn't going to physically do it. I wasn't going to physically take my own life, but you could argue that's what I was doing. I was slowly drinking myself to death with the understanding that at some point this would be over. And I would so much rather do that than face all of the things that I had to face. And that's what this disease does to you. It gets you to a point where there's this little voice in your head all the time, telling you a million things that you'll get a hold of it someday. One day you'll figure it out. Not today, but someday you're going to figure it out.

But in the meantime, it's going to be okay because you're going to lean on your crutch. You're going to lean on the bottle. You're going to lean on a drug of choice, whatever. it might be. It's in the back of your head all day and you wake up in the morning and you feel like the biggest piece of shit on the planet. And I blacked out every single night and I would wake up and try to put pieces together and thank God I was an introverted drunk. So most of the time I was on the same spot in my couch in my living room because once my ex and I got separated, I shut the door to my bedroom and I shut the door to my daughter's room because it was too painful for me to look at. I didn't want to see the damage that I had caused.

So I physically shut the door. And that's what I was doing in my life. I physically shut doors and then I mentally shut doors because that was easier. And then my addiction had a hold of me. It was in charge. Then it was only drinking all the time. That's all I fucking cared about. I was a professional baseball coach, a professional baseball coach.

I was at the upper level of what I wanted to do my whole life. My identity was baseball. And I did it. And I gave all of that away because of this thing that lives inside of us. And if I can describe it any way to people that don't understand it, it's just that. I was willing to sacrifice everything just to avoid dealing with it. And just so I didn't have to stop. My entire day became about how am I going to get my next drink?

When am I going to drink it? And how am I going to keep people from finding out? As if they couldn't tell already. as if I didn't reek of booze, if I wasn't stumbling around, and it literally came to a head in the dugout. I was in the dugout of a professional baseball game, drunk as a coach. I stood up off the bench. I fell down on the floor, and my manager called me out.

He said, you can't go out there. You're a mess. They took my heart rate at the end of the game. They called me into the clubhouse. I tried to get out of there, didn't. And they strapped me to an EKG machine, and my resting heart rate was one. which was close to a stroke or a heart attack, and when they finally got me back to my apartment

that night, the first thing I did was get an Uber to the liquor store and buy a handle of vodka. If that doesn't tell you the lack of control that people that are going through this have, I can't explain it any better. My life was falling apart. I had just confirmed that I wasn't going to be going back to professional baseball. I fell down drunk in the dugout. They sent me to the hospital where they told me, you're not doing great.

And my response to that was to get an Uber to buy more booze so I could get drunk and not think about it. Because at that point, I had seen the man that I am in the mirror, and my life was over. At no point was I thinking about my daughter. At no point was I thinking about my parents. at no point was I thinking about my friends I was thinking about me and nothing else and I was being directed by alcohol and this demon that lives inside of us and I can't explain it any different than that than who would sacrifice all of those things willingly willingly give up their dream willingly give up their career willingly except I'm going to die soon and I can't fucking

weight because this hurts a whole lot and I'm kind of sick of it and when I would wake up in the morning I was so pissed because I was still there and it was so painful my fucking insides hurt my liver hurt you're not supposed to feel your organs but after that day um my uncle flew to Florida and my stepmom was there my little brother was there and they packed up my truck and he drove me north back to Philly and I went through withdrawal on the way which is the single worst thing in the entire world I don't recommend it

but it is enough to make me not want to drink again but we got to the hospital and I detox there for five days and during that they were running tests on me and when they came back they said they hadn't seen that kind of liver damage in anybody under the age of 65 before and that I had cirrhosis that if I hadn't gotten to the hospital I probably had 36 to 48 more hours to live so that dream of me

wanting to just go to sleep and not wake up and not deal with my shit almost became a reality and it was in that moment that they weren't sure I was going to make it out of the hospital They ran tests for about five days, and on the fifth day, they came in and said, we think that you're going to be okay. We think that your liver can recover from this, but you can never drink again. And what do you think about rehab? And I've said this in past videos, but at that point in my life, I had no job. I had no home.

I was getting divorced. I was about to die. I was in a hospital. All I had to my name was my truck and my dog. And so I said, yeah, what else am I going to do? Send me to rehab. So my parents sent me to Karen, which was just outside of Redding. And that place saved my life.

Truly saved my life. And the craziest part is I was there for about 31 days, 30, 31 days. And it didn't click for me until the third week. I had been in there. I was doing everything I was supposed to do. I was going to the meetings. but I wasn't buying into it. I hadn't been sold on this idea yet.

And week three, we had a meeting with dads. It was only dads. And I've told this story before, but I will tell this story every chance I get because this is the moment that saved my life. And I don't remember his name. But if he ever hears this and you're out there and you remember this moment, you saved my life.

And we were in a meeting with dad, and it's going through the room. And if you don't know about meetings in recovery, you don't cross-talk. So if I'm talking, no matter what I'm saying, it's not your job in that meeting to interrupt me and give me your opinion. I'm allowed to share and then you can share. But went around the room and everybody there was, you know, a dad and they're saying, I'm so-and-so, my kids are 16, I want to get this right, blah, blah, blah, and it gets around to me. And again, at that point, I hadn't bought into this process.

I was just going through the motions and doing enough so I wouldn't get in trouble. But in that moment, I started to share. I said, hi, my name is Steele. My daughter's two. I want to get this right for her, blah, blah, blah. And an older man there cut me off mid-sentence and said, you don't know how lucky you are. And I just remember being angry. And I said, what are you talking about?

he said my kids are 25 21 18 and 16 it might be a little off but they were all older he said they remember every stupid thing that i've ever done every bad night every bad moment they remember all of it and if you get this right then your daughter doesn't have to know that side of you and that was the wake-up call that i needed it felt like somebody hit me over the head with a sledgehammer or a bat, it was like everything snapped into focus. Because up until that point, I was still trying to convince myself that I wasn't like the other people there. I wasn't a problem.

Maybe I could drink again someday. Up until that point, I had cirrhosis of the liver, my body was deformed, I was carrying 20 pounds of fluid, I'd isolated myself from all of my friends, my entire family, I was getting divorced, I hadn't seen my daughter in five months, and I had the balls to look around the room and say, I'm better than you, I'm better than you, and I'm better than you. Why? Because you did heroin, you did crystal meth and lived in a dumpster, and you hit a family with your car. That's all. I thought that made me better. Meanwhile, I'm sitting in the same exact place as these men, but I have the nerve to say that I'm better than anybody. And that leads to

comparison. And that's all I was doing was comparing myself to other people so that I didn't have to look at myself and see what I had to do to fix my own life. By comparing myself to other people, it gave me an excuse because I hadn't gotten to that point yet, which is bullshit. It's absolute bullshit. We were all the same. Every single person in that facility was the same as I was. Our vice was just different. But I had the audacity to say that I was better than any of them. And it was in that moment that all of that became apparent. And thank God it did because I wouldn't have been able to move forward in my life without that and without that man and to this day I am forever grateful and to this day I don't know who that was but as I've grown from from all of this

from my own experiences and from my time in rehab what that moment specifically has taught me what comparisons have taught me we are so quick to judge people we are so quick to assume things We are so quick to look outward and are so afraid to look inward. Whether your journeys with sobriety or not, whatever your life path might be, we get so caught up in other people's business because it makes us feel better about ourselves rather than look in the mirror, which is a much scarier concept. It's a much harder thing to do, to be honest with yourself. And had I not gone to rehab, I don't know if I would be that person.

because that gave me the tools to be able to open up myself emotionally my entire life I would put my shit to the side if you had a problem I'm there I got you but all of my stuff I'm going to put that on the back burner because I don't want to fucking deal with it and the best way I can describe it is we think of alcoholics or drug addicts and we're so quick to use those words I hear it on Bravo I hear it in everyday discussions he's a drunk he's a junkie She's a crackhead. Whatever you want to say, all of these things that people throw around without understanding the weight that they're carrying.

You don't know those people. People assume that an alcoholic is a homeless person living under a bridge with a brown paper bag. I use this analogy all the time. You don't know how that person got there. You don't know what their life story was up until that point. You don't know the trauma that that person has gone to that has led to them drinking under a bridge.

But yet you're going to sit there and judge them without knowing. them. One thing that rehab taught me is that addicts and alcoholics are some of the most amazing people on the planet. They are interesting. They are worldly. They are intelligent. They had just gone down a bad path and they were incapable of pulling themselves out and I can't explain it any other way. I did not want to drink anymore. When it got really bad at the end, I didn't want to be drinking. I could not physically stop to the point that I was throwing up shitting blood. Again, that is graphic and I apologize, but that is how strong this stranglehold was on me.

I would rather die than give this up. I would rather die than face all of this shit. I would rather die than everybody find out what a big piece of shit that I'd become. That is not something that anybody would choose. and I don't get upset with people that don't understand. I don't get upset with people that are short-sighted when it comes to this unless it's just blatant disrespect to it because it's very hard to understand.

And if there was a magic way to translate this to people, Lord knows I would try, but it's impossible unless you've gone through it. Or if you have somebody near you go through it or you're open to the idea of what recovery means, what it looks like, how hard it really is. And the best way I can describe it is one of my favorite artists, Jelly Roll. And he just recently kind of blew up a little bit, so you may know what I'm talking about. Back in the day, when I got into Jelly Roll, because I'm cool, he was a country rapper turned full-time country artist, but he sings a lot about recovery.

And there's a song that Jelly Roll sings called Save Me. and it is the most accurate description and depiction of what it feels like to be in active addiction or active alcoholism. And the lyric is, somebody saved me, me from myself, it's been so long living in hell. All of my lifestyles are bad for my health, but it's the only thing that seems to help. We are cognizant of what's happening to us. which is the scariest part. We are aware of how much we're deteriorating,

how our lives are falling apart around us, and we are so fucking good at rationalizing that we put it back here because that's what our addiction wants from us, because it does not want to go away. It wants to stay there and control us and run our life until there's nothing left. And that's what happened to me.

There was nothing left. And thank God I went to rehab. And thank God I snapped out of it. And thank God I saw the light and was able to look around and realize that I had so much to live for. I had a beautiful daughter. I had an amazing family. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life because up until that point, it was all

baseball all the time, and I just drank myself out of the game. So when I got back to Philly, I took all of these lessons that I learned. I took everything that I learned at rehab. I took all of the introspection, and I put it to good use because I knew damn well when I got out of care and that I wasn't going back. That was ingrained in me. I had to hit the ground running not just for my daughter, not just for my family. For the first time, I looked at it and said, I'm going to do this shit for me.

And I'm going to wrap up here a little bit, but it leads me to one more quote. And I'm not sure who said this, but I wrote it down so I don't butcher it. And it's maybe the journey isn't about becoming who you're supposed to be, but unbecoming who you aren't supposed to be. And I feel like that's what alcohol was doing for me. I feel like we have this notion of who we want to be when we're kids, when we're teenagers, when we're growing up. And I guarantee if you remember that version of yourself, what you wanted to be, it was a great job. Take care of everybody around you. Love your family, love your friends. Focus on the shit in life that actually fucking matters. Focus on the things in life that actually matter. Focus on the people that matter.

moments that matter. And somewhere along the way, no matter what, in all of our journeys, we get sidetracked, whether it's trying to fit the mold of a friend group, trying to fit the mold of a new job, trying to change something about yourself to simply become part of the norm. We lose pieces of ourself along the way until you are left with a person standing in front of the mirror that you don't recognize. We lose sight of that person that we want to be when we're younger and life from what I've gathered from what it has taught me from getting to this point in my life what it's about is rebecoming that person being reacquainted with the simple things that's what sobriety has given me that's something that I can never ever take for granted again

the simple shit I say a lot to take stock in your moments to take a step back and see where you are, where you've come, where you've been, whether you've gone through addiction or not, is irrelevant. Everybody can do this because we get so caught up in life, especially these days. It's hard out here. Life is really, really hard. But life does not suck. Take it from somebody that nearly lost theirs. Life doesn't suck. Life's just really fucking hard. And along this journey, At some point, we all need to be able to take that step back and look inward and say, hey, am I happy? Am I living for the right reasons?

Are my focus is where they need to be? And this isn't a rah-rah inspirational influencer post on Instagram. This is a genuine question. Are you happy? Do you like where you are in your life? Are you treating the people around you that you care about how they should be treated? do you love yourself do you love the people around you if the answer to some of those questions is no that's okay we all need help we all get lost along this path no matter what your journey is

people are inherently the same we are all as complex as everybody else everybody that you know has the same shit going on in their life in a different capacity that may not look exactly the same but i promise you it feels the same and the sooner that we can get to a point where we accept that, where we understand that, where we stop judging that, where we stop pointing the finger to make ourselves feel better about our own position in life, and just focus on our side of the street, take care of yourself, surround yourself with good people, work hard, be a good person, good things happen. You know how I know?

Because that's been my entire life for the past six years. Am I perfect? Fuck, no. Not even close. Do I try? Yeah, not to be perfect, but to be my best self for my daughter, for my wife, for my family, for my friends. I always have room for improving, but I am always open to that idea now. I try my absolute best to not compare myself to other people.

I try my absolute best to give everybody grace, no matter what their situation is, no matter how bad they fucked up. Because we all deserve a second chance. because I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you without my second chance. I wouldn't be in my daughter's life the way that I am without my second chance. I wouldn't be expecting a beautiful baby girl in October without my second chance. I wouldn't be going to dinner tonight because my sister's going to college tomorrow if I didn't get my second chance. Life is a really, really long, really hard journey.

And I promise you, no matter where you are, no matter what's going on in your life you have the ability to change it to do something different to be somebody that you wanted to be when you were younger getting back to the root of who you are that's what this has given me that's what sobriety has taught me and that's hopefully where some understanding can come in trying to understand where people on my side of the street are coming from not being so quick to judge, not pointing at the guy under the bridge of the brown paper bag. So the next time that you want to jump to judgment, or you think you know, or you think you assume things about somebody going through it,

take a step back and give them grace. Take a step back and give yourself grace in the moments where you need it. Take stock in your moments. That's what life has become all about for me. Taking stock in my moments, the littlest things make me the happiest, because I'm here for them. Again, we lose sight of this somewhere along the way. And being able to get back to that person is life-changing.

Am I that person all the time? No, I have to remind myself, hey, man, things are pretty cool right now. Why don't you take a breather and look around? Take stock in it. Be present. That's what changes your life, whether you're dealing with addiction or not. So not to ramble too much this time around, But at the end of it all, I just thank you to everybody out there that's supported, that's

listened to the podcast, to my family that shows up for me every day, to my beautiful wife, my beautiful daughter, my soon-to-be beautiful daughter in about two months. This is a life I never thought I would have. It's a life I didn't think I deserved. And it's a life that I can't imagine. not having now that I am here. And I promise you, no matter where you're at in your life, whether it's a battle with addiction, battle with sobriety, whatever it may be, I promise you that there is better out there waiting. If you don't like where you're at, I promise you

you have time to change. You have time to ask for help. Taking that first step is the hardest part. And if you ever want to talk to me, you can reach out to me. I'm happy to talk to whomever about it. Talk to those closest to you. That first step is terrifying. I'm not taking away from it and I hope that anybody out there that's listening to this you're able to take that step not for the people around you but for you so that you can get better so that you can grow and this is not coming from a place if I've got it figured out because I certainly do not I take it one day at a time and I keep putting one foot in front of the other and like I said earlier. I work hard. I surround myself with good people, and I try to be a good person

every day. And good things seem to happen. And I will continue to live my life like that until the day I die. Again, not just for the people around me, but for me. And just grateful. I'm grateful for all of you out there. I'm grateful for everybody in my life and grateful for the life I have. So, As always, thank you for the support. Reach out if you need to talk. I'm happy to discuss whatever and love you.