The Winding Road Of Sobriety

Finally, the story of a young man’s journey to sobriety, a path that for many is filled with ups and downs. Here’s Casey Brogan with his story.

I was born with PDD, which is pervasive developmental disorder. I developed physically and mentally a lot slower than other kids, and it required a lot of intense physical therapy. Back then, in the nineties, there was a study that it was just coming out about how to treat that disorder. It really hadn’t been used much. I think I was like the first person in my area to undergo that form of therapy. I had all the components to have a good childhood, but none of the mental ability to be able to enjoy it. I had loving parents; we grew up with a lot of money, but I was, I was miserable because I’d spend my whole day at school, and then I would go home and I would be in physical therapy or mental therapy. Everything in my life as a child was about being outside of my comfort zone because I was so far behind everyone else that if I was comfortable, not only was I not progressing, I wasn’t catching up either. It was very frustrating. But without it, doctors at the time said, I would have been fortunate enough to have said Mom and Dad by eighteen, and with the emotional issues that came with it.

I didn’t have a lot of friends. In fact, I alienated a lot of people as a kid. I just didn’t know how to process emotions and feelings. So everything from happiness to sadness to anger, I felt. It’s like it’s most extreme. My parents said I was a sweet kid, but I was very easily agitated. Anything could set me off because basic developmental disorder falls on the autism spectrum, so I had problems losing. I had problems with people not saying the things I wanted them to say. Everything would just snowball me into these over-the-top extreme reactions, made me a nightmare to be around.

By the age of nine or ten, I think is when it’s I started catching up. I never fully caught up. Even to this day, I still feel like I’m playing catch up in a lot of areas. I didn’t really start to come into my own until I started playing sports. Swimming was the sport that helped with my confidence a considerable amount. That was what I did. I went to school, and then I swam all day, and then I went to bed. And it was easy to have that structure. I didn’t have to think about what I had to do. I just, I just did everything blindly, and then I sound something I was really passionate about.

My junior year of high school, when I was enrolled in a film program as part of a dual enrollment with my school, which was a technical school, I barely passed senior year, I barely graduated, and I went to college. I only lasted about two semesters because I was drinking so much and smoking a lot of weed and sleeping in and not going to classes. I had gotten this idea of college because when I was, when I was a kid not being able to emotionally relate to people. When people can’t emotionally relate to other people, they bond to something that gives them that social fulfillment, and for me, that was movies and television. So I learned a lot about life from movies and TV, and I understood as a concept, you know, life is not like the movies. But I never really fully asked that in the back of my mind. So I had this idea of what college was going to be. I just forgot the part where you study and learn.

I ended up dropping out. I drifted around for a while, number of odd jobs. I worked at a news station for a while, and it was an extremely stressful job, and doing live shows and everything I was. I was an editor for them. I would cut together b-roll footage and uploaded into the system. Then I would also assistant direct the shows, like running the audio and playing the clips. All that. It was extremely stressful, and I’ve though I don’t think there was a day that goes by that someone wasn’t yelling at someone, if not me. Growing up with my disorders makes me extremely emotional, extremely susceptible to loud noises, and a lot of anxiety. So in order to deal with that anxiety, I would, I started drinking.

At one point, I had a bottle of vodka in my car and all my breaks from work. You we’d get done with the stressful show, I got to my car and I’d drink, and then I’d come back in and work. Once I quit the news station, I started working for my local church. I also got into my first relationship, which was really toxic looking back on it, we ended up breaking up. When I got into that relationship, I really stopped drinking, and like a crazy person, love kind of filled that void that I was trying to fill inside of myself for a while, but it was like it was like a plug in the bathtub. But once that was taken out, the floodwaters came rushing in.

So when I got out of that relationship, I started working at a local pizzeria in my hometown. I didn’t even realize it at the time, but it was in the middle of a large amount of bars, the central haven cocaine, and the pizzeria I worked at. Every single employee did cocaine almost every night, if not during their shift. We’d wait for the boss man to leave and then it was all hats off. We were doing shots, doing blow. That was all fun and good at first, and it was really, it was really feeling that void for a while. That was left by when my girlfriend and I broke up. So I would stay out all night because I missed her, and I was incredibly depressed, and I thought drugs were the answer to that reality. They were just fueling that depression, and I developed a really, really bad cocaine problem that lasted lasted up until a year ago.

My whole personality changed. I was starting to revert back to things that I would do, feel, and say when I was a child. I felt my mind regressing, too. That’s that state of, you know, the worst of my developmental disease. When I was younger, I started not having any threshold for with patience, or anxiety, or anger. I just ever just felt like everything was right on the surface. All the negative emotions I felt so deeply, but when it came to anything beneficial, like happiness, I felt so numb to it. I ended up losing my job at the church. You know, I couldn’t control my temper.

When I started off, I never thought I had a problem with anything, and then going into it like, okay, I might. It went from I don’t have a problem too, Okay, I might have a problem too. I definitely have a problem, but I don’t care too. I have a problem, and I care. But that took five years for that development to happen. So, in the grand scheme of my life, these are the I am going to eventually have to go to rehab. I am going to eventually have to deal with that. But this is still the fun phase, Like I can still enjoy this phase before I have to get serious and my life is essentially over. You know, the party will be over eventually, so I might as well enjoy the party as long as I can, because this is a problem and it will develop and it will come to a head and will ruin my life, but not today.

Towards the end of my career at the P three I worked at, a friend came over, and he was having a bad night, so we drank a lot, and I was sitting there on the couch. My friend was literally on the floor as passed out, black-out drunk. You couldn’t wake him up, could slap him, could pick him up. Nothing. Gone. And I was sitting there on the couch alone again, and I got it into my head that it would a good idea to take my whole bottle of antidepressants and see what was going to happen. In my mindset, it was either I’m gonna, I’m gonna get really high, or I’m gonna die. Either way, I don’t care, which looking back on it doesn’t really make sense because it wasn’t the type of medication that would even get you high. I don’t know what I was thinking of. It’s very drunk, so I didn’t carry the way. So I took all of it. And my Mom came home later, fortunately, and she saw that the pill bottle was out and it was empty. I ended up throwing up on my own just from all the drinking.

We still went to the hospital. From there, I my Mom sent me into a psych ward, where I stayed for a week. For anyone who hasn’t been in a psych ward, really don’t recommend it. It’s, there is absolutely nothing to do, and everyone else is crazy. Literally that’s why they’re there. So there’s not much room for conversation. But you’re expected to be up and be alive and walk around and be happy in this miserable, horrible environment. Because at first, when I was in the psych ward, all I was doing was sleeping all day because it was all there was to do. Was I was hoping that if I passed enough time that I would get out of there. But in order to get out of a psych ward, a doctor has to deem you medically fit to leave. Sleeping all day was not appealing to them as far as it was releasing me. Yeah. So eventually I got out of that. He went right back to my old ways.

I went to rehab a total of three times. First time I went to rehab, came out, started drinking immediately, immediately. It’s like, oh god, that was awful. I need a beer. Didn’t mind a thing. Yeah. The first time I went to rehab was just because, you know, my cocaine addiction was so bad. I was spending all of my money, and my parents told me, okay, you’re going to rehab in a week. So I was like, okay, so I’ve got a week to party, is the way I saw it. And then they realize that, and they’re like, no, you’re going today. So they sent me. So they sent me straight there the second time I went. The first time I went was for thirty days. The second time I went for for two months. It was really beneficial. I was really taking care of myself. Two or three months after I left three hal, I was back out again, drinking and using cocaine again.

I was in a program called Narcotics anonyment, which I guess it makes me not anonymous anymore. Narcotics Anonymous is a great program. One of the things they’ll tell you is that there’s this pink, fluffy cloud of sobriety. It’s when you’re super happy to be sober because you’ve been miserable for so long. It’s nice to just feel normal, and you’re really excited because it’s all the new stuff. It’s, you know, it’s going to meetings, it’s going to groups, it’s self-improvement, it’s the sponsor, it’s calling a sponsor, it’s having all these new friends. But it all wears off. Eventually, meetings get tedious to go to, and working steps becomes a chore. There’s something in Narcotics anonyment. It’s called the efforts when eventually, you know, we know everything’s good for us and everything’s gonna work out if we do this. But, if it, I want to get high. That’s that. So what triggered it was, was coming off that pink, fluffy cloud, realizing I just wanted to drink. All my friends were going out. Why can’t I? I was, I was a child again. You can’t have this. No, but you don’t understand, I want it. So that’s, so that’s what triggered it.

The second time that led to probably the worst my addiction had ever gotten. I lived in an apartment in Saint Petersburg, Florida. I had moved all my stuff out of my Mom’s place and put it in that tiny little studio apartment, and I was always like, okay, today’s the day. I’m going to sort through everything. That day never came. It looked like a hoarder’s apartment, the stuff all over, and all I was doing was I was sleeping. I was getting up in the morning, crawling over these mounds of stuff, getting dressed for work, going to work, driving home to Sarasota, buying cocaine, coming back, doing cocaine, and going to bed. And that was what I did almost every day for a year. And the apartment got so bad, there was, there was cockroaches everywhere. I sat in such a deep depression, I just had no ability to care for myself outside of basic functions like brushing your teeth or showering, making sure my clothes were clean, to my outward appearance to the world would still be semidecent, whereas the reality of my life was much worse. I had ended up eventually having asked my parents for help with that apartment, and it was probably one of the worst days of my life because no one had seen of how I was living for an entire year until that day, and that it was the most shame I’ve ever felt, was showing them how bad it had gotten in my life. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t hoarding in the sense it was like I didn’t want to throw things out. It was hoarding in the sense it was just I had a bunch of stuff, and I just didn’t care. I didn’t care that the inside of my house looked like that. I didn’t care that there was all this stuff. I didn’t care for the stuff. I just didn’t care to move. It just complete apathy for everything in life.

So I was able to move out of there, and I moved back in with my Mom, and I felt like such a failure because it was the first time besides college that I had ever lived away from home, and it could not have gone any worse. So I moved back in with my Mom for a while, and that was going horribly. I moved to Saint Petersburg again, and I lived with an old high school friend of mine and another roommate, and we lived in this house. He had a roommate that was a big part ar. He was a young kid; he was like eighteen, nineteen. He attracted a bad crowd to the apartment, and I would start drinking with them. Then they would start asking if I wanted things, which I always did. I would take anything anyone gave to me. Someone put something in my hand, I would do it without question.

The cocaine use led into the use of method feeding, means I started using meth very heavily over the course of a three-month period. Although my cocaine addiction lasted for four or five years, my meth addiction only lasted for two or three very, very intense months, where I barely slept. I mean barely slept. I would go an entire week without sleeping, and even then it would only be for about an hour. I wrote so much in that time. I thought, this is the best druggther I am soductive, I’m writing so much. And then once it got over, I went back and I read through it, and it’s the worst stuff you’ll ever read. It’s so poorly written and just not convoluted. My health was decaying so rapidly. I wasn’t sleeping. I was just going to work and then going home, and you know, sitting in a dark room for eight hours, and it’s like, okay, time to go back to work. It’s funny now looking back on it, it was very sad at the time. That’s what led me to the final time I ever asked for help from my parents.

I put my, I just want to say I’ve, I’ve put my parents through absolute hell, and I’m never gonna live that down. It will forever be the biggest regret of my Life’s, what I’ve done to my parents in my lifetime. So, my Mom in-depth researched a bunch of rehabilitation facilities because the facilities we’ve gone who hadn’t been working. And it’s not so much that they hadn’t been working, and said I hadn’t been working at it, but we had to find something better and different and far away because my parents didn’t want me home. They wanted me to go far away and not to come back. That was the goal. Eventually they stumbled upon a rehabilitation facility in Etta, Mississippi. So, a week after she found that, packed my bag has gone on a plane in Mississippi, and there I was. And for the next month I was in a beautiful facility in the mountains, and then I moved to treatment facility in Oxford, Mississippi, which is the next step of the program, and I’d lived there for two months. It was kind of, it’s like you’ve attended classes for the first half of the day, and then there were some classes in the second half, but if you were, there were different levels, and if you were a later level, if you’ve been there for long enough, you didn’t have to attend classes, and then the later half the day you were actually encouraged to find a job.

So I started working at a local restaurant Oxford. After working at the restaurant, I moved from Resolutions to a halfway house. It’s like a normal house. You live with a bunch of guys. The only thing is that there’s accountability. You have to be home at a certain time. You have to be able to pass a drug test randomly and a breathalyzer every night. You have to do x amount of community service, have a full-time job. It’s a lot, but it’s necessary. It’s stay busy, not have idle hands. As I was. As I was living at the halfway house, there was this, there’s this looming event at the place I worked, which was our Christmas party, which was all-inclusive party where they took all the tips that one of the go register made, and they compiled it all into a party at a local bar and Oxford where all the drinks were free. It was October. There was November. It’s like it’s a game closer and closer, and I was like, I know I can’t do as I know I can’t go. I can’t go.

So I’ve been living in that halfway house for three months. I, like most addicts, came up with an extremely devious plan where I was going to request. Because you live in, you live there for two months, you, you’re able to request a night off where you can go and stay with someone else. You don’t have to be back that night, but you have to be back the next day. I was like, okay, so I will request that off. I will go. I’ll drink at this party, and then I will come back the next day, and by that time the alcohol will be out of my system so it won’t show up on the breathalyzer. The drug tests don’t test for alcohol, so perfect. So I go to the party, and I drink. I ended up going home with a co-worker of mine, and we went to the after party, and I smoked weed at the after party, which field my fate of I didn’t care, because addicts can’t see long-term effects.