Big Think｜How one moment of shamelessness saved my life

ANDREW ZIMMERN: I used to be a user of people and a taker of things. I used to be as self-absorbed as anyone that I've ever known. 14 years of evolving from a pretty nice kid into an irredeemable person.

In 1974, my mother had some minor plastic surgery because the bikini lines dropped and she had an old appendix scar. They cut off the oxygen supply to her brain during the anesthesia process and she woke up a vegetable. She lived into her 80s, but she was never the same. Her physical looks changed. Her intelligence, her mental capacities, her emotional capacities all changed.

So when I came home from summer camp to find that, and my father gave me the talk on the walk from the hospital back to our apartment, telling me that this was the one time we would talk about this and we would never mention it again. Instinctively, I knew that's how we dealt with things in our house.

The problem was I was in horrific pain. I just lost my mother and I just became an anger and resentment machine. That early perception of myself and then the actions that resulted were essentially what almost killed me.

My alcoholism, my addictions, are a direct result of both nature and nurture. Coping with life, absent drugs and alcohol, became impossible for me once I knew that drugs and alcohol existed.

Growing up in the 60s in New York City, I had a very, very lucky childhood: private schools, everyone had a second home. I'd been around the world two or three times by the time I was 13 years old. I had a loving and creative mother. People ask me when I knew I was going to get into food and the answer is I've never not known. 

My father would lower me between these boulders the size of houses on Georgica Beach in East Hampton to pull up big ropes of mussels that we would clean and steam over a pot for dinner. We crabbed, we went eeling, we went clamming. I never knew a lifestyle that didn't place a high priority on food, on travel, on adventure.

Our household was a wonderful place to grow up in in many ways, but in many ways it had a lot of deficits. I was the recipient of so much carried shame. There was never talk about real feelings or real events in people's lives. In fact, quite the opposite. My dad had lived a closeted life as a young man. So that carried shame was already inside me.

I was obsessed with not getting what I thought I needed, not having what I wanted, and that you were always getting the stuff that I deserved. I didn't want to feel the feelings that I was feeling. And I also knew I couldn't talk about them. By the time I was 14, I was a daily pot smoker, daily drinker, daily pill user. It became my higher power. There is not a moral line that I had in the sand that I didn't cross as an addict and alcoholic.

I would be running some of the best restaurants in New York, and pretty successfully, snorting speedballs, doing three, four, five days in a row, and then when I'd have my two or three days off, that's when I had this other life. I would have brief moments of clarity once a week where I would just be like, "Holy fuck, I just stole from my grandmother's medicine cabinet. I just broke into a friend's home. I just rolled someone outside of a nightclub." 

At one point when I physically wasn't able to steal anymore, I actually had a guy in a nightclub who wanted to pay me money to jerk him off in the alley, and I said, "Sure." Because I wanted the money. Every decision is being dictated by the need to get high. Absolutely everything.

It's when I couldn't hold down a job at all I became homeless and was living on the streets.That's when things got a lot worse. The more you continue to use, the more consequences you have. And that creates a greater cycle of shame and anxiety and magnifies your own traumas. All I wanted to do was die.

And so in January of 1992, I stole a bunch of jewelry from my godmother, hocked it, walked across the street to the liquor store, bought a case of vodka, bought a handful of barbiturates, and tried to kill myself. 

When I woke up, no less than 48 hours later, I wasn't dead. I called one of my friends and I said the words that I had never used before in my life, which was, "Can you help me?"

That turning point in my life is probably the most profound hinge event I've experienced in six-plus decades of walking around planet Earth.

I did nothing, nothing to deserve that pause in the shame cycle of my life that allowed me the 30 seconds of clarity to actually know what to say, let alone say the words, "Can you help me?"But yet it happened. I knew somehow on some level that if I didn't get sober then that I was done for.

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