The Quiet That Comes After The Flood

I drank for over twenty years. Every day, every hour, every ache. I didn’t drink for fun. I didn’t drink to loosen up or celebrate or take the edge off. I drank because numb was easier than real. I drank because feeling anything—memories, shame, anger, disappointment—was unbearable. I drank because the past wouldn’t die and the present felt like a performance I had no interest in starring in. I drank to erase myself, pixel by pixel, until what was left was quiet enough to survive in a world that never asked who I really was, only what I could tolerate.

Childhood taught me to disappear. I learned early that emotions were liabilities. Needs were punishable. Love was a tool used to guilt and manipulate and mold. I was raised in a house full of monologues where my voice was background noise. Where my existence was tolerated, not celebrated. I was trained to say “Okay” and “Sure” and “Alright” while my insides screamed, while my hands curled into fists under the dinner table. The emotional violence of it all was so casual, so normalized, it took decades for me to call it abuse. By the time I wore a uniform, I was already hollowed out.

The military just taught me how to weaponize the emptiness. How to endure discomfort and call it discipline. How to live with fear and loneliness and call it strength. How to smile while drowning. I did my job. I shut up. I did what I was told. For my country, for my career, for the illusion of purpose. I watched other men break and kept moving like nothing was wrong. I became the kind of man you could rely on in a crisis, because I was already dead inside and didn’t have much to lose. But no one teaches you what to do with yourself when the war ends. When the silence comes back. When all that’s left is the echo of things you can’t unsee.

Then came the marriage. Another institution. Another script. She needed a version of me that didn’t exist. I needed her to be something she could never become. We clung to each other like debris after a shipwreck, pretending it was a life raft. Sex became routine. Conversations became transactions. I watched myself become smaller every year, until I could barely see who I used to be. I was dying in real time, smiling in family photos, counting down the minutes until I could drink again. Not because she was a monster—but because I didn’t know how to be loved. Not really. Not after all that.

So I drank. Hard. Constantly. Quietly. Brandy. Whiskey. Anything that burned and muted the noise. I drank because it worked. I drank because it let me forget. I drank because the alternative—sobriety—meant facing it all: the childhood that robbed me of safety, the service that rewired my brain, the marriage that left me feeling like a guest in my own life. I drank to keep the truth underwater. And for twenty years, it stayed down there.

Until I stopped.

Three years ago, I quit. No drama. No social media posts. No daily updates. No “Day 67!” captions with inspirational quotes and sunrise selfies. I didn’t count the days out loud. I didn’t want congratulations or encouragement or public applause. I didn’t want anyone to see it, because I didn’t want anyone to see me. The battle was private. Internal. Ugly. A silent war I fought behind my eyes, in the space between breaths. Some people needed the world to know they were climbing out of hell. I just needed to know if there was anything left of me on the other side.

And when I got there—when I finally clawed my way out of the dark—I didn’t even recognize what I found. I had been drunk for twenty years. I had no idea what “me” even felt like. I had built an entire identity around sedation. Around keeping everything at arm’s length. I wasn’t just quitting drinking—I was learning how to exist. How to sit in a room without numbing it. How to feel things again without jumping out of my skin. I had to rebuild myself from memory, but the memories were fragmented, scorched, unreliable.

Sobriety didn’t hand me peace. It handed me clarity—and that was worse. Because clarity meant seeing the abuse. The manipulation. The years of living someone else’s version of life. It meant standing in the ruins of my own choices, and realizing how many of them weren’t choices at all, just reactions. Just survival. Just damage on autopilot.

But I stay sober. Because even in the brutal honesty of it all, there’s something sacred in finally seeing. There’s dignity in walking through the wreckage without numbing the sting. I don’t want to forget anymore. I want to feel the cost. I want to remember who I was before the bottle, even if that version of me is long dead. Because the man I’m becoming now—quiet, scarred, sober—is mine. Not theirs. Not the one who kept disappearing to make other people comfortable. Not the one who drank his voice away.

Just me.

Whoever that turns out to be.