Yesterday, I marked the fifth anniversary of my decision to quit drinking alcohol. It was the most consequential choice I have ever made in my life, and I am able to stand before you today only because I made it.
I was slowly and steadily killing myself with booze. I was getting drunk every night, because I couldn’t face the incredible pain and PTSD I had from my childhood, at the hands of my abusive father and manipulative mother.
It was unsustainable, and I knew it was unsustainable, but when you’re an addict, knowing something is unhealthy and choosing to do something about it are two very different things.
On January 8, 2016, I was out in the game room, watching TV and getting drunk as usual. I was trying to numb and soothe the pain I felt, while also deliberately hurting myself because at a fundamental level, I believed the lies the man who was my father told me about myself: I was worthless. I was unworthy of love. I was stupid. The things I loved and cared about were stupid. It did not matter if I lived or died. Nobody cared about me, anyway.
I knocked a bottle into the trash, realized I had to pee, and — so I wouldn’t disturb Anne — did not go into the bathroom, but instead walked out into the middle of my backyard and peed on the grass. I turned around, and there was Anne. I will never forget the look on her face, this mixture of sadness and real fear.
“I am so worried about you,” was all she had to say. I’d been feeling it for a long time, and I faced a stark choice that I had known I was going to face sooner or later.
“So am I.”
Roughly 12 hours later, I woke up with the headache (hangover) I always had. For the first time in years, I accepted that I brought it on myself, instead of blaming it on allergies or the wind.
I picked up my phone, and I called Chris Hardwick, my best friend, who had been sober for over a decade at that point.
“I need help,” I said. “I don’t think going to AA is for me, but I absolutely have a problem with alcohol and I need to stop drinking.”
He told me a lot of things, and we stayed on the call for hours. I realized that that it was as simple and complicated as making a choice not to drink, one day or even one hour at a time. So I made the choice. HOLY SHIT was it hard. The first 45 days were a real struggle, but with the love and support of my wife and best friend, I got through it.
2016 … remember that year? Remember how bad things got? I was constantly making the joke about how I picked the wrong year to quit drinking, while I continued to make the choice to not drink.
Getting clean allowed (and forced) me to confront *why* I drank to excess so much. It turns out that being emotionally abused and neglected by both parents, then gaslit by my mother for my entire life had consequences for my emotional development and mental health.
I take responsibility for my choices. I made the choice to become a drunk. I own that.
But I know that, had the man who was my father loved me the way he loves my siblings, had my mother just once put my needs ahead of her own, the overwhelming pain and the black hole where paternal love should be would not have existed in my life.
I made a choice to fill that black hole with booze and self-destructive behavior. That sort of put a weak bandage over the psychic wound, but it never lasted more than a few hours or days before I was right back to believing all the lies that man planted in my head about myself, and feeling like I deserved all of it. If he wasn’t right, I thought, why didn’t my mother ever stand up for me? If he wasn’t right, how come nothing I ever did was good enough for him? I must be as worthless and contemptible as he made me believe I was. Anyone who says otherwise is just being fooled by me. I don’t really deserve any happiness, because I haven’t earned it. Anne’s just settling. She probably feels sorry for me.
All of that was just so much. It was so hard. It hurt, all the time. Because my mother made my success as an actor the most important thing in her life, I grew up believing that being the most successful actor in the world was the only way she’d be happy. And if that would make her happy, maybe it would prove to the man who was my father that I was worthy of his love. When I didn’t book jobs, I took it SO PERSONALLY. Didn’t those casting people know how important this was? This wasn’t just an acting role. This was the only chance I have to make my parents love me!
The thing is, I didn’t like it. I didn’t love acting and auditioning and attention like my mother did. It was never my dream. It was hers, and she sacrificed my childhood, and ultimately my relationship with her and her husband, in pursuit of it.
I didn’t jump straight to “get drunk all the time” as a coping mechanism. For *years* I tried to have conversations with my parents about how I felt, and every single time, I was dismissed for being ungrateful, overly dramatic, or just making things up. When the man who was my father didn’t blow me off, he got mad at me, mocked me, humiliated me, made me afraid of him. I began to hope that he’d just blow me off, because it wasn’t as bad as the alternative.
It was so painful, and so frustrating, I just gave up and dove into as many bottles as I could find.
But then in 2016 I quit, and as my body began to heal from how much I’d abused it, my spirit began to heal, too. I found a room in my heart, and in that room was a small child, terrified and abused and unloved, and I opened my arms to him. I held him the way he should have been held by our parents, and I loved him the way he deserved to be loved: unconditionally. I promised him that I would protect him from them. They could never hurt him again.
I realized I had walked up to that door countless times over the years, and I had always chosen to walk right past it and into a bar, instead.
But because I had made the choice to stop drinking, to stop hiding from my pain, to stop self-medicating, I could see that door clearly now. I could hear that little boy weeping in there, as quietly as possible, because he was so afraid that someone was going to come in and hurt him.
Sobriety let me see that my mother had been lying to me, and maybe to herself, about who that man was to me. I realized that the man who was my father had been a bully to me my whole life. I accepted and fucking OWNED that it wasn’t my fault. It was a choice he made, and while I will never know why, I knew what had happened to me. I knew my memories were real, and I hoped that, armed with this new certainty and confidence, I could have a heart-to-heart with my parents, and begin to heal these wounds. So I wrote to my parents, shared a lot of my feelings and fears, and finally told them, “I feel like my dad doesn’t love me.”
I know some of you are parents. What do you do when your child says that to you? What is your first instinct? Pick up the phone right away? Send a text right away? Somehow communicate to your child immediately that, no, they are wrong and they are not unloved, right? Well, if you’re my parents, you ignore me and go radio silent (for two months if you’re my mother, four months if you’re my father.) And then when you finally do acknowledge the email, you are incensed and offended. How dare I be so hateful and cruel and ungrateful! Nothing is more important than family! How could I say such hurtful things?! Why would I make all that up?
I had changed. They had not. They will not. Ever.
So, I want to be clear: I take responsibility for the choice I made to become a full-time drunk. But I also hold my parents accountable for the choices they made, including this one.
Their silence during those long weeks told me everything I needed to know, and my sobriety was severely tested for the first time. Everything I had always feared, everything I had been drinking to avoid, was right there, in my face. When they finally acknowledged me, and made it all about their feelings, I knew: this was never going to change. I mean, I’d known that for years, maybe for my whole life, but I still held out hope that, somehow, something would be different.
During those weeks, I spent a lot of time on the phone with Chris, spent a lot of time with Anne, and filled a bunch of journals. But I didn’t make the choice to pick up a drink. I’d committed to taking better care of myself, so I could be the husband and father my family deserved. So I could find the happiness that *I* deserve.
Once I was clean, I had clarity, and so much time to do activities! I was able to clearly and honestly assess who I was, and *why*. I was able to love myself and care for myself in ways that I hadn’t before, because I sincerely believed I didn’t deserve it.
I will never forget this epiphany I had one day, while walking through our kitchen: If I was the person the man who was my father made me believe I was, there is no way a woman as amazing and special as Anne would choose to spend her life with me. Why this never occurred to me up to that point can be found under a pile of bottles.
Not having parents sucks. It hurts all the time. But it hurts less than what I had with those people, so I continue to make the choice to keep them out of my life.
After five years, I don’t miss being drunk at all. It is not a coincidence that the last five years have been the best five years of my life, personally and professionally. In spite of everything 2020 took from us (and I know it’s taken far more from others than it took from me), I had the best year I’ve ever had in my career — and this is *my* career, being a host and a writer and audiobook narrator. This is what *I* want to do, and I still feel giddy when I take time to really own that I am finally following *MY* dream. It’s a shame I don’t have parents to share it with, but I have a pretty epic TNG family who celebrate everything I do with me.
I wondered how I would feel, crossing five years without a drink off the calendar. I thought I’d feel celebratory, but honestly the thing I feel the most is gratitude and resolve.
I am grateful that I have the love and support of my wife and children. I am grateful that I have so much privilege, this wasn’t as hard for me as it could have been. I am grateful that, every day, I can make a choice to not drink, and it’s entirely MY CHOICE.
Because I quit drinking, I had the clarity I needed to see WHY I was drinking, and I had the strength to confront it. It didn’t go the way I wanted or hoped, but instead of numbing that pain with booze, I have come to accept it, as painful as it is.
And even with that pain, my life is immeasurably better than it was, and for that I am immeasurably grateful.
Hi. I’m Wil, and it’s been five years and one day since my last drink. Happy birthday to me.
I haven’t had a drink since March of 2020 when the pandemic set in. I don’t miss it, one bit.
You chose bravely, you chose yourself. I’m moved and proud having read that.
Lior
Just a guy from Israel
Happy belated birthday and much congratulations!
Having grew up with a father who was an alcoholic, until he finally quit for good when I was 16, I just have to say, not only will this help you & Anne, but your children as well. You won’t be continuing a cycle of abuse, much like your parents ungraciously bestowed upon you. You may have never met your own wife & children with cruel words that can slip from drunk mouths, but seeing a parent controlled by any substance and how they act while drunk can leave a lifetime of memories kids would also rather forget.
I send support and celebration not only for & to you, but your whole family pod as well! Blessings.
It’s always good to see others making the the hard decision to break away from self-medication, and alcohol abuse. It definitely helps to have a support system. Congratulations on your five years!
Congratulations on getting sober, congratulations on figuring out and separating but putting together: that you were responsible for becoming a drunk and that the reason you turned to it was because of your parents.
Regardless of what some might like to think, because of their own conditioning… blaming the source is absolutely necessary, just as much as it is necessary to take accountability for our own actions.
Without blaming the source, we have no idea why we feel or act the way we do, nothing to target, thus, no healing.
I am glad to know that you still tried with them, but that you realised that they will never change, and that that was their decision.
I am glad that you are finally doing what you love to do, and that you were also blessed with a wife and kids as well as feeling free at last.
Life has a wonderful way of gifting things and people to us after a long time of pain suffering and being unappreciated.
I for one, really appreciate you blogging about this and taking us on the journey with you. Because this was and might end up being the reality of some of us. 💞
It is. And thank you for the insights on blaming the source. I know what got me started in seeking self-medication, and while pouring a glass of wine and drinking it are choices I make, what I lived with in my youth and much of my adult life was not. Blaming the source is not an excuse, but it is vitally important to know how and why I came here.
Absolutely so 🙂
That’s so amazing Wil. I’ve been in recovery on and off for years and have been doing good for a couple years now. One day at a time is all we can do!! Hope you’re keeping yourself busy and healthy especially around these crazy times. I seriously want to get involved in Star Trek I would seriously love to play a character but I’m sure you hear this ALL the time lol! It just looks like so much fun. Plus I have short hair so I feel like you can never get enough lesbian looking Tom-boy cast members for being on Discovery (I mean that’s the only active one other then POSSIBLY Picard Season 2 right?)
I was honestly trying to find an area you guys took submissions but I guess there’s not the option! Haha 🙂
Congratulations, Wil. I have not made it that far. Still too often the Joe Five-or-Sixpack of cabernet.
While I already knew you were a strong advocate for people who live with twin mind-killers of anxiety and depression, which I have for as long as I can remember, I was not aware of how similar our young lives seem to have been. My father, thankfully, was not abusive. It’s just that he could not be there much since my mother ghosted on him when I was maybe all of three. He is still living, and we have a very good relationship, even if we will never agree on politics.
I think our mothers may have had more than a share of narcissism, or even NPD. For me, it was never about acting or sports, but rather grades and other accomplishments that served to make her “proud” (read, “look good”). I finally worked up the courage to stop communicating in 1998, and was mostly silent for eight years. We reconnected then, but it was still always tense, until she died in 2017.
I want to add that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to you read Ready Player Two, and have been reliving a lot of my 80s GenX youth since I finished it a few weeks ago. At the moment, it’s my third time through LotR. 🙂
I’ve long admired you Wil, along with the no bs way you approach the world. Now … I admire you a little bit more. Cheers … oops sorry … I mean, best wishes and kindest regards.
I am sorry your parents treated you like an asset rather than a son and human with emotions and needs. I am glad that you found peace with that and I am happy for you.
I found my way to your blog because of some random old tweet that lead me to an old article of you from 2009 explaining what to expect when following you on Twitter. Before reading this article, I had already tapped the follow button and only later found out that it became quiet on that account. Because I already know you from TNG (and I was looking up to you as a kid that I was at that time) and a couple of episodes of that show with all those whizkids – what’s it called again? – I had an urge desire to better get to know the person Wil. Then I read this article and inspite of having 2021 with all that c19-crap still happening to us, there’s nothing I’d want more right now that giving you a hug and tell you that you are perfectly right as you are and people around you can be more than happy to have you as a friend, a stepdad and the guy who probably mows the lawn and even if you don’t – as a geek you might have a DIY automower, who knows? – you are being loved by the people around you and this is because you deserve to be loved.
I was an alcoholic too. I quit in 2004 and have been since. It was my way of escaping the fear. My mom was an evil woman. If any incident happened to me. It was my fault. The day she died in 2017 was the Best day of my life. The abuse was over. When my 1st husband forced an act sexually that I said no to. My mom knowing this said I was obligated and required to do what he wanted. When I left him he tried to kill me sabotaging my dad’s Jeep. As an art genius drawing portraits at 13. My mom was proud but when it was found out I was bipolar. I was a humiliation to her. My dad died suddenly in 2016. He was good man but wouldn’t stand up to her. My mom had cancer and died. Before she died she was going to change her will to my aunt and give the savings to her parrot. That was 300 k by the way. God’s since of humor and justice prevailed. He put her in hospice and took her before she had a chance to. I have my own house in Florida and a good supportive man who’s helped me talk and heal. As a believer God took care of me. I’m glad for every day of sobriety. 18 years this year.
I’m glad you recovered the kid that was you, and could see him as he was instead of through your parents’ eyes. Please don’t think you’re not worth loving for yourself; obviously people do. That your parents couldn’t is not your fault.
These are great words, and they ring true. And honestly they seemed… familiar.
About six months before the pandemic, I made a choice to check myself into therapy to try and solve a problem in the form of just having a sense of massive discontentment that has followed me around my whole life. I’m a deconstructionist by nature, the kid who always took the clock apart to see how it worked, and I finally put it together that I needed to take my own clock apart to discover the “why” of it, depression, anxiety, and all.
Turns out that if you look up “child of an alcoholic,” there is a picture of my face right there in both the dictionary AND probably the wikipedia entry. Throw on top of that a mother who was something of a textbook narcissist, who blamed her lack of freedom on having a child, and that indeed having that kid (me) was not something they really considered as a matter of choice, but rather just something they had to “check off” on the must-do list of life… well, it can lead to some problems.
Your words about finding that kid inside yourself and learning how to love and protect him ring very, very true. Although my problem wasn’t being shoved onto a path that wasn’t my own to validate the feelings of someone else so much as it was a very crushing level of isolation. I have no siblings, I grew up in a neighborhood in Florida where at the time the average age of the residents was like 75, and there were literally no other children. My folks also weren’t really ever that concerned with taking me across town to socialize with friends I’d made at school. Too much trouble. Time dragged. Boredom was intense to the level of torture. I guess an upside is that I developed a very active imagination to cope with the isolation, and to be my own company. Dad was either never around, or drunk to the point of being a terrifying person that I hid from. Mom was distant, unconcerned with anything other than obedience, and would use “the silent treatment” as a method of punishment. To this day, I hold those that use the withholding of love from someone as a punishment or a tool for manipulation in a great deal of contempt.
Maybe it’s a generational thing. Wil, you’re just about a year and a half older than me, and your parents response (or lack thereof) to your outreach seems to echo what I went through. The “making it about them,” thing. When I told my mother that I had got myself into therapy to try and address my depressive disorder, her very first words were, “Well, I hope you’re not blaming it all on me!” So, there you go. Familiar. I think it’s probably rooted in a good bit of shame and guilt on their part, if anything. And as anyone does, in an otherwise unexamined life, people will just respond to situations in the way that they have been conditioned. Their conditioning drove them to avoidance and denial, and a refusal to own any wrongdoing. It might be a thing that happened in the culture of the 1960’s or so, and they never thought to explore further. Also, there is the fact that the earlier iterations of the baby boomer generation and generations before tend to default to the idea that admission and addressing of a mental problem is socially unacceptable, and in fact more painful than just hiding it and pretending that it isn’t there. I say this not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it.
Wil, your ownership of your problems speaks volumes about your character. Often I have to tell people that something they’re dealing with “isn’t their fault, but it IS their problem.” It’s a frustrating thing about life in that sometimes you just have to clean up after someone else’s dog craps on your lawn, mentally metaphorically speaking. But there it is, it’s ours and only ours to deal with. Other people can’t do the work. Now that I think of it, the idea of relying on someone else to fix issues that are giving me problems would be as ridiculous as having to pee, but having a critical case of not wanting to move, and then looking for someone else to get up and go pee for me. It’s almost funny when you think of it that way.
But you’re now the captain of your own ship, because you’re making choices, and knowing that they’re yours. There’s power in owning those things. There’s strength in admitting that you messed something up, but then resolving to do something about it. I think for that, I’m very happy for you. And it’s nice to know that while we may all take these journeys by ourselves, we are not alone in taking them. You’re a good guy who got well. Keep doing good, and keep doing well. Cheers!
Thank you for sharing this with me.
I see you.
And thank you for reading. I hope that one day in the not too distant future, this version of me can hit the wave “superdeterminism” that has us sitting down over a cup of coffee to compare notes. It is, after all, only a finite improbability. You don’t need a heart of gold to see the potential…
Will,
Thank you for sharing this. All of it. I haven’t struggled with alcohol as you have. I have struggled with acknowledging that my upbringing was abusive. Hearing your story gives me confidence that estranging myself from my parents, while hard and painful, is the healthy choice for me and my children. God bless, and congratulations on the sobriety.