2nd Share

What Had Happened

A note before I start: this talks about addiction, an overdose, and suicidal thinking. If that's hard for you today, take care of yourself.

My name is Joey, and I'm an alcoholic and an addict, and a proud member of the Westside men's group.

Since this is Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm going to use the word Adderall in a lot of places where you might expect alcohol. The two did the same thing to me, so feel free to swap the word in your head as you read. Either way, here's the short version of my history: I found alcohol, drank too much, and abused it. I found drugs, took too much, and abused them. I found weed, smoked too much, ate too much, and abused that too. Over and over again. All of it led to a place that was pitiful and almost impossible to describe. But for me that demoralization dragged on for years, and the reason it dragged on was the Adderall.

The first pill

I knew something was going to happen the first time I took it. The doctors who prescribed it told me I might be on it for the rest of my life. My mind was racing constantly. My hands moved too fast to write, my speech came out jumbled, and I got frustrated all the time. The Adderall seemed to fix every bit of that.

I took that first pill in the summer of 2014, and my life changed completely. I could focus. I could hold a conversation. I could be perceived as normal, and for the first time I felt normal. That first year was perfect.

Then my doctor decided to take me off of it to balance me out. So I went from a very high stimulant to nothing. One night I was frustrated about something. My family had gone out to dinner without me. I don't fully know how I ended up where I ended up, but I grabbed the bottle and took five times the amount I was supposed to take. My heart rate jumped from around 80 to about 230. I was awake for roughly 36 hours. My mom cried and screamed that I was going to die, and she didn't know what to do, because it was too late for my body to throw any of it up.

That was my purple dragon. That moment of holy crap, this is amazing, I could feel like this all the time. From that point on, I abused the Adderall through high school, through college, with friends, without friends, at home, at the computer trying to be productive. Constantly.

The walls closing in

This went on until February of 2025. My grandparents had passed away, and they left their cash in my mom's closet. I took some of it and started acting like the biggest man in town. Buying food for my friends, going out for drinks, going out to strip clubs, doing everything I wasn't supposed to do. My mom found that money. I was also doing petty theft at my job at Target, a job I loved, but the thrill of taking something they didn't really need anymore was its own kind of high. I kept at it until I could feel the walls closing in there too.

My mom asked me in a very stern voice if I had taken the money. I said yes. I told her I would pay it back, but the damage was already done. Somebody at a seminar put it better than I ever could: you take your parents' peace of mind. That's exactly what I did. My mom didn't feel safe in her own home and didn't know what I was going to do next. My sister, all the way out in Utah, didn't know when she'd get the call that Joey had gone off again, screaming and breaking things. My dad couldn't stop meeting me for breakfast interventions.

I could tell you I was struggling, that the whole world was caving in on me. The truth is I was lounging by the pool having the best time of my life, doing nothing and facing no consequences. Then my mom said it plainly: your insurance runs out at the end of the year, you need to go to rehab. My therapist said the same thing. She told me I could work on all the self development I wanted, but the Adderall was the problem, and I needed to fix the addiction first.

Walking in

With that little bit of support behind me, I walked into recovery for the first time on June 9th, 2025.

Here's what had happened. My life got saved by my mom talking to me. It got saved by people believing there was one last hope for me. And I have God to thank for giving me that chance, because my heart still can't handle stress the way it used to after that overdose, and I still tremor to this day even without coffee.

Early on I was dazed and confused, because Adderall withdrawal lasts for months. Every day I was trying to process information the way I used to and just couldn't. I'd come home and crash. I was detoxing at home rather than in a center, so some nights I felt high and good, and other nights I cried so hard I'd soak my pillow.

The first thing they taught me in rehab was PAWS, post acute withdrawal syndrome. Your emotions go up, then down, then up, then down, and all you can do is pray it eventually levels off. It didn't at first. But about a month and a half in, I met the people in these rooms, and things started to turn.

Being present

I got an early pass to fly out to Utah and visit my family. I remember being fully present with my nephews, them knowing I was actually there with them. Not on my computer, not buried in my book, just with them. They're my de facto kids. I love them. There are two of them now, one and a half years old, with a third on the way, a baby girl. I am the happiest uncle in the world, and I get to be that uncle sober. They will never have to see me high or drunk. Maybe one day I'll be ready for kids of my own. Jury's still out on that one.

I came back with new energy and new hope that life could actually be better. I could start repairing things with my dad. We've been strained for a long time after the physical fights in my office, the tussles, the screaming arguments at breakfast places, but I could start to respect him again. And my mom could start to trust me again. Six months after I left rehab, in December, she went on another trip to Utah and trusted me with the house. The money was long gone, for good reason, but she trusted me not to throw too many parties or burn the place down. I didn't.

The steps

In July, I asked someone to be my first sponsor. I approached him barely knowing what AA even was. I could read the steps out loud with a lot of enthusiasm, but I had no idea what any of it actually meant. I just knew that to stay in the club with all these new friends, these people I love, I had to do the steps. So I figured, okay, let's do that.

We did step three at his house, and I felt an electric energy run through me when someone told me it was okay, that nothing I had done was any worse than what anyone else had done. The pressure lifted. I felt better.

Then came step four, and I procrastinated for months. Eventually I went to him and said it wasn't quite working, that I wanted to keep him as a spiritual sponsor and ask someone else to be my working sponsor. He told me he'd seen it coming for a while, but that he was proud of me for having the courage to say it out loud and do it formally. I didn't want to leave him behind, because the family connections run deep. His wife and I met in rehab. He got sober in Little River, where my uncle also got sober, and the two of them were close. I actually rode with him just last Wednesday to give my uncle his 37 year medallion, and it was a beautiful thing to watch. Now I'm collecting my one year medallion, so we get to celebrate together every year.

Working the next steps, I saw it clearly. Everything had been about me. I was self centered, dishonest, and I manipulated everything. I'm a writer. I manipulate things for fun. I build worlds and move the people in them around and play with their emotions. I did the exact same thing with my own life, and it wasn't serving me. It took a lot of phone calls with my self development sponsor to realize that all the pressure and the expectations I kept piling onto myself were just future resentments waiting to happen.

Showing up

I was working at Walmart and I was the happiest Walmart employee alive, because I had a job that made me feel good. Then I had a couple of bad days, started showing up a little late and leaving a little early, and they let me go. I said okay.

A while later I showed up to the Westside Men's group in a suit, fresh off an interview at Best Buy. A gentleman there said he was looking for someone to run his office and asked if I was interested. I said sure. So now I work for someone in the program. The program and my life are melded together, and I couldn't be more thankful for the peace and serenity it's given me, and for the chance to be okay with not being okay.

Because I'm not perfect. I still mess up. The last time was this past Mother's Day, which I spent with my dad's side of the family instead of with my mom. She was hurt, and I didn't realize it until I asked her to do a Mother's Day dinner too late. We talked about it. I apologized and promised to do better next time. The old me, the using me, would have screamed her out of the room, out of the whole neighborhood. There was no talking to me back then. It was do what I need to do and everyone else can go to hell. I was an asshole. I wouldn't even let friends call me before 11am, because the Adderall made me too productive to be interrupted.

As for alcohol, I was a drunk, and a happy one. But I knew that if I only cut out the Adderall, I'd just lean on weed and drinking to fill the same hole. So I cut off all three at once. And whenever I feel really bad, I run to a meeting. People showed up to support me at all three of mine, and I can't thank them enough. This room is sobriety. This is the fellowship. Taco Tuesday is the fellowship I look forward to every single week, a place where I can be myself and not wear a mask.

Because I'm a performer. I did debate, I did DECA, I did all the things where you put on a mask, until putting it on became automatic. I was always telling people I was great, life was great, everything was great, when none of it was. Things could be falling apart at home, my finances in disarray, my health in disarray, and my mental health was never okay.

Off the meds

I'll end on the Adderall. To counteract it, they had me on five more medications, including propranolol for my heart, and even another stimulant to balance the first one out. That was the so called stable equilibrium. Once the Adderall was gone, I was able to get off all of them but one.

I'm not a doctor, so to any medical people reading this, please do not take instructions from me. But for me, with my doctors supervising, I came off almost everything. My doctor looked at me and said, wow, you gained weight in a safe way, you're eating, you're sleeping a little better, how? I told her: off the Adderall, and AA. That's it. She told me to keep it up.

I've had a whole team of experts, a cardiologist, mental health, my regular doctor, all trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It turned out it was just in my head. And I'll keep learning and keep adapting.

A week from today I hit my one year anniversary. I am so thankful, and so much kinder to myself than I used to be, that all of this has happened and that so much has changed. I look forward to taking meetings everywhere, being everywhere, and being of service to the thing that gave me this life for free.

Thank you for letting me be here.