I made it to the top once. Then I drank my way to the bottom without noticing the slope.
I had my first drink in grade eight. By my twenties I was running businesses, training Muay Thai, getting on planes — and drinking through all of it. For a long time it looked like it was working. I built a real company, scaled it past a hundred staff, and sold it. From the outside, I'd made it.
What nobody could see was the slope. The fall isn't a cliff — it's a gradient. One drink, one excuse, one 'I've earned it' at a time. I went from training and building to drinking on a rooftop with a laptop, telling myself I was still the bloke who was at the top. I wasn't. The drink had been quietly feeding my head bad things for years.
The turn didn't come from a doctor or a program. It came from sitting in all the freedom in the world — money in, no boss, nobody to answer to — and realising I'd torched the health, the hobbies and the people that were supposed to make any of it mean something. So I put the bottle down. For good. Not a break. Done.
I poured the last one out on camera. That's why the profile shot is me tipping a can onto the ground — I turned the worst of it into the line in the sand. Day one again, in the open, where I can't quietly negotiate my way back.
This page is everything I'm working out about staying sober: the decision itself, the brutal early days, the triggers nobody warns you about, and the slow rebuild of an identity that isn't soaked in it. If you're standing at the bottom of your own slope, this is the rung I'm on too.