Every bloke’s got a story with booze. Mine stretches nearly 50 years, some wild, some messy, most of it soaked in drinking culture, mateship, and eventually quiet desperation.

I’m sharing it not for sympathy, but so maybe you can skip a few of the potholes I hit.

My earliest brush with alcohol was at 9, sneaking leftovers after Mum’s famous neighbourhood bashes. But it kicked off proper in the RAAF when I was 16. Just a bunch of young blokes in training, far from home, trying to be men. We learned to work hard and party harder. Beer wasn’t just beer it was camaraderie, currency, status, escape.

I wore the drinking badge proudly until the side effects started piling up: DUI charge, car crash, motorbike crash, broken ribs, scraped-up limbs, hungover Mondays and plenty of shame masked as the “big night.” Still, I kept ticking boxes husband, dad, instructor, contract trainer but the drinking was always there in the background, waiting for the quiet moments.

Then came the creeping losses: control, energy, memory, clarity. I was topping up my wife’s scotch bottle with water and lying to myself that things were “normal.” Gout, anxiety, 3 a.m. wake-ups and Sunday benders turned into “missing Mondays.” I was building an aeroplane while buzzed and remaking parts later when I was sober enough to see straight.

In 2007, I hit my own version of rock bottom. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a quiet, worn-out knowing: this has to stop. I tried white-knuckling it. Read the Big Book. AA didn’t feel like my fit.
 I didn’t want the label - Alcoholic. I wanted my life back.

So I went cold turkey. No pub, no life, no laughs for a while. I distracted myself with building my plane. I kept praying and counting days. I told myself: You’re not like them. You can’t drink, ever. It wasn’t easy, and I wasn’t exactly pleasant to live with, but I stuck to it.

It was an emotional roller coaster, many times I felt angry, why me, why am I the one?  But as I later learned all these emotions stemmed from the mistaken belief I was being deprived from a substance that I believed was essential to my existence. 

The years ticked by. I flew the plane I built myself. I felt proud again. And for the first time in forever, I drove through an RBT and felt free, not scared.
That one moment told me I’d crossed a line, and I wasn’t going back.

Later, I’d be tempted again, just one drink, right? Always with the FOMO. But that thought was like termites in the house. Quiet. Persistent. Dangerous.

I stayed the course. For years.

The Slip, The Struggle, The Shift

After nearly nine years sober a friend of mine suddenly passed away from cancer. I was trying to deal with the grief but I didn’t have the tools. Just raw emotion and no clue how to handle it.

So the warring noise in my head got louder. You’re broken. You’ve got a disease. You’ll never be normal. You know a drink would fix this. How could you even think that, you idiot, fool?!

For two weeks it drilled into me until I caved. I hid in my shed, cracked open two tall cans of Stella, and sobbed my heart out.
I thought the sky would suddenly darken, laced with streaks of lightning aimed at me. I mean, all the praying I’d done to stay sober but the only thing that hit me was shame. What had I done?

I kept it from my wife for weeks. Sneaky drinking had begun. Fessing up shattered her. Seven years and nine months sobriety down the drain or so it seemed.