Sober Motivation: Sharing Sobriety Stories - Mike's consumption of alcohol nearly took his life. After being in a coma for three weeks, Mike was given a second chance.

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

On this episode, we have Mike aka Jersey Mike. Early on in life, Mike struggled to find himself and where he belonged so he gravitated towards acting out., a rebel type lifestyle. Mike also reveals his experiences with substance abuse and his struggles towards recovery. His journey is further complicated by a separation, health complications, dysfunctional relationships, and personal traumas. Several weeks after Mike noticed his eyes turned yellow, his mother called an ambulance to his house to see if he was doing okay. Mike’s health was in very very bad shape and he struggled to accept the help. He is extremely grateful for another chance at life and is making his best effort to make it something he is proud of. This is Mike’s story on the Sober Motivation podcast. --------------- Follow Mike on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jerzeymike/ Check out SoberBuddy Community App: https://yoursoberbuddy.com Follow Sober Motivation on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sobermotivation/ Donate to support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sobermotivation

Welcome back to season three of the Suburmotivation podcast. Join me, Brad, each week as my guests and I share incredible and powerful sobriety stories. We are here to show sobriety as possible, one story at a time. Let's go. On this episode, we have Mike, aka Jersey Mike. Early on in life, Mike struggled to find himself in where he belonged in this world, so he gravitated towards acting out a rebel-type lifestyle. Mike also revealed his experiences with substance abuse and his struggles towards recovery.

His journey is further complicated by separation, health complications, dysfunctional relationships, and personal traumas. Several weeks after Mike noticed, his eyes turned yellow, his mother called an ambulance to his house to see if he was doing okay. Mike's health was in very, very bad shape and he struggled to even accept the help at this point. Mike is extremely grateful for another chance at life and is making the best effort to make it something he is proud of. This is Mike's story on the Subur Motivation podcast. Hey, how's it going, everyone? Brad here. Welcome back to another episode.

Before we jump right in to Mike's story, I just wanted to give a shout out to a few of my friends over at Sober Buddy, who are also big fans of the show and their milestones they're reaching. We got my friend Heather with 11 months of surprise. incredible job. Keep kicking butt. We've also got Noel, who is a massive fan of the podcast. Thank you for that, Noel. Four months. Noel joined Sober Buddy very early on in his journey for months. Incredible job. And we've also got Ellie, a fellow podcaster with 19 months of sobriety. She does a podcast in Spanish and shares her story and other people's stories

and the experience that she's having and what she's learning throughout the sober journey. So thank you, everybody. Keep up the great work. And if you're looking for an incredible community to get plugged into to get some support, be sure to check us out on Sober Buddy. I do three meetings a week over there,

and I would love to see you. There's a bunch of podcast fans there. Now let's get to the episode. Welcome back to another episode of the Sober Motivation podcast. Today I've got my buddy Mike with us. Mike, how are you? Good. What's up, Brad. It was good, man. Not a whole lot, man. Hanging out with you, dude, nowhere else I'd rather be.

Thanks for being willing to jump on here and share your story with everybody. Yes, man. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. So what were things like for you growing up? Crazy. Crazy. Crazy in a come. I had a nice upbringing. My parents did their best. As a parent now, that's all I can say we can do is our best. And, you know, looking back, my parents, they tried their best. But I had a tough upbringing as far as just not having a lot of male figures around in my life.

I was raising a household of women, my mother, grandmother, sister. And when I started a hit, puberty, 12, 13 years old, I started out of her tub kind navigating, you know, through school and being that age with having lack of a little male figure. That's when I started to kind of get involved in things that were outside of my upbringing. So your dad wasn't in the home? He was in the home, but my dad was very much, I would think, like a stereotypical dad back then. He worked a lot, and when he got out of work, he'd go to the bars on a daily basis. It was a bar kind of lifestyle. And then he'd get home, two, three in the morning, go to sleep and be gone.

I would see my dad glimpses of him maybe once or 20. twice a week. Maybe sometimes it'd be like twice a month, I'd see him just because our schedule was conflicted with school and his lifestyle. So he was just never really around. I think at the time, a lot of dads were doing that. It was pretty common. I'd go over my friend's houses and, you know, their dads were out working or still out from work. And it would be late eight, nine o'clock. You know, dads were running around socializing in a different way than I think people do today. Yeah, even way off topic of the story here. I think there's a big transition in today.

And I mean, your life with your kids, I see that, I hear about that. And my life and with my kids compared to the way things were, it's a lot more of hands-on, it seems today, which is so cool. So that's interesting. Where did you grow up? I grew up in New Jersey, born and raised in Jersey. And around 7th grade was when my mom and dad started to suffer issues in their marriage from my father's lifestyle, you know, which was just being a provider, very hands-off. He was just not in the picture. So they started to have issues and our house actually burned down.

It was like a big crazy thing. Seventh grade, my house burned down. And we were jumping around with living with family members and then back at my father's old place. And my mom saw an opportunity where we had a house in Florida. Then my father had invested in years earlier. And she was like, I want to move there. I want to get away from your dad. And we're just going to take some town apart, which kind of crushed me at that age,

12 years old. I was like going into eighth grade. I had all these friends I grew up with that. I thought I'd know the rest of my life to continue on school in high school. And, you know, we moved. And when I got to to Florida. My dad wasn't in the picture already enough. Before in Jersey, just seeing him once in a while when we got to Florida, I made him see him like once a month, once every two months he'd fly out, come spend some time with us during this like break that him and my mom took. And that's when things took a turn to the worst that year because his presence was no longer in the home. I started like really acting out. And at that point, the little whoopens, my mom,

used to give me, you know, I was 13, they didn't work anymore. And my dad just wasn't around. And there was no discipline, no male force in the house to discipline me. And I just started to wreak havoc and do what I wanted to do drugs and started experimenting. Kind of out of rebelling. Just stick everybody's shit, everybody's outer problems, creating a complete chaotic world for me at 12 years old set me, you know, that kind of pace of life. Yeah. something like that.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's a tough spot to be in, especially with the transition, your friends, you leave them behind, right? Now you're in a new place. And I'm sure the culture and everything is the same in Florida, in a sense, in New Jersey, but there's still some differences, right? I made a big move when I was younger. It was way earlier than that, but I made a move from up here in Canada down to Texas with my mom.

She was a single mom. I have a twin brother, single mom of twins. And it was so hard, right? because people had already established their friend groups, and they had already kind of established that from the neighborhoods and the people they hung out with. And you're the new person. You're the new person in town, right? So you can do one of two things. You can do really well academically and fit in with people and find your people that way. That was never. I never did well that way. Or you could be so uncomfortable in your own skin and kind of act out and act out in different ways.

That's the way I, that's the only way I knew how to really fit in and make things make sense. And then it comes with the whirlwind of problems, right? So my guess here, Mikey, is there's not there. Your father's kind of not at the place there. And I share a lot of that story too. I didn't see my pops at all really growing up. But then the discipline starts to come down from the school system in a sense, right? And external stuff.

That was my experience anyway. What about you? What was it like for you. What she said was absolutely right. It's tough in that position because that time I coped as well. I started acting out. And it was hard to figure out how to like react to what seemed like my outside life falling apart. And the only thing I could do was like puffing up.

And in the sense of toughening and up came that acting out shit. And Florida was a completely different. It was a little the same, but it was a completely different world than New Jersey. I feel like it's in comparison. When I got to Florida, cocaine was like big. And it was big in the sense of like freshman year big. I got there eighth grade and it was like normal drinking smoking weed shit. And that in the in its innocence going my eighth grade graduation party, I went, got shit face, smoke weed.

And I felt horrible about it. I was like, oh my God, I'm such a bad person. I can't believe I did all this stuff. I had all these air program sayings coming back in my head. Oh man, my scramble day again. I'm doing bad and all this stuff. And it was just in the tentative sense, the freshman year. And at that point, I hadn't been keeping my grades up.

That was something I always consistently did to kind of keep my mother's spirits up. So the school system thing, I was getting in fights. And I was definitely starting to make a reputation for myself or someone that was getting in trouble. But I kept my grades up. I did very well in school. So I let that speak for itself. So my mother would always let me go out because even though she might tell me, me I couldn't go do shit. I still had respect at home. So I earned my way of being out there

on the streets hanging out by getting my good grades and keeping my mom happy. It made me feel good that my mother was like still proud, but now I had this double life. Then now I'm like going out and doing whatever that I want. I get home on a Friday. My grades would be A's and B's and then I'd have a bag of Coke in my sock leading the house, which my mother caught onto him. She pulled me out a school freshman year and put me in a Catholic school and in Daytona Beach, Florida in efforts to try to get me out of that mess. But that was a big mistake. I knew the school I was going to, I had kids with a lot of money there. And I was like, it was going to be a great time. That was my third high school. It was like, again, cocaine was the big thing. Drinking wasn't even that big. I used to go

to parties and people were giving beer and I take Simpson's shit and I'd leave the cans aside and pretend And like I lost my beer. I didn't enjoy alcohol. And I had a crazy time with that. And it started to get into shit like stealing, doing like bad habits, like real nasty stuff started to come out where we were stealing at school. I got in trouble for stealing at school at a somebody's backpack that was a friend of mine and my buddies. And there were words exchanged. I got suspended and got on AOL and I started making threats to the person. And they printed out there. the threat I made, which back then was like in the late 90s. And they baker acted me.

It was a whole like a swat team. It was the first time I had rented the psychiatric unit. Daytona Beach police showed up at my house while I'm watching Blymeet's world, you know, with my sister hanging out, making all life's normal. And then it becomes a lot of team like boom, do you have a gun? You should see all their stuff and they brought me in for a mental evaluation for four days. And then when I got out there, everything was okay. I started my like a run on taking medications at that time they thought,

prescribing me different things. It was like the 90s. They had an answer with everything with the pill. They're like, we'll give you this. You tried feeling better, tried this antidepressant. And my mom was so embarrassed. She was out of here. We're back to Jersey.

Took me back to New Jersey. She was so embarrassed about the whole swatting thing. I got back to New Jersey, went to more ice force. So I just, it was consistently molding. My mother was always trying to run from the problem. She always started a new location with fix what was going on with me. me and that wasn't a case. So it just ran through high school like that, you know, graduated.

But very much in the party sense and rebelling. I didn't have this like depressed, self-destructive shit going on that started to come later in life at a high school. In 2006, a cousin of mine passed away that just, it just rocked my fucking world. Everything went from partying. You know, I was partying. at that time still, almost four years out of high school and I was still a bum living at my mother's place, partying. And my cousin passes away and everything changed. Life changed as I knew it. And now alcohol became my best friend. It was where I could go drop all my sorrows off and just leave. And that's when the fucking downward spiral with alcohol completely took over my life and just stayed in the

background for years to come. Wow. So you get a, you finished high school, which is good, which is really good back in Jersey. Yeah, it sounds like wherever you go there you are. It's like that old expression, right? You can kind of change wherever you want to go. But if you don't do that internal work, then you're still going to be the person that shows up at the place, right? And you finish high school. So you're at mom's place. You're just kind of kicking it here and you're this is your late teens, early 20. Hey, man, I was there too, right? I was there too, right? I was out of my parents' house pretty early, but, I mean, we were just kicking it, buddy. I didn't see anything wrong with it back then, though.

Like at first, I didn't, you know what I mean? Like, looking back now, it's, oh, man, you know, what the heck, right? But at the time, I don't know how you felt about it, but, I mean, I thought this was what life was about, right? We were kicking it every night. We were going to parties. We knew a ton of people. I mean, everybody knew us in this little town of 30,000, and a couple of the bigger towns over. We were just connected.

I just thought it was the coolest thing. And when I look back now, connecting the dots. It was so great because I never really had to look at myself. You know, I mean, we were just constantly drinking, constantly partying, constantly escaping life and the emotions. And I just couldn't wait to get off work, hopping the shower, have a beer while the boys waited in the living room and us just to, you know, run off again every single night, man, for years.

Like, that's what we did. What was that like for you, though? Did you realize the road that you were going down early on? No. It felt just the way you described. It felt like this was what life was kind of. I actually even got chills when you described everything because that's exactly how it was for me. It was like this was the way life was supposed to be.

You graduated and to me, I tried the college thing. I didn't have the patience for it. And I started doing like jobs here and there with my cousins and doing different things. But it was all about going out and hanging out every single night, every night. And I did that for years, man. Whether it be going out on the off nights and then it'd be hanging. and out playing video games, so can we play in Halo, watching shows. It was like a frat kind of life outside even to college.

It just cycled, and I thought it was normal. I thought this was like what your early 20s, you know, was supposed to be like this, everything was okay. And I didn't see any harm in it until when my cousin passed. Then I started feeling now I'm like, this is fucked up. Of course, I had when I'm probably like a good six month binge after. after he died, that was just every day. I was drunk from morning till night.

And I tried hanging out with friends and they would turn into blackouts and fist fights and shit. And friends didn't want to hang out with me anymore. They were like, you're a drunk. You're not even fun to be around anymore. My house was like the party house. They were scared to hang out with me because I'd ruin everybody in that kind of drinking that I had started. And that was the first time in my life that I was like, something is different. here than it used to be where shit was fine.

And that's when it started to hit me. Yeah. So that's in it. That's in 2006, the blackouts and stuff. I don't have a ton of experience with that, but a couple of times I did. It was, it was embarrassing, man. You know, it was having the stories recanted back about the, you know, my operation during those times.

Yeah, it was rough. And I can imagine if that's something you're frequenting, you lose control and you don't remember what's going on. It's a scary spot to be. So, Mikey, and it's, so 2006, you know, popping into two, I mean, you're saying, too, you picked up on it there that something was a little bit different with the way you were drinking. What the heck does that look like? What does that dialogue look like with yourself?

I'm assuming, I don't know if you told anybody, but you have that internal conversation. I think we all go through that too, right? We have that internal conversation. Hey, I know that this is not probably the best thing for me. I'm definitely a lead. I was having that conversation with me on a daily basis. And I felt like I was in such a negative place. I just kind of embraced it.

I go further and further into it. While being aware, I'm here blacking out. I'm cursing out people that love me and care about me. I'm taking like Xanax and Kalanapins for anxiety while mixing it with the alcohol. I'm talking about these nights blacked out. It's like you can hurt somebody physically and remember anything up and wake up the next day, feeling like complete shit. Like life is horrible and I would immediately run from that spotlight of accountability.

Like I wake up and see family members that I, people that I hurt their feelings, friends, all of this shit and I go drink again. If people wanted to reach out to me, they could if they didn't. Maybe when I was drunk enough, I'd reach out to them and apologize or kind of somewhat, you know, finesse my kind of accountability by also stuble. not accepting any responsibility that it's alcohol doing it. Hey, sorry, you know, I'm going through a lot, all of this shit. Because that was, but the alcohol just started to take a force of me that made me so aggressive

and such a release of horrible energy, I just got stuck in that place. I kind of embraced that shit. I kind of was happy there. It felt good. I almost felt like I didn't care what happened to me. If a car hit me, a car hit me. If someone pulled a gun on me in some situation. and then that's what happened.

I was okay with every scenario as long as I was just drunk and not dealing with reality. I was okay with it. And that was a new reality that was starting to set in that I never felt before in my life that I was okay with this.

Yeah. After that, I kind of live like that in this kind of horrible purgatory or just being a bad person for a while and I meet the mother and my kids back then. And even that situation, in itself was one created out of alcohol.

It was like something that created around the bond of alcohol, relationship with alcohol, and she got pregnant with my son. And that was kind of like a game changer in this kind of like gap of, I don't know, five, six years that I just existed and didn't do anything. It's so amazing how I look back now that I spent that long and I didn't grow whatsoever. I was just one person that never changed. This one shitty version of myself. And finally, when I knew that I had a son coming along, I started to change.

I went to a retreat and a religious retreat to try to give up drinking. And on that retreat was a real eye-opening experience that I had, that I was able to quit drinking for a year after that retreat. I had finally stopped. And I quit drink until my son was born. When was that? That was 2010. I had stopped. When my son was born, I was like, I had my life together.

In this year that I had taken to stop drinking, I got a job in the drilling industry. I started to build a very small little meme for myself. I started to put enough money away to try to get a big apartment and stuff on my own. I started to do all these things in this year of sobriety that I was like, I just spent five years not doing shit. Not doing a fucking thing. I didn't do shit. I did nothing.

And then there's one year of sobriety. I'm like, boom, I'm accomplishing so many things. And then my son's born in a couple months after that. I look back in hindsight, I'm like, maybe it wasn't the alcohol. Maybe it was my state of mind. Maybe I was such in a bad place with what happened with my cousin and I didn't have a purpose. And now maybe I'm in a better place mentally. And there's barbecue.

to have some beer and it started like that. And that's how it crept back into my life. When you were going through that one year, I mean, were you approaching this as like sobriety or was this just, I'm this not drinking and I'm just working on some goals in life? What was your mindset with it? My mindset was like I had established such a connection with God on that retreat that I was like, I'm going to do this and I'm going to get my life together.

I'm going to stop drinking and I'm going to build a stronger relationship with God. I'm going to try to incorporate God into my relationship with the mother of my kids. And I'm going to try to be the best person I can be. But no part was like, I'm never going to drink again to the rest of my life. And I really set out to become this better person and prove that I could be a dad and prove that I could become a man and do all these things at such a later point in life. And when I did, that's when I was like, okay, maybe now I can have a beer like a big boy and do my thing. Yeah, the circumstances had changed.

So, I mean, it makes perfect sense that, of course, now things are going better. You've got maybe more stuff to lose in a sense. So this time you'll be able to, you know, keep it going. So let's fire up the barbecue and they call the boys over and have a few. How does that progress for you? Because I've been in those spots before, too, and I wouldn't say, the bottom fell out for me right away. Everybody's thing is different, but for me, it was progressive.

Sometimes it worked out. Sometimes it didn't work out. And sometimes I was just pissed off. I just couldn't really get into it. Anytime I couldn't get into it, I was really pissed off. I was not happy. But I had restraints sometimes for it. What was that like for you?

So you kind of get back into things. It was progressive, too. Like I had a couple of years of, I'd say where things were in moderation, but I would still have these moments, these like random blackouts where I would be back in this dark place morning and grieving my cousin. So, you know, let's say the first year that my son was one years old and going into two, things started to work out. I'd say it was like a beautiful six months of drinking that I was like, wow, okay, I can do this. And then it starts to come in where now the circumstances had changed, but the traumas in my past did it. And the thing that would still haunt me when I would drink sometimes would be those traumas.

And as much as this new version I was working on myself was doing well, when I would be drunk, I'd kind of soak into those old traumas and shit from the past. And I become a asshole. I'd be like in mourning and full grieving, you know. And little by little throughout the years, that started to always linger, but linger more and more. And after my second son, Mason was born, my life was still going like good. I was drinking in a way where I still didn't even feel like I had an issue. I was kind of coasted. I had my drunk nights and shit, but they were still nights where I,

It didn't affect really life like that. And I wasn't drinking every single day. I was going to work. I was successful. I was building like this career going into deeper into drilling. And I was working so hard trying to build my career. But life was good. And it seemed like life was good.

I'm like, this is, I'm getting somewhere. It felt stable, but also started to feel the effects that came with it too, the drinking after so many years. I started to gain weight sometimes. I'd be on this roller coaster of weight, like weight gain from the drinking. And overall, I was still this negative person. That always kind of rolled with me when I drank. I always just didn't want to face or own my shit, the only person I was when I drank.

I always carry that shit. I would never own up to my shit. I'd never apologize. I'd always run from situations or I'd get overly assertive or aggressive and confrontational in situations that I just didn't want to take accountability. And so that kind of attitude flowed with me through life, which just I wasn't a happy person. What do you think's behind that to how you carried yourself through those years? I had this ego that wouldn't face myself and in not being able to own up to it, I acted out aggressively and assertively. And that's how I protected myself

since I was like 12 years old. And I never would own up to it because I'd always be hiding from the real shit about myself that I was just every day, little by little, becoming a worse and worse person, drinking more and more, hiding deeper and deeper, going into a darker place and just cycling into exactly what I was afraid of becoming. And it just kept manifest in itself worse. And I couldn't even be in my own skin, you know, like it started to get to that point. And that's how I navigate it. It's that part two of the feelings, right? It's about managing the feelings and working through those feelings and everything that's brought up.

And the other way is, I mean, you just drink and then your brain stops thinking after a while. And you don't have to think about all these things in life that have happened and everything you've been through. And you don't have to worry about solving any problems. And it's interesting. You mentioned there five years, too, before in their story. It was the same Jersey Mike. And then in one year, you make a ton of progress. and then you probably kind of find yourself from one way or another,

kind of back to how things were before. So how do things move forward from here? So you've got your two boys now. How was that, man? That was the most beautiful part of my life, man, having my two kids. It was life-changing and it was like just feeling love in its truest form. I had even felt like I got a piece back from when I lost my cousin when they were born. It was like I got a little piece.

back in some kind of way. And now I have something to strive for it to try to be this like father. I take such a pride and I have such a good time investing into my kids. It's the one thing that I can see the rewards and the things that I've worked on in myself kind of reflecting back at me. I love it. And it was what kept me up for years was fighting to this little family that I had. It wasn't perfect. The relationship with the mother and my kids was always in a roller coaster kind of format with alcohol being involved. Up and down. Things were good.

Things are bad, quick back and forth. Talking one day, not talking the next, talking one week, not talking the next. Always, you know, apologies, both ends. Back and forth just for a toxic relationship in every way with alcohol and all that shit. That played out all the week, too. 2019. Like I said, my work path kept becoming more successful while my kind of family life, at least my relationship with the mother and my kids became worse and worse. But my relationship with my kids was what it was. I still had fun with them home doing my thing.

I could have been a lot more present and I could have had a lot more time that I remembered and better memories spent with them than the ones that I did. And it went like that until things with me and the mother and my kids got so bad that there was infidelity. That's what set me off. I was always like on the brink of if something happens, what's going to happen when it blows up. Mother of my kids stand with somebody else and she made up with somebody while I was with the kids and I found out about it. And that shit crushed me, man. The one thing I was fighting for, now it's done. Everything I was working for is a shit show and started really drinking and coping with alcohol on a daily basis because we were living together

and we couldn't figure out this separation. I had a tough time being in the same place as her after the events that took place. So I drank to deal with it. And I had a mental breakdown during this process. I had to stop working, requested off work. I'm like, I can't be here. I need to figure out my life. Yeah. Now I remember when we talked the first time too, this is when sort of things picked up, right? You asked for that time off work and the plan. Maybe some of the intention was to get things on track, but all it ended up kind of turning into for you was more downtime, more free time, more drinking time. And things really went downhill for you at this point, right? So walk us through that. This is in, what you said, 2019, right?

2019, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, bring us up to speed on these events. Yeah, at that time, I had asked off work in October and pushing into December. They'll just drinking every day, got the blinds closed, not interacting with anybody, trying to figure out what mess is about to occur with my life and the life of my kids with this whole separation. And I just drank, drank, drank it away. And this was the first time in my life when I started to have some experience. extreme symptoms of drinking alcohol, the amount of alcohol that I was drinking. I had been at work and I've had these welts all over my body, this crazy-ass reaction on my body and a very odd taste in

my mouth. People have asked me, like, what's one something that came first? I'd get flushed. My face would have been really red and I'd feel hot. And that's usually a sign of your liver, not really breaking everything down at that time. It started to happen more and more. And when I I saw those welts. I freaked out, but I still just kept drinking. Again, this ego, this person that didn't want to see shit. I think I went on Amazon. I ordered some liver pills. I'm like, I got this. A lot of water and some liver pills and some milk. That's so we'll fix this right up. I'll be back in action. Figure this out. And next thing, you know, my eyes are yellow. I'm like, whoa, I've been Googling for like the whole time I was off for two, three months. I had been

Googling everyday liver failure symptoms, you know, little. looking at all their symptoms where they talk about your stool color being clay and looking out for all of these things. I'll tell you one thing for people out there, it's never going to hit you the way it's described on a paper. It's never going to come like that. So if they're looking at a paper and you're expecting up this perfect list for you to then make a realization where you're like, okay, these little symptoms add up to that. It doesn't work that way because our bodies are all different. You're just going to experience some things and you're going to be the judge to make the call of what you think. things happening and most of the time, if you're at that point with alcohol and your addiction,

it's so strong. It's very hard to not convince yourself otherwise. I'm fine. I'm good. It's not that. It's something else. Even the well to my body, I was like, I must have had an allergic reaction. I took Benadryl and I shot a vodka. This is not a big deal. But the eyes being yellow, that was the deal. That's always interesting, right? Because we do go to Google and find stuff and then it doesn't always pan out or play out exactly how it's written up. what, you looked at a mirror. Did you, because I've heard some people share this before that were worried about this, that they would check in a mirror frequently and look at their eyes in the morning.

Was that something you did or was this just one day you recognized it? I wouldn't check. And I saw it being as a symptom, but my eyes were always white. And they were always like white and maybe a little bit red from work. I never once would be like in the mirror looking at my eyes. But this one day that I woke up completely on Gover, maybe two weeks after having those highs, and I turned the light on it and I went to go piss.

I looked in the mirror and it was like, boom, that shit hit me. My eyes are highlighter yellow, like not a little tin. It was like glowing. I covered my eyes. I was like, oh my God, I'm fucking dying. It hit me like that. And I tried playing with the light. I just knew I knew I was dying at that point.

Yeah. Could you feel it elsewhere in your body too? Yeah. I had a very dull, numbing sensation where my liver was. It felt like it was like something was asleep there, if you would compare it to like when your hand falls asleep or something. It was like a very dull feeling. I'd have some sharp pains here and there, but then it mostly would go back to feeling

dull and numb. And I always had this. extreme thirst. It was like, obviously I'm drinking alcohol. I'm not hydrating, but I had a thirst that was like on another level that felt like nothing could take care of this thirst that I had, even sometimes that I would drink water. I was so dehydrated. The yellow eyes, man, it was like a monumental moment in my life because even from being a kid at 12, like this person I created myself into, this person that, I, didn't want to deal with accountability, would wreak havoc and do whatever you wanted, and not

face up to it, I couldn't run for my yellow eyes anymore. It hit. And that was like a big moment for me. Yeah. Wow. Where do you go after that? You notice this? Do you get some help at this point? No, I get sunglasses and I go downstairs and I crack open a twisted tea and I drink and I take something from my liver. I go on Amazon and start searching for more stuff from my liver, thinking of more things that could help. And I start trying to drink water thinking, okay, maybe something could be done here. Let me try to get hydrated. The things I Google at that time said, obviously, if your eyes turned yellow, you're going jaunders from liver failure. And also your eyes could be like tinted yellow from extreme dehydration. And I'm in my head like

which one probably is. It's obviously to be alcohol, but I'm trying to try to be. I'm trying to hydrate myself and get out of it. But that doesn't work. Maybe a day or two after my eyes were yellow, I started to almost hallucinate. Brad, I was like just in a very dream state. I would drink. I couldn't drink as much as I was before and I would be very lethargic. And I'm guessing that was when the effects of their pneumonia build up in my blood

from my liver shale, you started to occur in the hepatic encephalipathy. and reality seemed very weird. It seemed very dreamy. It didn't really feel like I was there a lot of it. And I was like in and out of blacking out on the couch at my house. I don't know, conscious, unconscious, sleeping, walking around, see my kids playing on the couch, talk to them, and they eat. They go to bed, go back and drink, fall asleep.

Mother and my kids would be doing her own thing, drinking upstairs. And next thing you know, I'm like, completely confused. Actually, in this very room, you know what's really funny? I'll tell you this. It's funny how the car is land. It's funny the way shit works out. Because it's, it was four years ago today, Brad, January 11th that in this room, my son and the ambulance and my mom called and they came and got me was four years today, January 11. So it was in this room that they came and I wasn't able to breathe correctly. My son was trying to get my mom to talk to me because I hadn't been active on Facebook for a couple days, and my mom had some kind of feeling that something was wrong.

And when she reached out, I feel like in those moments when my son had come in the room, I was dying. I was like in and out of consciousness. I don't think if he would have came in the room that day, that I would have been found kind of in a pool in my own bile that day. I really feel like that's how I would have been discovered by my kids. And it sounds like there too, once things started, the process, it sped up. happen fast, right? A couple weeks. Leading up to this, and while all of this is going on, Mike, did you consider not drinking at all?

Yeah, I didn't even consider it. It's one that I didn't even consider the accountability thing. I just couldn't. I couldn't. I was too ashamed. I was too ashamed of myself. I was too much in my shame that I just couldn't bring myself to accept that I got myself in this position that I let myself.

I let my kids down in the hardest time of our lives while going through this separation with their mother. I let my kids down. I let my shelf down. And my thinking didn't even think that far ahead. My thinking process was not like I need help to get out of this. My thinking process was still, I've got to figure out my own way out of this because I can't have anybody know what's going on here. and my mother knew I was having issues, but didn't know to the extent that I was like dying. And it was fast. That shit happened in weeks.

It was in a matter of weeks that my eyes turned yellow. And I went from being somewhat coherent to dying, dying, like swollen, 200 and 70 pounds. I couldn't really walk around and I was just unable to go to the bathroom for weeks. And I went from being an alcoholic to literally die, just completely spotting organ failure. Yeah. In a couple weeks, too. Yeah, that's fast. So I remember from the last time we talked, that's wild that this is the same room.

This is now your studio. That's like a full circle kind of moment in a sense. But I remember as your mom saw the Facebook stuff and then had called an ambulance over. But even at this point, if I remember correctly, you were still like, No, I'm not doing any of this. Was that right or no? I still said no. When the ambulance showed up, when the guys came in to room,

I remember crawling from this room to my bedroom, which is two bedrooms up, like the floor up. I went and crawled into the room and was looking for my bottle of vodka. And I was like, get away from me, please. No one's taking me. I'm like, I got this. I got this. I don't need to leave.

I'm okay. I'm okay and they're like, have you seen yourself? I'm like, yes, I've seen myself, but I'm still okay. I can make my own decisions fine. I don't need anybody to make anything for me. I'm like, you're doing this in front of my kids. I'm like, I want you guys out. I was so defensive and still unable to surrender.

And when I saw my kids in the room and then one guy came over to me, he like looked at me. He's like, you're darned. He's like, I promise. Like, you're done. all right. He's like, you are dying. You need to go now. And then I sat down and finally started to give in where my energy was just giving. I didn't even have enough energy to still say no anymore. And that's what I mean when I tell you, I don't know if you can imagine what that feeling is like because I know you got to be thinking in my case. How could he not be wondering for help?

But I just never thought that far out, even in the moments of a paramedic. like dragging me out of here. I was still like, I got this. I can stop like I'm in control. I can, I won't get myself off. I don't need this. And that's what I was singing. As I'm like throwing up coffee grounds when they started to give me IDs, I started vomiting

everywhere, black blood. It just horrible was this like, I don't even know how I made it there. Yeah, I mean for people I think outside of. talking with people about addiction, yeah, it would probably be something you wonder. But I mean, you hear these stories a lot. And I mean, just because of the network and I get the messages and stuff, you know, it's 35, 36-year-olds, 40-year-olds, the whole spectrum of ages of so-and-so drank themselves to death. You know, and it's just tragedy, but it happens out there.

And I think a big part of it is that you're mentioning there, right, the shame that's involved, the shame that's involved of getting help and the shame of admitting that you've lost control of this thing. You can't handle it on your own. And sometimes that's ingrained in us to not ask for help and to just try to do it on our own. And even hearing your story before, you had kind of been in places maybe close to this where you had done these at home detoxes and you had, you know, quote unquote, figured it out, which for everybody listening is extremely dangerous, never do these at home.

Definitely get help for it because. it can be very dangerous, but you kind of had some experience with that. And, you know, I just think, I think just as humans, you can get so low sometimes. You know you need help to get out. But asking for that help and accepting that help is really the last thing you kind of want to do, you know. So I'm glad you got the help, though, Mikey. How does it go, though? So they bring you to the hospital and how does that all play out?

I got the help. And if it was less than my choice, the way things. were being handled, I would have went to the grave like that. And from when I left here, there was a lot, very little of what I physically remember that started to happen to me, but I know they reached out to my mom in Florida. When I had kidney failure for like permission for dialysis, they had me set up in a Clara Miles Hospital here in Jersey where there was no hepatologist, but they had another hospital watching from a kind of like control room, the different doctors that would come

and watch me and check on things periodically. They had put me in an induced coma because of the withdrawal symptoms. This time, my withdrawal was in a place that I had never felt before. I had done those detoxions at home that had be sick for a period of probably between three to five days, very heavily on the fifth day, I'd be selling back to normal. But really sick in those three to five days. Brad said that shit is dangerous. I used to feel like symptoms that would come that were almost seizure like that I felt coming in those things. So they're not smart to do, but that's how I thought I'd be able to handle it. And the last time, it was so bad that I was having respiratory failure when I got to the hospital and heart issues, all because of the withdrawal from the alcohol.

So they immediately had to put me in an induced coma just to stabilize me. You know, they tube down my throat, brain monitoring system, and that was the only way that they could stop me from going into cardiac arrest from the alcohol withdrawal, which I never even knew that this could happen like that from alcohol at that time in my life. Like, I knew that there were issues from alcohol, but I never knew that this would be the way I'd crash. cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, hepatic ancillepathy, all from a matter of three, four weeks after John the Sinai's death. That's what I never knew alcohol could cause that kind of destruction in such a small period of time. I never knew what I was up against. Never did I see that coming. That's a thing a lot of people share to wherever they fall on the spectrum.

You don't set out to get it hooked on this stuff. I've never met anybody that says that they set out to experience this. No, I always envisioned, I had a grandfather that died from cirrhosis. So this kind of shit runs in my family. But I always envisioned liver failure being like you had issues, you had some kind of major symptom, you ended up at the hospital and you kind of had this like slow, torturous kind of thing going on. But I thought it would be progressive.

I thought it was something that would happen over us. long period of time. I didn't know from when my eyes turned yellow, I just had weeks to live. You know, that I never knew existed in the realm of drinking. But when I went through that, man, I just, I swole up. It was so much liquid in me. I had all, you know, catheters everywhere, I'll feed into. And I was like that for almost three weeks with family coming in and out to seeing me. The mother and my kids have taken my kids out of state. And I stayed in this purgatory asleep, just kind of hanging out where I was going through a lot spiritually in my sleep. But on the outside, wasn't much happening. And there was a meeting with my family,

my cousins. They brought everybody in and kind of gave me the word that things were looking not good. And I was most likely going to be dying, you know, within the coming time. And my mom wasn't even a part of that meeting. She had kind of already said this is done and accepted that a little bit. And I guess after that meeting with my family, there was like a turnaround from where my body was extremely hot. I had stayed with these fevers going on for a couple of weeks. And my body started to cool down. They had these little stands by my seat that were keeping my body cool.

And when my fever started to go down, my liver wasn't getting it. better, but it stopped getting worse. My melt score kind of stopped. And I started to come out in my coma. And things turned for the better. I had one doctor that saw me and was like, look at what you did. You're kind of fucked. You're probably going to need a new liver, which you don't qualify for. So let's see if you're going to live the next six months and get qualified for a liver after those six months of being clean. And you're in a bad place. My friend, that was like the first doctor I spoke with and then I spoke with another doctor. I'll never forget this woman. She was like an angel. She just came in and didn't give me all this bullshit medical term shit. She was like,

your liver's not getting worse anymore. And she's like, I feel like you're just going to get better from here. You're okay. You're going to be okay. And you should be so happy that you're here and that your liver's not getting worse. And that woman kind of set the tone of gratitude in my life a moment. She put the hand perspective for me. That's so powerful. It must have been incredible, too, overwhelming experience to come out of things. And it was probably maybe a nice relief for somebody to come in and be like, you're going to be

all right from this. It was everything I needed. You know, it was so much. And in the sense that she just told me I should be so happy just for where I was at that moment. Even for right now, you should be so happy. And she, she spoke so genuinely and in such a compassionate way, it was like, I'll take it. And I was in just pure gratitude of everything in that moment. And so, like, there was a switch.

And I would just look at life differently from that moment. Instead of, like, glass half empty was always glass at full. kind of deal. And I still know her until her day. She was like, she continued on being my hepatologist for up until a year ago. And I was like an angel at that moment, man. I swear it wasn't for that woman and talking with the doctor, if I would have left with his perspective and his kind of view of me that I would have never ever been able to

or kind of pull myself out of it. At that point, I was just great. grateful to be alive and the whole thing I was thinking. I had such a crazy place to climb out of. Right away, one of the first issues was like, I can't go to the bathroom. I can't walk from having been asleep for so long. My limbs were moving. My legs didn't move. And sitting there in a hospital bed, having just woke up and being almost like double the weight, at least I felt double the size. I wasn't double the weight, but I felt double the size. And all of this fluidity. build up in me and then not being able to go to the bathroom and my kids and my family seeing me

like this. There was just so much humility in that whole setting, man. I was physically like forced to kind of have to sit with everything I had been running from for so many years and deal with it, look at people over and I was crying like a baby. Everybody I saw, I was in a sense just very humbled and crying. That was right in the early 20, early 2020. Oh, yeah, early 2020. So where do you go from here? So you get out of the hospital. And so they sent me home. And I got back home into a toxic situation again. I'm back home now, the mother and my kids.

And I got my dad helping me out with stuff. But I'm at home, unable to walk doing IV infusions with my kids, being homeschooled. Encephalepilepity. One thing that I know me and you didn't talk about before, hepatic encephalepilepathy, they feel. for a while, I'd say for months to come, I would sometimes be in random, confused states where I didn't know what was going on because of my liver. And it's crazy that liver can really control even your reality. What's going on around you, what you think. We can cloud your judgment to that

point. It's not doing well. Yeah, wow. I stayed on that course for about four months. and what that one doctor, that one hepatologist said had stayed with me. I just kept getting better. No drinking. Stayed home. Learning how to walk, cooking, and doing things for myself, doing things for my kids again. And right around four or five months after my liver was like good, my liver was good on blood work. And I was like so happy.

I was like, damn, okay, that's great. But then again, that same doctor that gave me so much hope, she was like, Mike, I still feel like you're going to live a long, healthy life. You're going to keep getting better. I feel like all of these things are going to just keep happening for you. You should be so grateful. You should be happy. She's like, I never even thought like that you'd even be at this point so fast.

She's like, look how grateful you should be. Again, giving me all this like great positive. And she's like, this is only going to stay like this if you don't drink. If you go drink, you better believe your liver is going to go back so fast until state that you'll be back here. You ain't going to get another miracle. She's, you ain't going to get another shot where you'll ever walk away from the situation if you want to go play with that.

And I took what she said seriously, but I was walking back into a world of having no tools to kind of navigate around alcohol, which was now I was getting healthy again. I'm a single dad. The mother of my kids had left. The kids were with me. And I'm like, okay, now I'm in a place of I need to meet people and socialize, but I have no tools. I have no A's, no stuff. And I'm not really reaching out for it either. I'm not looking for the help. I'm just happy to kind of be in a position or Matt. And right away, I'm over here. I'm over here. thinking about dating. Let's go out of a date. And I start navigating back in that world without the right tools. And I walk back into it blindsided and I start to kind of think about drinking in moderation

again. I'm like, if I'm on a date, let me try this. Again, I'm back in a point in my life where I'm talking to myself in another perspective of the same way I did when my son was born that was like circumstances of change. And I'm thinking. thinking about this all over again. How can I realistically navigate in this world socially with alcohol being everywhere? How am I going to do it? Why am I even going to try it? So I didn't try.

And I kind of went with that. And it wasn't so good in that small amount of time, which you would say were some fun nights that led up to me getting sick again. That led up to me starting to feel symptoms that were all too, like, friendly and all too scary at the same. same time they were like, I was just feeling this shit. No way I'm not going to do this again. And I was like, I needed to back out. And I did back out and kind of played with that idea up until our, like I really, when we first spoke, Brad, one thing I always had a tough time telling myself in life, kind of problem with authority. And I hated when any option was taken off the table for me about anything. Like, why can't.

If you can't, why can't I? And I always just hated that. So I navigated even after my coma for a while, like wanting to give myself the option to have a drink if I wanted to. And also while doing therapy, trying to like move in a direction that I'm like, I can approach a healthy mental state and still partake in these activities to not experience FOMO, to not experience feeling like everybody's doing something and I can't do it and all of this kind of shit because I dealt with those things, especially in a sense of in a dating situations or just meeting people was like, I hated feeling out of place. Like, why me? Yeah, I'm here messing up everybody else's good time, whatever, all this shit. And after we did them,

podcast again comes knocking on my door, a health issue from my previous experience from liver failure where my diverticulitis started to become a problem in my life. Doctors are like we have to remove a part of your colon. We need to take 20 some odd centimeters and this is a major surgery. And right around the time that I got that news, my uncle passed away that was over here kind of helping me. He was visiting. And he passed away from COVID. And right at that time, two things was like blow after blow. And I'm like, in my head, I'm like, man, life don't fucking stop.

Like, life is still just kicking my ass. And the life is always still just going to kick my ass. Moderation, no alcohol, completely drunk. And but right there in that moment, I was like, I don't want to consistently like, fight for my life with alcohol anymore. I got so sick of justifying those situations in my head. I got so fed up with myself. Then I was like, this is really what you're justifying? Like you're justifying keeping an option open to do something that's kind of physically put your health in the place of more risk that you're already in. And this is what you're,

call fulfilling any experience that you might feel you're missing out on, Mike. And that's the way I was talking to myself. And I'm like, man, I'm sick of this shit. I'm like, I want to live a long life. I want to see my kids grow. And I'm sick of justifying this behavior. And I got to a point where I was just like, I can do this. I feel good enough in my own skin.

Like, I can face this. I can feel this. I don't need to run from this feeling yet. I don't need to. And even when I'm out, I don't need to hide anymore. I'd be out sometimes. I'd have a drink in this moderation shit. And I'm having the drink.

And I'm like, what did I even need that for? I'm just over here. Not only am I not experiencing my time because I'm planning my time to drink, but now I'm actually not even experiencing the time after I had the drink because I'm thinking about the drink so much. And now I've completely shut down my total human experience by this whole entire justification of a drink. that I don't even need it. And I minus all of that out of the equation and I'm there with the drink or water and I'm talking to you and now I'm actually smiling and I'm actually maybe

telling you a joke and we're having a good time and we're laughing. And now my experience and my clarity is just like what was I thinking and my choice of that chaotic way of thinking, showing up here justifying a drink in comparison to my water and just having a good time bullshit with you. The choice became obvious at that moment and I was finally able to take it. and meaning like in the sense that I was comfortable enough in my own skin to get there. It took and look what it took. Look at what it took. Look at what it took.

So many people tell me what was wrong with you that you'd even ingest alcohol after your coma experience. And I agree. I don't know what was wrong with me, but I do know that added the choices that were made, it got me to a place of getting sick of my own shit that led me to finally think. And I'm done. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I think even things we've covered in this in the show here. I mean, I think it kind of points to what struggles you were going through.

And having the hospital visits, I mean, there's a lot of people have hospital visits. And I mean, of course, it would be like, hey, you know, had a hospital visit. And then I just stopped. But it's just not everybody's story. Some people, it's going to be enough and they're going to make sense of it after. But there's all that other stuff, right? I mean, really, this whole thing, the perspective I come from is this whole thing really has nothing to do with the drinking. Because even when we stop the drinking, I mean, we're still left with self, right?

Self is still not fully healed. And maybe never will be. Maybe we'll continuously be working on a quest or on a journey of be our best self. I don't know if we're ever going to reach the end of the line for that. But that's sort of what maybe people from outside of this have a hard time understanding is that it's not really about the drinks, about the behaviors. It's about the way that we're moving through day to day. and we don't know how to deal with the manage emotions.

And there's that big buzzword right now, emotional sobriety, right? So that's a big buzzword right now is about how do we work, do that stuff. And if you're a guy, too, who just doesn't like what you see in the mirror. And I was there at a point in my life, too, then drinking's a great idea. Because when you drink, you see, at one time, it worked really well, man. It took away the insecurities. We were able to talk to girls. We were able to come out of our shell and be somebody that we weren't.

somebody that people enjoyed. And I think in my case, I can't speak for yours, but in my case, I really enjoyed that. And my brain in my thought process has got used to that being my experience every time. What I found, though, over the years is that no longer was my experience from something that started out as fun and enjoyable. I was not able to get back to that place. You know what I mean? It's like the pickle to a cucumber.

You can't turn a pickle back to a cucumber. And that was my experience, you know? So I think even though there was a lot of stuff going on, I think, too, like your insight is incredible to like what you were struggling with and going through the intervention of the hospital visit was another stepping stone and sort of realizing and maybe coming to terms with this just may never work out for me. And like maybe my life could just be better without the obsession 24-7 of the next one. I don't know. That's a lot there, man. But it was sort of my thoughts on that share you had. And you're right on the money, man.

That whole part of everything you said about self, because it's not the drinking. It's the work on self. It's those experiences. And in the growth of self, at that time, I had recently met you. I had recently met people in the sober community. There were things happening with me that were available and that now were like,

these were tools that were at my disposal that I didn't have to go hunting for. It was like perfect timing as well. Like, the online sober community presence had such a major role in my thinking back then and my perspective and the way that things were settling in and processing with my health issues and the direction I wanted to go in. The support I had from you, from other people, so many people in the sober community that would just reach out, like people that I could talk to. It was like I was able to work on things without having a sense. step out there to do it because I'm always a go go on the move guide and my help was always on like phone. And these things were my support system walking into those health issues that ultimately I was like, I'm not missing out here. If anything, I'm missing out on my experience.

I had this whole fear of missing out, not being able to drink. I'm like, I'm missing out while being worried about not being able to drink. I'm like, I'm here experiencing more than everyone now, I'm even experiencing more than the people drinking. So in all reality, when that clicked in my head, I shouldn't feel bad for myself that I'm not having to drink. I should be extremely grateful that I'm in a place where I can feel the things that people feel drinking while sober. And I'm really at an advantage from my point of view now. And I'm not missing out. The people drinking are missing out on this. real shit that I have going on.

And that's like where I found my power. And that's where I saw my strength. And that's where I was like, that's what I'll build off of. And it's been like, it's been the truth. I've just been consistent and becoming a better version of myself. Committing to being sober and working through things in such a natural way, rather than having these breaks and setbacks of. nights where I would want to try to moderate.

I'm making too much progress. My momentum is too strong. And I'm at such a, I feel like advantage with my clarity. I could never give this up. This is the best, you know, natural drug I've ever discovered, natural feeling. And it hurts and you have to feel and you have to deal with life and have your breakdown still and get upset and get mad and go through everything. Yeah. I love the way you put that.

Yeah. I mean, it does convince us, though, and maybe society too as well and all the stuff that we get fed, right, in the movies and the billboards and everything, right? It looks so glamorous, man. It's beautiful, right? It's a billboard, shiny, Vegas. All the celebrities got their own stuff. They put it out there, right? That it just looks, man, this is the way to just rock and roll and be cool.

And when you really look at it for what it is, it's not the way to rock and roll. It's not at all. It's just an escape from ourselves. And then it just becomes this cycle and this pattern and this obsession and this addiction and so many layers to it. But the whole part too about your story too, man, about the accountability part, responsibility. That's powerful too. But I'm wondering too on this this sober journey for you, I mean, what's one thing that's really surprised you? That I'm slowly trying to live life with my guard down, that I can live life with my guard down.

I can live life with an open heart. I don't need to let everything that's happened to me or that I've done, define who I am. I can be here and live life and I'm worthy of good experiences. That's the biggest thing that is slowly surprising me is me becoming more comfortable with accepting and letting happiness flourish into my life. I never thought I could be experiencing life in real time without dreams. at one point. I just never thought a reality like that could exist. And the beautiful thing on this side, man, it's, you know, I had to get dragged here. I had to get dragged in my own vomit to get over here. But boy, it's nice over here on this, on this side. And if people can make a proactive choice to get over here before having to go through what I did and possibly risk, health issues are dying, make your way here. Sobriety's trimming.

And I think everybody's really making their way to it. Like you said, emotional sobriety, sober, chary. These are words that are like becoming available and used more often to younger kids as they're growing. And I hope it sticks because society is always going to have its bullshit. But at least to not have one that's literally backed by society, to shove down everybody's throat. If it little by little, it makes its way into the background. wouldn't mind it. I think it's for a better, for the better cause of everybody eventually.

Yeah. No, that's so true. So are you a lot kinder now in your interactions, Mike? So much kinder, man. I'm a nice guy. I'm not a fucking asshole. And I feel, you know, feel bad for anybody that I was an asshole to. I said, mom, I'm sorry. Anybody I've been an asshole too. My dad, my kids, everybody. I'm just always, I'm consciously, I'll tell you one thing, Brad, one thing that I take with me from my whole coma experience, right, was that it was such a dark, uncomfortable place where I was when I was asleep, spiritually, mentally. Like, I was in such a, such a hell. I would describe it as like hell in my coma that I never want to like live life in a way

that I revisit my transition into death with that kind of weight. that I had on me at that time. I never want to do it. It's all like I was gonna be stuck there for a turning. And luckily I was able to wake up, come back, have a second chance at life. God willing, I had a second chance at this that I try to live in a way that if something was to happen to me,

somebody was to point a gun at me and say, this is your last moment that I'm kind of comfortable with the life that I'm living, the choices that I'm making. And sharing my story helps. It helps me so tremendously in staying on that path and trying to live up to the person I'm trying to be not being drunk. That's beautiful. I love that.

But yeah, sharing stories are healing, right? Sharing stories, hearing stories. The whole process is healing. And every time I feel like I do it, I learn a little bit something I didn't even really pick up on before. I learned a little bit something about myself. But the whole thing, too, I love the apologies for people. You know what I mean? I think a lot of stuff just goes back to a lot of what you shared in the episode.

episode, right? Is if you're so unhappy with yourself, I don't even necessarily know if it's anything other people are doing. I think we just project on maybe how we're reflecting on ourselves. But it's incredible, Mikey, to see the progress you've made, man. You know, as always, I appreciate your support. I appreciate you sharing your story. If you guys want to see as well, too, what Mikey talked about, he probably is the best number one real creator in the world, man. But he puts him on his on his Instagram, you know, highlighting the story and sharing stuff on there. So if you want to get some visuals too of his journey, for sure, check him out on Instagram. Thank you, Brad.

And, yo, I can't thank you enough for the role you've played in my life and your community, man. And everybody, it's sharing and connecting and hearing other people's stories and not feeling alone, man. We've talked about this. Connection is so big in this. And it's so nice to have it to disposal of your hands. I know there's so many, whatever works for other people out there, God bless you. I support whatever is working for you. I know that for me, these communities have just been great to me, man.

It's what set me on this in this journey of when I started having these health issues that I was like, I'm ready for this. I'm ready to commit to sobriety. I'm ready to start my little day. count. And even though I don't focus on days, it's just so nice to have it. And I feel like it's a family man. It's like a big family. And so many of us here for each other. So thank you, Brad, for what you do, homie, because you really and so many people on this community played a major role in changing the direction. My life was going in. So I appreciate it. Of course, man. I'm so happy

to be part of it. And for the community, yeah, too. I'm with you, man. It's incredible people out there that, you know, you find people out there strangers that care, buddy. It's so cool to meet people and connect with people and share stories. So thanks again, Mike. Thank you, Brad.

Appreciate you, brother. Well, there it is, everyone. Mike, aka Jersey, Mike, be sure if you like the episode, you appreciate Mike coming on here to share his story. Send him a note over on Instagram. I followed up with Mike. after doing the edits for the episode and realized we didn't have a timeline for his sober days. I know he's not a huge counter. He's not really much of a counter at all, but he shared with me he's

over 500 days living life like this and things just continue to get better. What an incredible example of putting one foot in front of the other to make a change. And really, if you go through Mike's story there, really break it down the barriers about what's behind drinking. And I mean, I think for all of us and that's going to be a continuous journey that we're going to to go on about self-development and stuff, but that initial part of getting to the bottom of all of this can be so helpful. So thanks again, Mike. Thank you to all of you for hanging out to the end of the episode. And be sure to leave a review on Apple or Spotify if you have not yet. And I'll see you on the next one.