“It was easy to stop drinking. It's hard to stay stopped.” Shannon Describes His Recovery Journey
I remember other people's grief a lot. And over time, I started to lose friends to suicide, alcoholism. When I'm in cold water, I'm in the present. I don't brood on the past and I don't, you know, sit there and try to negotiate a future I don't know about. I'm right there where I'm supposed to be.
My name is Shannon. I'm in the U.S. Army. I'm a 351 Lima counterintelligence chief warrant officer, and I joined in March of 1990. The Army was literally kind of my last choice. College wasn't really a consideration, so I joined the Army. Since I spent most of the time in the desert, very hot, very thirsty, a lot of beer drinking. I was young, I grew up in the military. Once September 11th occurred, the paradigm kind of shifted. I was recruited to join intelligence from my military police unit, and my first deployment was to Herat, Afghanistan. And that I did as a counterintelligence agent that was enlisted at the time. It was the impending fear of things worse than death. And right before I deployed, my mother died. She died of brain cancer. That was pretty hard. Then I started to drink. And that's what was my primary coping mechanism. You get questionnaires on how you're doing, and I knew what the answers that would send me into a treatment center. So those were the answers I am not going to answer honestly. And a lot of my peer group was in the same boat as me, and so it was a bunch of sick people trying to help sick people.
I had met another military member and she had helped me a lot. And then we developed a relationship. She got pregnant, we had a kid, but I was still paying for all of like this wreckage. There was a lot more drinking and things going on on deployments near the end. She really understood what was going on with me, but kind of was like, ‘You've got to handle this.’ And so I hit the Vet centers. I received a PTSD diagnosis with panic anxiety disorder and acute alcoholism. This time around, I have been sober for eight years, going on nine. It was easy to stop drinking. It's hard to stay stopped. As someone who has a drinking disorder, my natural state is to be using that substance or delving into that behavior. That's my natural state. So when I use a process, I have to surrender 100% to that process, because if I have just an inkling that I can just go back to the behavior, I mean, it happens to us in basic training, you have to submit to the instruction. It takes trust. But once the trust is given, then the trust is usually returned. The struggle is real, but the struggle is rewarding. And I immediately started going to group meetings with other men, other Veterans, and just started to… It was liberating.
I ended up finding a group that I really liked, and then I got introduced to other activities, and that's when I was introduced to open water swimming, and that changed my life exponentially. That's my group, they’re a Veteran group. A lot of them are Veterans, they're people who've been touched by Veterans. I like watching them, when that light goes on. Of, you're out in the middle of the bay between the pier and between Alcatraz Island, and you see them look up and look around like, ‘Man, I'm really doing this.’ And it's like, yeah, you're really doing this. I remember thinking that my combat experience was the only shared experience I had for a minute, and I realize now that there's lots of shared experiences with all people from everywhere, and that makes me feel part of a lot more. It's a scientific and medical fact that humans, when left alone, will die alone. It's not in our ethos to give up, it's in our ethos to go on. So, sit down and start talking.
