I was 14 years old and at summer camp when I had my first experience with alcohol. I'd never seen people my age drinking before, but I wanted to fit in. I got completely blitzed, felt amazing, and learned that I could erase my social anxiety with alcohol. Masking my negative feelings with a temporary solution that would lead down a dark path? Hello self-sabotage, my name is Adi.
From age 16 to about 20, I was a daily drinker and marijuana smoker. While they did an adequate job of keeping my social anxiety under control, I didn't realize how I had inadvertently narrowed my social circle to the other "druggie" people who wanted to pursue constant intoxication as much as I did. I continued to quick-fix my life away, compensating for the guilt of being too wasted to study or attend school by getting wasted or stoned yet again. By the time I landed on academic probation, self-sabotage was an old friend.
It's all about doing things that are bad for you and telling yourself you're actually improving things—even as the evidence piles up around you. It isn't about making a single mistake but rather a world-perception so inherently skewed that you can't see the destruction of your own choices. For me, that meant clinging to the idea that I needed drugs and alcohol to fit in and feel cool, even as many of the people I started out trying to impress were driven away by my behavior. Ultimately, my perception of my own choices was so warped that it would take me from the relative mundanity of being a stoner burnout to something far darker.
At 18, I was arrested for shoplifting in the upstate New York town where I was attending college. A normal kid without a pattern of self-sabotage might have been forced to admit the incident to his parents. I was unwilling to deal with the castigation I was sure to receive. The thought occurred that as a legal adult, I could hire my own lawyer and hide the incident from my parents. Of course, I didn't have the $500 for a lawyer—so I started selling marijuana to pay the fee. Yet again, a mistake bigger than the problem it was supposed to solve.
Over the next five years, alcohol and marijuana gave way to ecstasy and meth. Selling dime-bags of marijuana morphed into five- and six-figure drug deals involving shady cartel characters. I moved to Los Angeles, telling myself that I was going to become a musician, but I focused almost exclusively on using and selling drugs. The lifestyle was inherently dangerous, but all I could think about was the money, the parties, the luxuries. I was barely making music, but I was selling drugs throughout the music world, and I was able to tell myself that this was a step in the right direction. Even when an armed SWAT team kicked down my door and dragged me to jail to face 13 felony counts and the possibility of decades in prison, my self-sabotage was such that I wasn't sure exactly what I had done wrong.
What I couldn't have known until spending the better part of a decade studying psychology and neuroscience is just how perfectly I fit the classic profile of a kid with poor impulse control. Most people are naturally equipped to filter the constant electrochemical firing going on throughout their brains. When "normal" people feel the compulsion to do something they're not supposed to do—say, run a red light—their control mechanisms go to work. Actions, comments, and momentary impulses that aren't meant to see the light of day stay secretly locked inside forever. This happens largely on a subconscious level, without the person realizing that their brain has automatically filtered out a dangerous or stupid impulse.
For me, that type of control requires conscious deliberation, exactly the kind of effort lacking in my past because I did not realize, and had not been taught, that I would have to think so hard about those things. In other words, my self-sabotage came not because I didn't do the things I was supposed to do but because I never learned to stop myself from doing the things I wasn't supposed to do.
It took a failed stint in rehab and near-homelessness to get me to realize that what I had been doing wasn't working for me. As I sat on the phone with my father, prepared to lie yet again about why I needed to transfer to another rehab facility, he asked me the ultimate question point-blank: "You keep messing this up; what do you want us to do?"
From age 16 to about 20, I was a daily drinker and marijuana smoker. While they did an adequate job of keeping my social anxiety under control, I didn't realize how I had inadvertently narrowed my social circle to the other "druggie" people who wanted to pursue constant intoxication as much as I did. I continued to quick-fix my life away, compensating for the guilt of being too wasted to study or attend school by getting wasted or stoned yet again. By the time I landed on academic probation, self-sabotage was an old friend.
It's all about doing things that are bad for you and telling yourself you're actually improving things—even as the evidence piles up around you. It isn't about making a single mistake but rather a world-perception so inherently skewed that you can't see the destruction of your own choices. For me, that meant clinging to the idea that I needed drugs and alcohol to fit in and feel cool, even as many of the people I started out trying to impress were driven away by my behavior. Ultimately, my perception of my own choices was so warped that it would take me from the relative mundanity of being a stoner burnout to something far darker.
At 18, I was arrested for shoplifting in the upstate New York town where I was attending college. A normal kid without a pattern of self-sabotage might have been forced to admit the incident to his parents. I was unwilling to deal with the castigation I was sure to receive. The thought occurred that as a legal adult, I could hire my own lawyer and hide the incident from my parents. Of course, I didn't have the $500 for a lawyer—so I started selling marijuana to pay the fee. Yet again, a mistake bigger than the problem it was supposed to solve.
Over the next five years, alcohol and marijuana gave way to ecstasy and meth. Selling dime-bags of marijuana morphed into five- and six-figure drug deals involving shady cartel characters. I moved to Los Angeles, telling myself that I was going to become a musician, but I focused almost exclusively on using and selling drugs. The lifestyle was inherently dangerous, but all I could think about was the money, the parties, the luxuries. I was barely making music, but I was selling drugs throughout the music world, and I was able to tell myself that this was a step in the right direction. Even when an armed SWAT team kicked down my door and dragged me to jail to face 13 felony counts and the possibility of decades in prison, my self-sabotage was such that I wasn't sure exactly what I had done wrong.
What I couldn't have known until spending the better part of a decade studying psychology and neuroscience is just how perfectly I fit the classic profile of a kid with poor impulse control. Most people are naturally equipped to filter the constant electrochemical firing going on throughout their brains. When "normal" people feel the compulsion to do something they're not supposed to do—say, run a red light—their control mechanisms go to work. Actions, comments, and momentary impulses that aren't meant to see the light of day stay secretly locked inside forever. This happens largely on a subconscious level, without the person realizing that their brain has automatically filtered out a dangerous or stupid impulse.
For me, that type of control requires conscious deliberation, exactly the kind of effort lacking in my past because I did not realize, and had not been taught, that I would have to think so hard about those things. In other words, my self-sabotage came not because I didn't do the things I was supposed to do but because I never learned to stop myself from doing the things I wasn't supposed to do.
It took a failed stint in rehab and near-homelessness to get me to realize that what I had been doing wasn't working for me. As I sat on the phone with my father, prepared to lie yet again about why I needed to transfer to another rehab facility, he asked me the ultimate question point-blank: "You keep messing this up; what do you want us to do?"
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