Hi, my name is Jesse, and I don’t drink alcohol anymore.

Nothing terrible ever came from my drinking, other than some pretty epic hangovers and one incident involving spicy shrimp and a surprise head-shaving. I was excelling at my career. My family was healthy and happy and from the outside looking in I had it all together. What they didn’t see was that I was regularly consuming 4-8 drinks a day. I was hiding how much I drank from friends and family. I was gaining weight at an alarming rate and I was pretty much miserable.

Looking back, my relationship with alcohol was never really “normal.” During high school, I would frequently be the guy at the party doing the dumbest things because I was the drunkest. In college, I used alcohol as a crutch to help me socialize and make me feel more comfortable during sexual encounters. After college, I used alcohol as a way to relax after work and sometimes as a way to deal with stress during work (lunch hour beers).

Despite my obvious reliance on alcohol, it didn’t really appear to be having any adverse effects on my life. It was just something that I did without really thinking about.

This all changed when my wife gave birth to our first son.

The birth of a child forced me to come to terms with my shortcomings. I analyzed what type of dad I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be the dad that gets home from work and immediately cracks open a beer and turns on Netflix. Deep down I knew that drinking EVERY SINGLE DAY was not ok and not a habit I wanted my son to one day learn. I also knew that I wanted more from life then what I currently had. I knew alcohol was holding me back and I was ready to change.

So, I tried to moderate my drinking. I would tell myself “ok, I’m only drinking on the weekends” or “I’m only drinking 4 beers a week”.

You can probably guess how well that worked…or didn’t work. Alcohol was so ingrained in my habits and routines that my brain would practically shut down until I appeased it with all of the booze that it wanted. In fact, my drinking became even worse when I tried to moderate. It’s the whole forbidden fruit thing. Because it was off the menu, alcohol became the only thing that I desired.