Summer '23: Blacking Out A Perfect Summer

At the time, I thought my summer in 2023 was the best summer of my life. I was living in Chicago, had what I thought was my dream job, was living in a city with people that I considered friends, became super close with my roommate, was working out daily, rekindled a relationship with my ex girlfriend. Everything seemed amazing.

The one thing I didn't mention was that everyday after my workout, after work, I would take a Xanax, have a glass of wine or a beer and blackout for the rest of the night. I did this for 3 straight months. That was my escape.

I viewed the combination of Xanax and alcohol as perfect. It was what I had been looking for my whole life. A way to truly escape and not feel anything. I was basically not alive from the time I took it until I woke up the next morning.

It was passive suicide.

The first time I tried Xanax was in my freshman year of college. I fell in love with the drug. On about my fifth time in as many days, I remember blacking out during the 2021 NFC championship game. Not remembering watching this game was a big deal for me because I was a massive sports fan and this was one of the biggest games of the year.

That's when I realized my relationship to Xanax was not going in the right direction. I told myself the next day that I would never touch them again. I liked them too much and evidently it was interfering with my life.

Right before summer 2023, I broke up with my girlfriend. I was in a really bad place. It didn't take much for one of my friends to convince me that we were going to have what we called a "bean night". That was the first night of what would end up being a 3 month bender.

While I was in it, I didn't see it as a bender because I had most parts of my life under control. As the summer went on though, I began to lose more and more of this perceived control I had.

The first sign of this loss of control was that my tolerance started to build up. To combat this, I started ingesting the pills differently. I started to snort them because I thought this would be the best bang for my buck rather than taking more. The pills that I was getting were street pressed, non prescription. I was buying them off of a random guy that I didn't know. I never tested these pills, anything could have been in them. I didn't know how dangerous what I was doing was at the time.

A couple of other things happened consecutively towards the end of the summer that made me realize that maybe I didn't have it as together as I thought I did. One night, I invited one of my close friends to a Drake concert. For those of you that don't know, I live for Drake and honestly that's an understatement. I took a Xanax before I went into the concert. It made no sense as I was going to a place that I would have wanted to remember yet I took this drug that was going to make me forget. And forget I did, I don't even remember the first song that was played. The night ended with me in classic fashion taking my anger out on my friend, calling him all sorts of names, making fun of his girlfriend and so on. At least that was what was told to me by another friend because like I said, I didn't remember any of it. The next morning, I went to work and I was still piss drunk. I walked into the office and my boss smelled it on me right away. I kept dozing off at my desk. He told me I should go into the locker room to sleep it off. Five minutes after I went into the locker room, some guy I had never seen before told me I should probably just go home. Instead of making a change or doing something different, I took more Xanax as soon as I got home to numb the shame and guilt that came with this experience.

At the end of the summer, I was really hoping to get a return offer for a full-time position at this company once I graduated. That did not happen. In the moment, I could not figure out why. I got praised the whole summer by my bosses and even got the maximum bonus that an intern can get at the end of it. It didn't make any sense to me. I can now see that my behaviour was not what they were looking for in a prospective full-time employee and they decided to go in a different direction.

By the end of the summer, my roommate that I had gotten very close with stopped hanging out with me because he saw first hand my relationship with this drug. My other friends though, did not see it to the fullest extent yet. That was until I moved in with them when I got back to school after the summer.

My time living with them was cut short when one day that we had a home football game and tailgate, I took my first Xanax at around 6:00 am. Needless to say, by the time game-time rolled around I no longer had control of anything that I was doing and don't remember any of it. I went nuclear on the people I called my friends, I treated them awfully, similarly to the way I did after the Drake concert. They tried doing me a favour by taking away my drugs so that I didn't take more which would have been dangerous. When I found this out, I exploded. When I came to, I was in the withdrawal phase, the come down. I remember immediately calling my dad threatening him that unless he told my friends to give me back my drugs then I would kill myself.

That was the last day I ever took Xanax. That morning, I woke up with so much shame and guilt that I immediately left my apartment, checked into a hotel and started looking at other living arrangements. I couldn't show my face back in that room.

I thought that was my rock bottom. In the moment it surely felt that way. I did not think that I could get lower than that.

That was the beginning of what would end up being an 8 month long isolation.

I replaced the Xanax with alcohol and isolated myself in that hotel room for 7 days before I found a different apartment that I could move into. When I got into that apartment, my coke addiction took off like a fighter jet.

That's a story for a different time.