No problem. Doctors, insurance companies, and Big Pharma profit by overprescribing these types of pain killers. I took it for two to three days, and it made me loopy, so I stopped and just took Advil. Kids can steal it. A spouse can abuse it.
Having all of these highly addictive opioids and other pain killers around is more of a gateway problem to addictions of all kinds than marijuana ever could be. I found that when I walked into sobriety, I had problems in my life. The minute I stopped and put a cork in the bottle, 50 of those problems immediately went away.
It a literal impossibility! And then you keep going down the road. Within a few short months, I stopped lying. Over the course of the next 15 years of sobriety, 45 more problems went away. It took a while in some cases, but a lot of changes went down in my life, all for the better.
Yet somehow, every year when I was taking inventory—talking to my people that I work with, talking to my family, talking to my friends—I would see that there were five problems that kept popping up all the time.
I believe that for most people who have my kind of story, you stay sober a long time and a lot of shit gets better, but there a couple little things that are still there. I have found that it takes a very concentrated, focused effort in later years of sobriety to really target those things and pursue a higher plane of wellness. One or two more of those problems went away, and I found myself at 20 years sober just unable to shake those last two or three things.
They were causing me problems in life because I no longer had a hundred issues that would pop up in different combinations, I just had three. It was like having much higher-caliber weaponry.
When those problems exploded, there was more collateral damage. In some cases, being sober is being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
So, I started to talk to people about this. I worked with a therapist for a couple months. He uncovered some trauma and intimacy issues that were at the core of these three problems. Every year I started going to the Meadows , or to Onsite , or back to Hazelden , where I first went to treatment. There are dozens and dozens more great wellness centers around the country that do ongoing workshopping for people who are confronting all kinds of issues in their lives.
I just happen to have a special place in my heart for Hazelden, the Meadows, and Onsite. I think everyone—every man , all my male friends—could benefit from doing intimacy and trauma work at the Meadows. These things are remarkable tools. Trauma is transmitted from generation to generation: from my grandparents, to my parents, to me. I want to transform that trauma, because that trauma has shame associated with it.
Of all the human feelings, shame, I believe, is the most toxic. I still have challenges in those departments, but no longer do I feel powerless. I now have a solution for how to deal with all of that—the same way I learned solutions to deal with my chemicals and booze.
And I call this whole jumble of stuff emotional sobriety. You said that all your male friends in particular would benefit from working through these kinds of issues. Within your industry, chefs have these stereotyped personas of being these masculine, heavy-drinking, pack-a-day-smoking party-goers.
Is there something about the food and beverage industry that either attracts or incubates those kinds of personalities? I had my professional life during the day. I had my life with my friends that I was desperately trying to hold onto. Then I had my secret after-three-in-the-morning life.
You go out to a show; you go to a bar. But then everyone has had enough and goes home. And all of that caught up with me. Everyone had had enough. So after I got evicted, I put a bunch of my stuff in storage with the last of my money then went to the Blarney Stone and started drinking with the same drunks who were always there at two in the morning.
They told me to go talk to Bobby. Now Bobby was part of a bottle gang. When the Blarney Stone would close for a couple of hours, people would buy a bottle at the all-night liquor store and drink in the alley around the corner. Bottle gangs were fairly prevalent then, and they still are. So that night I took my duffel bag with some clothes and some of my possessions and slept in this abandoned building on Sullivan Street.
It was a townhouse that was in the midst of being renovated. Work had stopped. Actually, demolition is more like it; renovation is a little too fancy a term.
There were concrete casements in the windows. There was electricity that had been pirated from a nearby building across the roof with extension cords. And there was a sink with running water, so you could drink water. Thus began my year of homelessness.
Every night, I slept on a pile of dirty clothes on the floor that I called my bed. And I thought that was OK and normal. And I just kept falling further and further down. I would steal purses off the backs of chairs in bistros on the Upper East Side and bring them downtown to drug dealers to sell the credit cards and passports for money.
That was my life. I convinced myself that the easiest way to deal with the guilt, the shame, the unaddressed trauma going back to my childhood would be to drink until my body broke down.
So I stole some jewelry from my godmother, hawked it, got a little pile of cash and checked into this hotel called the San Pedro, a grade above a flophouse. I never actually broke into the third case. I started drinking around the clock and blacking out. I felt a desperate need to reach out to someone. I called my friend Clark, who was shocked to hear from me.
He came down and got me out of there. Unbeknownst to me, he was already planning my intervention. Some people wanted to say some stuff to me. I had a choice and a plane ticket to Minnesota. And everybody wanted me to get on that plane and go get help. The most caring and compassionate thing that you can do for another human being is sprinkle them with dignity and respect, and show them that you love them.
It was an incredible act of profound kindness. All the quit had left me. I had always been fighting everything my whole life. One of the hallmarks of recovery is that at some point, you have to bottom out, and I really bottomed out that day. People want to help other people. I had thousands of life jackets thrown to me while I was drowning, and I just kept throwing them back in the boat. The first couple days, I was on the medical board while they detoxed me and made sure I was physically safe enough to go to a unit.
When I got down to my unit, I was so ready to be done with this phase of my life that I just said yes to everything. I attended every group. I attended every lecture. And I found myself with a solution put in front of me very quickly: the step program. Everything in the literature, everything people were telling me was that my success really hinged on a relationship with something bigger than myself. It could be the great spirit, it could be a tree, it could be the ocean.
And one thing everyone had in common was that they had stopped living their life on a me-me-me basis and started living in an other-centered fashion. My whole life, I thought there was nothing bigger than me, which was pointed out to me many times during those first couple weeks in treatment.
All I had to do was look at my own story. My best thinking and acting had gotten me to this horrific place in my life where I had bottomed out, crashed, almost died — and wanted to die. I could admit I had a problem and that my life was unmanageable, but the idea that something other than me was going to help me get well was like Greek mythology. He's a man who has lived his life in service of others. Andrew Zimmern: It depends on which one you buy. There are more humble ones and then there are flashier ones—especially through the big numbers.
When you see three Xs there in Roman numerals on a coin you think of the horrific black hole you crawled out of quite some time ago, it's kind of crazy. I turned 60 this year, so mathematically that gives me half of my life clean. It's a time of great perspective. I was homeless in New York. I was living in an abandoned building. I was stealing purses and stuff like that, you know, petty thievery to get by. I was a user of people.
It occurred to me one night, I'm sleeping on a pile of dirty clothes on the floor and I'm thinking to myself, well, there are winners and losers in life. I had lost a lot so that means I'm a loser.
And I really was overwhelmed with this feeling of not going on. I took the bold action of stealing some things, hawking some things, and putting together a couple of hundred dollars into a a pathetic little war chest.
Then I checked into a hotel that doesn't exist anymore called the San Pedro. It was one of the last kind of flophouse hotel—a terrible place. There was a liquor store across the street and I'd bought a couple of cases of Popov vodka. I ripped the phone cord out of the wall and just started drinking around the clock. My goal was to drink myself to death. I truly just didn't want to exist anymore. I came to less than three, no more than four, days later. I plugged in the cord in the wall and called a friend and asked for help.
That was something that I had never done before in my life. I called a friend and he said, "Where are you? He kept me at his house for 48 hours and he said I should have a cup of coffee with this friend of his. I agreed just to keep him happy. That was my last intervention. Some friends drove me to the airport; literally walked me on the plane. I had a one way ticket to Minnesota. That was the evening of January 28th, I was on the hospital unit [at treatment] and a meeting was brought in by volunteers.
My first real [voluntary] meeting was the very first night that I was transitioned to a halfway house. A bunch of people were going to this meeting in Saint Paul and asked me to join them. I knew that I was required to go to a meeting every day, and I went. There was three feet of snow on the ground and there was a plowed path about 50 feet in front of a house that was set back on this avenue.
And there was this stunningly dressed, older woman with a tweed skirt and matching jacket and a kind of a throw over shoulders. She just looked so classy and I remember having no self-esteem and feeling slovenly. Step two: get jobs in media so I could learn how to do this thing," explains Zimmern. He took jobs working for free at the local radio station, magazine and TV station. At the same time, Zimmern kept pitching show ideas to Food Network and was rejected repeatedly.
Then he had "a true epiphany. The "Bizarre Foods" host has tasted some interesting culinary treats in his travels to more than countries, but can still appreciate a good burger and fries.
That idea transformed into " Bizarre Foods " and debuted on Travel Channel in The series is still going strong today, as is Zimmern's quest to remain clean. On January 28, he will enter his 26th year of sobriety. Channeled in the right way the boundless energy that I had as an addict and alcoholic has become a tremendous part of my success. Much of that energy is focused on helping others battling addiction and homelessness.
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