Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - From Struggles to Strength: Benjamin Lerner’s Journey to Sobriety

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

In this episode, we have Benjamin Lerner, who has been sober since June 13, 2016. Ever since he can remember, Ben did not feel comfortable in his own skin, and alcohol and drugs would help him loosen up. After dropping out of college at 20 years old, Ben got his first DUI, and his one thought in that moment was that if he were arrested, he would not be able to drink or use that day, and that’s all that mattered. Throughout the years, Ben’s addiction progressed, and he found himself in situations he always told himself he would never end up in. This is Benjamin’s story on the Sober Motivation podcast. ----------- Follow Benjamin on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benjamin.lerner Follow Sober Motivation on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sobermotivation/ Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sobermotivation 30 Day Sober Motivation Journal:  https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sobermotivation/e/154076 Download the Sober Buddy App: https://soberbuddy.app.link/motivation Check out SoberLink: www.soberlink.com/recover

Welcome to season three of the sober motivation podcast. Join me, Brad, each week is my guests and I share incredible, inspiring, and powerful sobriety stories. We are here to show sobriety as possible one story at a time. Let's go. In this episode, we have Benjamin, who has been sober since June 13, 2016. Ever since he can remember, Ben did not feel comfortable in his own skin and alcohol and drugs would help him with loosening up.

After dropping out of college at 20 years old, Ben got his first DUI, and his one thought in that moment was if he was arrested, he would not be able to drink or use that day, and that's all that seemed to matter. Throughout the years, Ben's addiction progressed, and he found himself in situations. He always told himself he would never end up in. This is Benjamin's story on the Sober Motivation podcast. How's it going, everyone? Welcome back to the show. This is an incredible episode, and we're going to get right into it shortly.

but I just want to mention first, you don't have to do this alone. Getting sober is hard. It can be very hard at times, easier at other times, but you don't have to do it alone. Me trying to do it alone ended me back up at square one more times than I would care to admit. Join us over at Sober Buddy. We have live support groups that you can plug into a community of caring, loving, and incredible humans. Check it out, Your SoberBuddy.com. if you have any questions about how to get on the meeting,

send me a message over on Instagram at Sober Motivation, and I hope to see you there soon. So many incredible supporters of the podcast are joining Sober Buddy and attending the meetings and doing incredible things. Getting sober is a lifestyle change, and sometimes a little technology can help. Imagine a breathalyzer that works like a habit tracker for sobriety.

Soberlink helps you replace bad habits with healthy ones. Weighing less than a pound than as compact as a sunglass case. Soberlink devices have built in facial recognition, tamper detection, and advanced reporting, which is just another way of saying it'll keep you honest. On top of all that, results are sent instantly to love ones to help you stay accountable. Go after your goals. Visit soberlink.com slash recover to sign up and receive $50 off your device today. Welcome back to another episode of the Sober Motivation podcast.

Today we've got Benjamin with us. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing great, man. I'm grateful to be alive and sober. It was an early morning with my beautiful little baby boy, but hey, I'm grateful to be six feet up, not six feet under, and trying my best to live in a solution. Yeah, beautiful, man.

That's incredible. Look how we start every episode is exactly the same. What was it like for you growing up? Well, it's interesting being a dad. Now I was going to announce this to my followers next week on the Monday live, but hey, I'm going to do it now. We're four and a half months in. I got a second kid on the way.

So seeing that and being sober and being a dad, about to be a two-time dad, taking care of my kids, seeing the world anew through his eyes. It takes me back to when I was a young kid. Growing up, I grew up in a family of privilege. I grew up in Washington, D.C., in a place where the first thing that other kids would ask you when you were playing around with them in a sandbox, it's not, hey, do you like dinosaurs? Do you like trucks? What do your parents do for a living?

Like, regardless to where you're at, so there's a lot of pressure there. You know, I came from a family of musicians and journalists. My parents didn't really care about me going any. specific path. They just cared that I was passionate about what I did. But there was this big kind of, you know, imagined pressure. Like, there was a little pressure from them, but they were wonderful people and more so pressure from other people, like seeing that I was the great grandson of this American composer who was also playing music. But as a result of my autism spectrum disorder and my kind of disproportionate thinking and the sensory overload that I experienced, I would internalize that pressure and magnify it

within myself. And at first, the coping mechanisms, which I dealt with my a-neurotypical mind state and like my brain frame and how I interpreted and dealt with the world was through external medium that weren't necessarily chemically based. I'm a millennial. So it was Pokemon cars. It was pogs. It was video games. It was Power Rangers like action figures. And it was approval from other people. But when I took my first drink at the age of 13, man, it was a complete game changer. And that's the day that my childhood ended. But it was a wonderful childhood. I just was in so much pain and believing that I was not deserving of human happiness because of a bunch of different neurological and experiential factors that I just wasn't there. And I sought out an

unsustainable solution. And it robbed me in my childhood during my early teenage years. Yeah. I hear you on that, man. Thanks for sharing all that. Of course. When was the first time you picked up on? That's what you were struggling with. In terms of like the autism spectrum and the sensory overload and like the whole different malangeum kind of sad facts. There? Yeah, yeah. So it was little portals of clarity that before I first picked up a drink with the expressed intention of changing consciousness, I realized that I always like to say I was an alcoholic

and an addict before I ever changed consciousness chemically because I never felt comfortable within my own skin. And growing up, I thought everybody else was equally as nervous as I was. And I basically had to learn how to deconstruct social cues, kind of like they have chat GPT now and all these other cool AI programs. I never had an intrinsically born ability to understand social situations. And everybody feels awkward in social situations. And I'm learning that in recovery, kind of deconstructing my own previous held paradigms, trying to get to a more healthy place.

But for me, it's really visceral. It's like when I look in somebody's eyes, there's this incredible tension and feeling. self-doubt, that I'm afraid to be seen. I'm afraid to see other people. And I became gradually more aware of that as I grew up and social stuff advanced from just playing on a playground to who's invited to the birthday party, who's invited to play like touch football or whatever. And I would realize that the ways that I saw these social interactions were very dysfunctional. And it kind of perpetually rolled into this continual ball rolling down a hill, capturing all this mental and emotional debris where I locked myself in this thing.

thing of I did not deserve basic human happiness and social connection because it was so hard for me to do naturally. And like I say, when that first drink came into play, it served as this kind of false, euphoric thing that made me think I was capable of breaking through that self-enforced pattern, but it came at a big cost. Yeah, it didn't happen right away, though, did it? Well, just like I knew I was an alcoholic and an addict, even before I knew what alcohol did, like I was always seeking out that external solution. I mean, it came in bits and pieces. Like, I kind of equated to the first time I ever saw my next door neighbor playing a video game, and I was like, that's what I want to do. But I had to buy the console. I had to figure out

how the controller worked, but there was that sense of euphoria from the beginning. I'll never forget it. And I've told this story, my followers probably going to get sick of it. But I got to stay rooted in my truth. So I got to tell it. You know, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I think eighth grade, I forget the specific age, but I'll never forget the moment. I was in my friend's basement and I had taken little steps of alcohol here and there and I was beginning to become aware of like how it changed my chemical fabric and metal fabric to the point that like I felt looser like that underlying current of stress and self-hatred and anxiety kind of dissipated into this poisonous euphoric false bliss but I hadn't really put the pieces together until we discovered

this literally cobweb musty might have had mold on it for all I know forgotten six pack of Sam Adams behind his parents' couch and he only had one, but I drank five that night. But for the first time in my life, that feeling of not belonging in my own body, regardless of the social situation, went away. And I was able to use it. Everybody says social lubricant,

but for me it was more of a mental lubricant where all of these kind of synaptic connections that I had formed trying to protect myself from the outside because I was so afraid of social interaction. They got literally washed away with that dream. and it gave me this false sense of security. But the problem was that the more I did it, the tolerance, the physical, but more than that emotional and mental tolerance that I gained pushed me forward.

And it was like I was riding a white water wrapped current of this alcohol, which was my first drug of choice and then to other things. But it was gradual in the beginning. It wasn't like, you know, I picked up a beer and then by my 14th, 15th birthday, I was shooting dope and smoking crack like it took me to at the end. but that kind of gradual nature of it made it all the more insidious because I wasn't really aware about how this current was taking me until it was too late. Yeah.

Wow. Just thanking too, a lot of the stuff you shared, man, is like right on there with me too, man. I felt like comfortable in my own skin. I mean, I think maybe that's the simplest form to put it, right, the first time I got involved with alcohol. And then obviously a transition from there, you know, to the pain pills, to the heroin, to the cocaine, to basically anything to just avoid who. I was. Towards the end and the middle, I couldn't stand what I saw in the mirror. At first,

it wasn't as scary for me personally, but, you know, halfway through it all, I just was like, I can't look at that. But at 13th, so where do you go from there? So I completely relates to what you just said, man, that mirror moment down the line, if we get a chance to talk about it, mirrors have played a big part in my life. And when I say that, you know, looking into other people's eyes was always uncomfortable for me. It was always like their little facial cues and how they responded to my interactions was like a non-glass mirror. And it wasn't just that I was afraid of them. I was afraid to see how they reacted to me because I was so externally based because I didn't have that foundation of self-actualized,

healthy self-esteem that I would see the external world and whether or not it gave me validation as a reflection of myself. Like nothing was internally based. So when these chemicals came in and they gave me that false, poisonous baseline from which I could, supersede climb past the metaphoric fence that I was blocking myself in and blocking everybody out because I was so afraid of being seen. You know, it started out pretty suburban. Like, I was drinking a lot. The first real stupid thing that I did looking back, I don't hate myself for it. It's just I wasn't thinking. And this was a common theme for the next 10 years in escalating degrees. Like, once I discovered that I could change consciousness chemically, a lot of people were like, I finally realized I was an alcoholic.

Like I knew that I was an alcoholic from the day I drank it. I just thought everybody else was crazy for not drinking the way I was and not pursuing that same inebriation the way I was because I say it like this. I grew up in D.C. like I said, I went to private school there and there were a lot of kids of like senators, congressmen, CEOs or whatever. And they're drinking a lot with me. They're using drugs. But they would nurse their hangover, go back to school. And the sports, the school, the social scene separate from the drugs was their, life and they just occasionally went to the party. It was the exact opposite of me. My life was the

party and everything else was something getting in the way of me going there. So alcohol, cannabis, I want to make it clear. Like, I support all paths of recovery. And if people choose to recover with cannabis, like that's cool. It's just like a drug that I'm chemically absent. That didn't work for me. So that is a part of my trajectory. It went on to cannabis. It went on to cocaine, ecstasy, all that. And, you know, I got some pretty serious consequences. But I just kind of to like, I don't want to say I was desensitized, but I was because the consequences of the people that I kept escalating, hanging out with kept escalating too. And if other people started thinking I was like sketchy or whatever, I would stop hanging out with them because I didn't want to be made to feel

bad. But I wasn't really aware of it. It was just kind of this natural evolving process where I went from like just smoking a little bit, drink a little bit to having this false ego complex is this whole suburban scarface complex of pulling up to the party with XYZ. and at the same time I'm working on music. I'm still playing classical piano, but at this point, I branched into making hip hop music, and at the time I was glorifying drugs a lot

through my music, I'm not shy about admitting that. Eventually, the drugs completely superseded any passion that I had for the music. The music was kind of like this lifesaver vest that was holding me above the water from drowning, but I just kind of like buckled myself out and just went full tilt into the drugs. And when I was 19, I had dropped out of college.

I had gotten into school, paid for by my parents, but I chose to leave because I didn't want to go pursue this incredible opportunity of getting a degree in classical piano and music business at the University of Miami because MI-Yos, they call it. I like to think people can get sober anywhere, but maybe as a budding alcohol and cocaine addicts, like it was not the right place for me to be at 19 years old. So I dropped down within a year, I had gotten my first DUI, and not only did I get a DUI, I crashed my car in three other cars on this sleety afternoon in Washington, D.C. in January 2012 when I was 20 years old. But after I crashed my car, I wasn't thinking like my life is over

because I had been like manipulating my family trying to dodge all these consequences to make them think it wasn't as bad as it was. But this is like cars mangled, cars totaled, thank God, nobody was injured. But I didn't know that right when it happened. But I wasn't thinking I'm about to get arrested. I totaled my mom's car. Is everybody else okay? The one thought I had in that moment was if they arrest me, I'm not going to be able to drink or use today. Because I was so focused on running from my own pain with those substances that nothing else mattered. So that's how it basically got me to the point before the worst took over, which is the one line up to that point, even with the DUI, I swore I wouldn't cross, which was opioids. But that's kind of like a little

anatomy of how it escalated from that beer in the basement to the point where drugs had completely taken over my life. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I can relate to so much of what you're saying, right? So much of your story there for sure. And for me, too, it happened. Like, I like what you said there too. We don't necessarily see what the heck is happening when it's going on. I mean, hindsight's 2020. We look back. We're like, oh, yeah, now I have a better understanding of it. But at the time, we get sucked up into it becomes your identity. It becomes the solution to maybe the problem it was for me. I mean, I just couldn't feel comfortable. This was helping a lot until it didn't. I mean, that was definitely part of my story too. And then you get

in this car accident. You get for school, though. I mean, so the school, there was a lot of drugs there. Is that what you were mentioning there? And you didn't want to do the school? I didn't really care if I went to college. Like, I went to this high-powered private school in D.C. And there was like 120 kids in my grade. Everybody got into college and everybody went.

But I thought I was going to be the one not to because I had a horrible GPA compared to the rest of my kids sometimes during classes to, like, drink and smoke during the day. But somehow by the skin of my teeth, I was very passionate about classical piano still, even though it had kind of taken a back seat to the drugs, and I had a good audition at University of Miami. I sent in a good audition tape and I got in. But the second I got down there, I was like, it's beautiful here.

There are a lot of beautiful people here. There's a lot of drugs here. Like, I'm not going to class. That's for suckers. I'm just going to beat myself up with these substances and, like, take myself out of my anxiety about being in a new place because I didn't want to admit it. But as someone with autism spectrum

and someone who had been numbing myself with chemicals and afraid of sensory overload, like I was happy. I loved partying at the time. I thought I did, but it was so overwhelming that it was my way of running away, not just in terms of running away from my pain, but like, I think it was kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy where I thought I couldn't make it work and I used the drugs as an escape, not just in terms of the chemical escape he gave me, but as an excuse for I didn't go to class because I got high,

I'm leaving because that's what I did. I used drugs not only as a way to escape my own mental bondage, but as a way to kind of run away from things that I thought I didn't deserve or thought I wasn't capable of doing. So yeah, the second I got there, I was like, this is not going to work. And I dropped out within a couple months. Yeah. Where do your folks fit into all of this? Like, what do they say? Are they mentioning anything to you? They picking up on it? They notice any of these behaviors, the substance use? So what's interesting is that my mom is also admitted alcoholic in recovery. And she got sober in 2011. So the most screwed up thing about this is that when I was in high school, she was not like partying with us, but she got to be.

to a point where I was basically throwing parties whenever she left and she'd come back to the house all dirty and me trying my best to clean it. But you can't get the smell of like grape dutch cigars and like cannabis and like spilled whiskey out. You just can't do that. There's no cleaning company that can do that. So she knew what I was doing. She was drinking a lot of the time. She's like, you might as well have kids over so like I can make sure it doesn't get out of control. So I would throw these parties and she would have her wine and occasionally she'd like come get a thing of the mixed drink we were doing. So we drank together and she didn't use drugs. Alcohol was her drug of choice, but like she hit her rock bottom emotionally, not as bad as

my rock bottom, but she did in 2011 and she got sober. She didn't go to treatment. She just like tapered down and did it on her own. But that accident happened when she was six, seven months sober because that was January of 2012 and she got sober in June of 2011. So she knew that I was an alcoholic. And I don't want to say she enabled me, but I think she was scared of losing the connection that she had with me because my parents.

got divorced when I was seven. And everybody got, like, I don't even want to say the word trauma because between like SV, like DV, like SADV, all that, like I'm not even on the continuum there. But I did witness my mom getting intensely emotionally abused by her boyfriend, a little bit of physical abuse too. My dad got progressively more and more distant because he was seeing a new woman in California. And he stayed in my hometown of D.C. till I graduated to his credit. But he was the kind of dude that like he tried all the drugs in the 60s. He was a hippie. And he was over in Vietnam, like as a reporter during the Vietnam War in the early 70s, and he went to an opium and, like, heroin den.

He tried it. And he's like, this isn't for me. And he threw it away. So he always thought that it was a discipline issue. He could have, like, three or four beers and then have nothing the next day and get high off work. So he always kind of saw it as like a moral failing. And he kind of turned it around a little in recovery. But his advice to me was always like, work hard, stop doing all this.

But they knew what I was doing. It's just as a manipulative addict who put. all of the effort that I should have put towards self-actualization and making a better life for myself and actually confronting my fears towards continuing this charade of like using but trying to conceal it from them. They didn't know the full extent until I really hit rock bottom like four years later after the crash. They knew, but I just spent so much time trying to convince them otherwise that they weren't ever able to like completely call me on it, even though they had differing understandings of the disease of addiction and they knew I was addicted.

Yeah. Do you think through that whole process you had yourself convinced that all that things weren't as bad as maybe they were? I think that I knew how bad they were, but I thought that it would be worse if I stopped. My whole thing was if people only knew how anxious I was, like honestly, the weirdest thing was before I got sober and put effort into like working the program that works for me and learning the tools of like acceptance, surrender and all of those good things that allow me to like, I'm not perfect damn far from it, but like actually address the underlying issues rather than run from them

with chemicals. I was convinced it was completely impossible. And my parents thought that I was belligerently drunk when I was actually hung over in stone cold sober because I was resentful. I was angry. I was belligerent. I was all of these things. And I was truly self-medicating in every sense. And when I wasn't high, it was when they thought I was high. When I was in withdrawal, they thought I was using because I was so lethargic. So it was weird. Like when I would actually try to make a change, that's when the consequences would start to show up

other than like getting drunk, the DUIs, the arrest for sure. But I kind of convinced myself, not that it wasn't bad, I knew it was horrible. And I knew I needed to change. But I did convince myself that the first time I went to rehab

after it really got bad, like after the crash, I went to San Francisco. And when my dad was saying, he relocated with his new wife. And I re-enrolled in a really cheap, school out there just to try to dodge consequences why I waited for my trial. And the one line I I hadn't crossed was opioids, but I got all my wisdom teeth removed at once. It was impacted. It was

major dental surgery. They didn't just give me novocane. Like they knocked me the heck out with like heavy anesthetic. And they told me I couldn't smoke. Couldn't smoke cannabis, couldn't smoke cigarettes, couldn't drink because like it was abrasive. Couldn't even like drink soda out of a straw because the clots would get removed and I get dry socket. But they gave me a big bottle of opioid pills and four blocks down from my student apartment out there was the second worst, and if you include Vancouver and Canada, maybe the third,

although they're pretty close, open-air drug market on the West Coast, which is the tender line, and now there are documentaries about it in the fentanyl crisis, and I was out there, like, before fentanyl hit when it was just, like, heroin and pills, but it took me years, like I said, that slow progression of getting a drink and a party

to, like, full-blown binge alcoholic, it took me, like, the same amount of weeks before I was dependent on opioids. Like I went from like popping one pill like for surgery to snorting multiple 30s to get out of bed within like five, six weeks. It was fast. And that's the point in which I realized that there were no delusions about that I needed to get sober.

Like at that point, there was no kind of joking with myself. But at that point I was so addicted that I didn't know how to stop. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And you hear that story a lot. I mean, same for me, man. I had an operation man.

You get a taste of the pills. There's painkillers. It kills the pain. It kills the emotional pain and everything else. And you feel comfortable. And then, yeah, the physical dependency kicks in. That's the same thing to have with me. These pills, I got them for surgery.

Then I got some more from a friend. And I had this box from a friend. And I took them every day, all day for a month. I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing. I just knew I felt good. And when I would run out, I would feel a little unwell until I actually ran out. And then I called a buddy of mine because I didn't know people

that were really into using drugs. And then I called a buddy mine. I'm like, dude, my legs are shaking. I'm really sweaty. Like, I'm not sick. I don't think I'm sick. And he's like, oh, it's withdrawal, right? Like, he's a veteran at this thing.

So for him, it was just like, oh, it's withdrawn. I'm like, okay, like, what do we do about this? He's like, oh, you have to get more. And then that's when the pursuit happened. For most people, too, the problem with the pills, they were readily available until they weren't. The price went through the roof and that heroin was cheaper and you could get it whenever you wanted to.

Does that relate to your story at all? Yeah, man. For the first six months, like I was out, they call it Pill Hill, Turk Street, Leavenworth, Hyde Street out in San Francisco. And, you know, I was getting decent grades at school, which is a crazy thing. Like, I was never functional, but like I was maintaining the things that I had to do to make my family think I was at least having some forward motion until I got back home. And what was crazy is I had only been in school now. Like, my friends were all about to be juniors in college. Like, I was 20 years old. And they were like multiple years in. But I got back and I was hanging my mom's porch and I pulled out like a pill that I brought back with me from San Francisco and my friend was like, oh, you're doing that too? And these are like preppy, you know, rugby lacrosse playing kids and they're all doing 30s too. And I was like, oh, it's on. And what was crazy is I had been the sketchy one for so long, but like it was a moment where we were like all at the same place again. It was like now they're speaking my drug language for lack of a better term. And it was just pills for a

minute. And they were expensive, but I hustled. I did XYZ. But then a friend of mine who was already a heroin addict asked me if I could get dope for him. And I knew that the dude I got my pills from could also get that. But I still had all these delusions, right? Like I was addicted to opioids, but I'm like, I'm an uptown pill dealer. I'm a private school like fiend. I'm a private school addict. So he gave me this money to get this dope. And I went with this guy to Baltimore, which is like, the tenderloin is crazy. But Baltimore is a different kind of like savage type deal. and I'm up here with this ex-con dude, and he's bumping, like, Scarface,

like that 90s Houston rapper on the stereo, and he pulls out the dope that he's got the smaller bag for my friend, but he's chopping stuff up, and he literally says to me, he's like, I got to know right now if you're not a snitch. I need to know you're not on papers, man. You need to do this. And he gives me this big line of it,

and he's like, and I've never done it before. And I realized it was exactly the same after that, and then it was just off to the races. Like the second I was forced to try it in this like, look, be a big guy for the boys' situation, it was just over. And I went to rehab for a month after that because every single thing I swore I would not do one out of the window, started pawning stuff, started selling my clothes to my friends, started stealing 20s out of like, you know, I'd already been stealing money for my family,

but like stealing from my friends when they weren't looking, stealing little things off of the street to pawn them, like, it got so real so quickly. But I still was not ready to stop when I went to rehab for the first time in late 2012. I wasn't ready for another three and a half years. But that's when I really knew. I was like, this is not private school vodka parties anymore, man. It's real. This is not a movie anymore.

Yeah. Wow. That's intense. So you went to the rehab. How do you get into the rehab? You wanted to go to it or was this someone else's idea? I did not want to go. My mom had this time, had been sober for a year and a half.

She was telling her friends what was going on. And then the second they heard opioids, they're like rehab. If he has a problem with opioids, he needs to go. because she didn't need rehab. So the first, she told me to go to certain, like, recovery events. If you know, you know, I don't talk about fellowship specifics because I don't want a tradition violation people getting on me for all that, but she told me to go to those. And, you know, I went and I was like, that's great that this works for these people.

I was under no illusion that I wasn't like them. I knew I was one of them, but I was like, this can't work for me. But I figured I'll go to rehab. I'll say all the things the counselors want me to say. I'll go to a sober house and intensive outpatient if they want me to, just so. so I can save, but my goal was to do that, get a job, and save up money so I could use. I didn't want to stop. I went through withdrawal. I went through everything I needed to get a clean slate, but my intention going in there was to use on the other side. And I did.

The crazy thing about it is I was so egotistical and so delusional. I knew I was an addict, but I put so much effort into going back to school, managing consequences, doing all the things that my family wanted me to do, that when I did use, it was controlled for the first several months. Like some people like, oh, if I used once, it's going to be like, that wasn't the case for me, but here's the funny thing. I was able to control it, but I was absolutely miserable in doing so. Like I would have one pill and the entire night I would just be obsessed about trying to stop myself having the next. And then after a couple months of doing that, I realized, okay, I can control this, but there's no point. Like, this is not enjoyable for me. And so then I started using the way I wanted

to. And it got pretty, I mean, I'm not going to drug a log too much. because you know the people out there, they know I don't, but the best way I can put it, man, it went and I thought it couldn't get any worse from those like Baltimore trap houses and like dude with a gun on his way saying, do this or I'm kicking you out of the car or worse. Like every consequence you can think of, I did not ever shoot anybody, but anything else that you can name abscesses, every single drug, every single route of administration, tar, fentanyl, everything. I got to the point where I was walking around, nodding out on the sides of buildings, picking cigarettes out of the gutter, Lansing abscesses, like, because I don't want my family

to take me to the hospital, having seizures the one time I did go with my family of the hospital when I was in withdrawal. My dad saw me have a seizure when they had to load me up with Ativan, stop me foaming at the mouth. And I still didn't think that I wanted to stop. Because again, it's like that delusion of if they only knew how much pain I was in, they wouldn't just get out of my way. bankroll my habit. They would pay for me getting the dope that I needed in a small amount. And I didn't really want to get clean even though I was in and out of outpatient rehab, MAT, which I support it, fully support MAT recovery. It never worked for me. I just used it as a crutch between binges and trying to convince my family. But there was one day in early 2016,

I had been abusing opioids for four and a half years. And I got what I thought was all the drugs I needed. Ball of crack, almost a ball of dope, a couple bundles up in New York City, and I shot up, and I did not feel a thing. I got physically high, but I did not get emotionally high, and that's what scared me. Those same voices I've been trying to dampen out for years, came back with a vengeance, no matter how much dope, crack, liquor, anything, K, nitrous, whatever. I put on it, it could not be silenced. And that's when I knew that I had to get sober for myself because my solution had stopped working. So I called the treatment center with the needle in my arm, man, but I called him. And I'm grateful I did because at that point, it was beyond any consequence. It was beyond my

family anything. I knew that if I did not get sober, that I could not keep using. Wow, dude. Was it June 13, 2016? Yeah, that's my sober day. Was that the next day after you made the call? Did things happen that quick or no? No, what happened is I went up to New York to use my friend who I think I've been in contact with him for the past year. But the last I checked, he was like three years sober too, which is a beautiful thing. But I was up in New York. I had stolen some money from my family, like, stolen some money from some people, made some licks happen. And like, I went up and I used in this motel room and then I came back. The crazy thing is, I used in that motel room over the weekend when I was supposed to be going outpatient. And I knew I was going to test hot. So I came in,

I was going to be honest with him. But before I did, they had a meeting with me. And it was so serendipitous that this happened right after I had that moment of the dope not working because they're like they had a prescription for the MAT medication in their hand. They're like, we know you're just coming here to get this, man. We don't want you to die. So here's a 90 day full strength prescription. Here's a doctor who will refill it for you. We know this is helping you. We don't want you to die. But like, we cannot have you nodding out in groups anymore. We can't have you relapsing every time and having people see you coming back. Like, you need to go to inpatient treatment. And at first I was like, know, but then it hit me and they gave me a card for the treatment center and then I called them

and I was like, let's set this up. And I got my family on board. And during the intake, because most treatment centers, they have to hear from the person themselves. They won't drag you kicking and screaming. So when I said, I'm ready to go. I told them what was going on. I was shooting up when I was doing it. And I'm so glad I did, man, because after that intake, it was five days later, the van picked me up and took me to central Pennsylvania, Amish country to this place called the retreat and it was the right place, the right time, and my ears were finally open. I was ready to listen. And I know earlier on you talked about this mirror, right, like the thing not being able to look at yourself. And there's one story which even though June 13th, 2016, is my sobriety date,

I like to say this is the day that I actually got sober because I did something really stupid. I had been unintentionally celibate for the past several years before that because I didn't care about the opposite sex. I didn't care about girls. I was married to the needle. I was not taking care of myself. But, you know, I met someone in treatment who was equally beaten down and broken as I was. Looking back, I was so selfish. I should have just let them be. But I needed something still outside of myself.

I was grasping at anything, even if it wasn't a drug, to, like, make me feel a piece. And now that the drugs were gone and they had ripped me off of, like, my substance, I hooked up with this person in there. But then someone got jealous and told her a rumor about me that made her not want to talk to me. And when she didn't want to talk to me, I was like 14 days in, completely detox. I was still a little sick, but not even that bad, but I decided to leave. And so I packed my bag. I told my family I wanted to go to another treatment center, but really, I just wanted to take the remaining money that I had, go to Kensington and Philly, which was like a couple bus stops

away from Central PA and just go end it. But I sat in this office at this treatment center and I'm telling, you know, the treatment counselor who oversees all that against medical advice, leaving stuff, I'm going to go to another treatment center. She's heard all before. She's like, yeah, yeah, giving me the same half-lited skeptical smile that countless treatment. Center, family members, people from fellowships have given me before when I say I'm going to do XYZ, but I'm planning to do something else and they can see right through me. But I'm still justifying it to myself until I see a mirror. It might even been a mirror. It might have just been like a reflective surface, but it was right on the desk. And I saw myself, I saw my scraggly beard,

my gaunt cheek bones, my hallow sunken eyes, not getting any sleep from withdrawal. And I saw a path for my future that I didn't like. And it was either death, it was jail, or it was a fate that I believe is worse than that than chasing that high I'm not getting anymore. And I knew it was going to be hard for me to move forward in recovery. And not just without drugs, but without a guarantee that just because I got sober, I was going to have romantic success, career success, life success, creative success. I was going to immediately find the same fulfillment in an instant gratification way that the drugs once gave me. Like, there was no guarantee. And I needed to accept that. But what I realized in that chair looking at that mirror is I'm afraid to look at myself, but if I don't look at myself in every sense, examine what I'm doing,

examine how the drugs are killing me, examine how a better life does exist in recovery and run towards that truth, instead of literally running away from it by leaving the treatment center, metaphorically running away from it with the substances I'm putting in my vein in my mouth, it's going to be 10 times harder. And that was the revelation that is now tatted on my arm. It's the ending of my column that I write every week about recovery. And it's keep moving forward, run towards the truth, and don't quit before the miracle happens. Because I wanted to quit.

I wanted to run away. And I wanted to run away from the truth. And it wasn't like a moral thing. It wasn't like, oh, I need to put on my bootstraps and get sober because that's the right thing to do. No, it was because I knew it was going to be harder to run away from my feelings and myself through dope than it would be to chase recovery with the same tenacity. And so ever since that day, that's what I've done.

There have been hard days, but I've done everything that I can to chase that truth with the same feverish intensity that I chased a fix when I was sick. Wow, that's heavy. So you stayed then. Did you stay? I did. Yeah, okay. Good. And then where do you go from here? So this is a 30-day program? Do you go to sober living? It was a 28 to 30-day program. It was 31 days for me. The thing about it was they didn't tell you when you were going to leave. And that was a cool approach because they had tried that. But then kids would like line up dope through their phone calls and like they didn't want people. knowing. And so they set up a recovery house for me in D.C. because they knew I had family support there. The outpatient treatment program that had told me I needed to go to treatment, welcomed me back, and I'm grateful they did. So I had the support, but more than that, I had the support of my mom. And up until this point, I want to say she'd been enabling me, but she didn't know.

But over the course of the time I was in treatment, I thought I had cleaned out all my stashes, but I didn't. And there was a big stash of paraphernalia, bundle bags, track bags, like she found it, riggs, spoons, and she knew everything. I could not lie to her anymore. It was plainest day what was going on. She knew it was bad. She knew I was an Ibiatic, but she didn't know it was that dirty, that real. And so I met with her the day I got back to the treatment center. She took me to a Chipotle to get some food. And I'm telling, oh, it was so great. Like, I went to treatment, this music therapist, like, you know, I'm doing the fellowship stuff now. And she's like, great. What are you going to do to keep it? And I was like, whoa, because my mom had always been

this incredibly. And she still was, supplant. just in a different way. But after she said that and said, you need to get a job, you need to like make your recovery program more than just going to treatment, you need to have a purpose. She lined this stuff out for me. But then she did something amazing. And again, I'm not going to talk fellowship specifics. But the language I speak is probably enough for people to know, like, what's going on and what time it is. So she was also a member of that thing. And she took me to a place where guys that were not in my family that could do stuff that she could not do, could show me how to live sober life one day at a time. And I met a wonderful person who I had nothing in common

with who showed me a lot of the foundational blocks of that program that worked for me. And I made it a daily thing. I went out of my way to not just like go to treatment on time, hand in job applications, but make recovery front and center. Before I went into treatment, these kids that I used to make music with like hip hop music would had told me they had just gotten a development deal. And one of the other things that got me into rehab was I had taken some time away from music because I was just using. And I used to make music with these kids. But when I was using and nodding out in the bathroom, they were like, nah, like, same way the treatment center, they're like, we can't have you like blood dripping down your arm. It shows, man. That's not a good look. When they heard that I was trying to get sober, they're like,

you can come be part of this deal. But when I got out, I was like, nah, that can't happen. Because they didn't use dope. They used crack, but they partied. And like, I was like, I can't be around that. So it was hard pill to swallow. But I made the decision to put my creative aspirations to the side. for the first two and a half years, focused on getting the trust in my family back, focused on work in my program. I got a job in the service industry, and what's weird is, I worked from busboy to server to bartender. And the crazy thing is, the first two years of my recovery, I became a bartender when I was a year and three months sober, did it until I was three and a half years sober in different capacities. I learned so many lessons of how to stay sober

behind a bar because it was literally in my hand. I could not run from it. Some people are like, I got to have boundaries. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. But for me, I was the type of person where I knew that if I tried to hide from it in any way, that it would come to find me. Because the plug called me several times. I deleted his number. I did everything. Like, found a way to find me.

So even though alcohol was not my drug of choice at the time, being around it, being around people who more than drunk were resentful, were anxious, I don't want to diagnose them as alcoholics, but exhibiting those traits, both the bartenders I work with and the people in front. So that really helped me. I got a position at the same treatment center once I was two years sober, like, bringing in people to the therapy groups they would have as a peer counselor. And my life had gotten to a really beautiful place, build back to trust with my family. You know, my mom was one of my biggest inspirations of recovery.

We're going on vacations together. I'm seeing my dad. My dad gave me the keys to a house. He built with his bare hands, this little cabin up in Vermont, which is the reason why I'm where I am now. And the one thing I hadn't done was become an open advocate for recovery. I didn't know how I wanted to do it. But I started making music about recovery.

and I didn't think anybody was going to want to hear it. I just didn't do it like the cloud-chasing drug music I did back in the day. I just did it passionate, like combining my love for piano with hip-hop, which is something I could never do when I was high. I couldn't conceive playing piano and rapping at the same time, but I was just doing it in-between shifts at the restaurant and at the Truman Center. But I like to think that whether you call it God, universal order, just math, science, like whatever works.

I like to think it's all the same thing, like whatever your perspective is on it. But the way my life worked, I got the chance to meet this person up in Vermont near the house my dad gave me, who owned a studio up here, and I played a song that I had written about my addiction and recovery, and we started working together. I moved up here in 2019,

and I've been working in the field of recovery advocacy, journalism, and music in various capacities ever since. I get to write about recovery through a weekly column, through my journalism aspect. I've gotten to cover various recovery organizations and the work they're doing. I have a weekly radio show about recovery that I partner with the station to do,

and I make reels and content about recovery every day. That's the most recent thing. I only started doing that last November, but every single thing I do in my life, the same way everything I used to do in active addiction was to run away from my pain is to make every effort that I can to run towards it and to celebrate recovery

and integrate principles of recovery and the program that works for me in my life. The same way I'm mainline dope, active addiction. I'm mainline recovery today metaphorically, man. And life is beautiful. I'm a dad. I'm a full-time worker at my job. I'm an advocate. And more than that, I like to say, I'm just a dude in recovery, trying my best to stay alive one day at a time. And life has blessed me with that, man. And that's the beautiful thing about recovery. When we're on our most hopeless,

I like to think, our most anxious, our most afraid. If we can take that and figure a way to flip the script and channel that same anxiety and to chase the recovery, we can't do it, man. I'm a low bottom crack cocaine, I be heroin addict. And I stand here today, seven years sober and clean one day at a time. grateful that that was true for me. Beautiful, man. Beautiful. And I feel like, too, when we first started, too, you were mentioning that you're expecting. I feel like we skated right over that. We got to get back to that.

That's incredible. Oh, dude. Like, she's four and a half months in now. I'm not going to post about, like, if people listen to this and they want to start, maybe that's going to be, I want to announce this. She wants to wait until our next ultrasound. I have a 14-month-old kid right now. My beautiful son, Jude, he was born on June.

7th of 2022 and we are expecting a second me and my future wife we're working on a ring and all those things in the works yeah man being a dad in recovery first of all i thought that all the damage i had done to my body would make me incapable of being a dad second of all i never thought that anybody would want to co-parent with me because of my past relationship issues trauma is like addiction all that but watching my kid grow and learning all the lessons just like i did in early i see a lot of parallels between early parenthood and early recovery and a lot of the lessons that i learned of like acceptance, detachment, surrender, but at the same time, like awareness and gratitude, I have to work those principles every day as a dad, man, because if I don't, I'm going to get

mired the same way I got mired in those cravings and that stress and that resentment and early recovery. And so it's kind of the same way I said, I get to see my childhood again through being a dad. I get to see my recovery again anew and relearn all those principles. So it's been a beautiful experience, man. I'm so excited to have a second kid. I have an incredible, wonderful partner. Shout out to Alex, the mom of my kid, and the love of my life. She's not in recovery, but she goes to therapy. She's got her own issues and she's very supportive, man. So, I mean, I'm gushing about it. I love being a dad, man. It's something I never expected, but I cherish it as much as I cherish my recovery. Yeah, dude, I'm with you too. I've got three,

three under five. So I'm awesome. Yeah, being a dad is just beautiful. And it's beautiful that we get to do this stuff. I never envisioned a life like this, honestly, when I was growing up and when I was stuck in the addiction part. I never envisioned a normal life for myself. I mean, I was a convicted felon at 18. I mean, I got kicked out of college, lost my first department, destroyed every relationship basically that I had, got deported from the U.S., went to prison. So I never envisioned having like a quote unquote normal life. Like I don't really know what that is, but like having kids and, you know, that stuff. So I'm extremely grateful, man, and I can see it on your face that you are too. What's the deal with the music before we wrap up,

Ben, if you don't mind, asking, man. What's your first? favorite song, like, of your music. I've seen a few of them. What are your thoughts there? What's that all about? So I'm going to try my best to wrap this up and micro-encapsulate in like three or four minutes because there's a lot. But thank you for asking, man. I made music for years, glorifying addiction. I just did the long-form content on my Facebook page about, you know, the fact that I got to work with Matt Miller and more than any like name drops of, you know, making the song with him and whatever flex move, that is the fact that he passed away from addiction when I was two and a half or sober and looking to like find a new way to use music to tell the story of my recovery

was sadly one of the primary inspirations for me is taking the moments I had with him in my active addiction not just with him but all the people I work with who struggle with addiction so to that end it's the two sides of my personality musically it's classical piano and hip-hop I play piano and I rap at the same time and the project that I work on with my producer up here Dr. Joshua Sherman, who owns Old Mill Road recording and Old Mill Road Media that has the magazines that I work at. The first project we put out was called Clean. And we have a column called Clean. We have Clean Jams, the radio station. So all these like inter-institutional collaborations here in Vermont work for Clean. But recently for the Reels, in addition to dropping

little segments from Clean here and there, I've been recording weekly verses and dropping them as reels just to keep like my toolbox sharp. And I just started it for the same reason. I started making music in early recovery. It wasn't because I thought anybody would listen. It's cathartic for me. Like, I like writing verses about my struggles and addiction and the life I've found in recovery. And it's just 16 bars every week, but I'm about to release a compilation of them. Hopefully, once I get clearance from my team and Spotify and YouTube and TuneCore, Distrocade, whatever we do, to put those verses together. I've got like 26 so far. We're going to take the first 25, and we're going to make them into a tape where they, like, seamlessly integrated to the best of our ability,

because it's been so amazing building this platform, like the same way I didn't expect to have community, to have success in recovery. And I say this on all my lives, I never expected the community online because when I got sober, like recovery reels, recovery, there were a few content creators, but you had to like dig to find them

because there was no algorithm showing you stuff. So when I first saw recovery reels last year, man, like Quinn Lapeer, like Rachel Elizabeth, like Jimmy McGill, like all of these awesome content, Like your content, man. Like I saw it and I was like, whoa, this is epic. There's recovery music. There's recovery reels.

And just being able to like use the content I've already created as the base. Like the music is inspiration for my weekly music reels. The weekly column is inspiration for my storytelling reels. And meet awesome folks like you who are dedicated to like telling stories of recovery and spotlighting that. It just gives me so much more inspiration to keep going with my artistic pursuits and my recovery. because for me, the music more than anything, more than a view count,

follower count, any of that, it's a way for me to cathartically intertwine my passion with my recovery. And that's why I tell people, whether you're a carpenter, whether you're a stonemason, whether you're a doctor, lawyer, fast food clerk, whatever.

There are always ways to apply whatever program of recovery you have and the principles through that through what you love to do or what you're doing. And that's music for me, man. So clean is the album, clean jams on, W.EQX, W.EQX.com. Thursday nights at 11 is the show, the clean column in the Vermont News Guide, the weekly music reels, the clean verses on all platforms, all for YouTube, TikTok,

Facebook, Instagram, all the handles on those. But more than any of that, man, just making music and telling stories of recovery. And there's so many amazing recovery artists, Kaliazhi, real young swag. Dax has great recovery content. There's so many people out there doing in amazing ways, man. I'm blessed to be able to be part of that community. And to be here with you and your content is freaking incredible too, man. It's an honor to be here. Thanks, Benjamin. Thanks, buddy.

Yeah, man, it's so true. There is so many people out there that when I first started this six years ago on Instagram, there was like three of us who did stuff. And then now it's, yeah, it's so many people, it's incredible. Do you have any bars? Is that what it's called bars to share with us? Like off the top of your head or no? Or is that asking too?

Yeah, you know what? I'm not in a freestyly mood right now, but I am about to just go off. the top of my head in a freestyle, like it's 2011 and I'm at a party, because every day in recovery is a party, man. And let's just go for it. Hey. You know, I'm here, politic and on the sober podcast, working through it all as the menacing thoughts passed. Think about the way it used to be out in the streets when I was wallowed into feet, swallowing my feet because I'm taking all my shoes and crouching over for a 30 that I used to give the dealers through when my life was so dirty. I used to think that I'd be so ashamed in this game that was laying when my brain

was infested with the pain, but now I'm chilling and speaking out about recovery. I'm insane. I love myself, but I'm in love with D. Forward motion that my life achieving through actualization, no procrastination, sober nation. Every day we lacerating all cutting through all the past issues. I don't need to cry, but if catharticraft tissue be the way it's gravitating, levitating, escalating through the way I'm never going back to self-medicate.

Wow. Mic drop. Thanks, dude. You know, that's a little throwaway, man. That's just, you know, me preverse and associate in little things. But I used to be so scared to do that, man. Just throw stuff together. But I got to power through that fear.

Is it the best freestyle ever? No, but it's the truth. It's where I'm at today as a tire down in recovery. And that's what it is, man. Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you so much, dude. I'll put all the links to your networking stuff in the show notes. So if anybody wants to check that out your music or your Facebook or anything like that,

I'll be sure to add all those links in the show notes. Is there anything you'd like to end with? Yes. It's the same thing I end all my lives with, and thank you so much for giving me the prompt. One of the hardest things about moving forward in recovery when I was an active addiction was that on a certain level, I didn't think I deserve to be sober. If you're listening to this and you're struggling under an early recovery or an active addiction, you do deserve to be sober.

I don't care if you've been Narcan 100 times. I don't care if you're in and out of jail. You're on the 40th treatment center, out of pocket your family pain. you deserve to be sober and a second, third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth chance. And please just know that if you think I have too much fear, I have too much anxiety, too much trauma, too much pain, everybody's different. And I don't want to gloss anything over, but I firmly believe that if we channel that same anxiety and pain into chasing purpose and life and recovery, our whole life can change.

And though you don't think that anxiety and fear has ever to go away. And it hasn't completely gone away from me. It doesn't matter because the life that I have found using it as the fuel to work. work towards a better day is infinite, just like the infinite quest for dope and the infinite energy I put towards that. I put that towards recovery and life is beautiful, even though there are still challenges. And the challenges are beautiful because the same inner voice of turmoil in my head that pushed me towards those blocks and those bottles and those bundles pushed me towards the truth

and recovery. So one day at a time, we got this. And I love you and I believe me. You have nobody's told you that today. Love it, man. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, man. Big love.

Huge shout out to Ben for coming and sharing his story on the podcast. Look, I'll drop Ben's information and way to contact him if you want to say thank you. In the show notes below, you can message him on Instagram. I'll put his Facebook in there too. But thank you, everybody, for the continued support. Look, if you're enjoying the show and you haven't left a review yet, head over to Spotify, head over to Apple, drop a written review. That way, when new people are checking out the show, maybe they'll give it a chance.

I really appreciate, too, everybody's comments and messages over on Instagram. Instagram supporting the show, saying that they're enjoying it. That is, it's helping them in their recovery and sobriety. I never expected that type of response, to be honest with all of you. I never expected it to have that impact on people. But I'm grateful that it does. You know, we're putting in a lot of work over here, and it's really nice to hear that it's being helpful for people.

And the people that are sharing their stories are making a difference. That's what this is all about, paying it forward. So thank you for your support. And I'll see you on the next one.