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I had a feeling it was going to happen.
I had a suspicion that my contract with my current job was going to be put on hold indefinitely. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just the time that we’re living in.
When I got the news, I immediately thought, “HOW AM I GOING TO PAY RENT?!” I cried on the phone with a colleague who is so used to hearing me being professional and motivated. While I was crying, I simultaneously thought: “OMG I AM SO EMBARRASSED HE IS HEARING ME UGLY CRY.”
Considering the current state of the world around us, I’ve been catastrophizing everything in my head which has resulted in a deep, isolating funk of a depression.
This was the tipping point.
A long time ago, a psychiatrist said I may be bipolar. It was never “official” but for sure, I had bouts of depression and severe anxiety. Turns out I wasn’t really bipolar. Eventually, I went to therapy and learned that mental health will always be a work in progress. But I have learned to manage and take care of myself the best way I can — and boy, oh boy has it been one helluva journey.
But one thing was for certain about my past — I had a problem with alcohol.
Lately, I’ve been haunted by my addiction with alcohol. Fortunately, I have not gone back to drinking. I have just been reflecting on the person who I was — a person who I don’t want to be again.
The thing about alcoholism is… it isn’t just one thing. And it never goes away.
As we all know from the many “very special” episodes of our favorite ‘80s sitcom, it is a form of addiction and it comes in many forms. I was “alcohol dependent” moon; “binge drinker” rising.
I relied on alcohol to define who was and I drank with the intention of getting drunk. If I was hugging the toilet and violently vomiting at the end of the evening, it was a successful night.
Friends had to pull over for vomit pit stops on the way home from clubs and bars on multiple occasions. There was one time my friends lost me in a club – only to find me asleep on a couch in one of the back rooms.
I’ve even driven home drunk before. Not sloppy drunk. It wasn’t far. No highways were involved, barely even 3 miles if I recall. But still. It was one of the most idiotic things I have done. No one was harmed and I arrived home safely. It was a horrible choice that I shouldn’t have done. I don’t know what I was thinking… because I wasn’t. I don’t know if I have forgiven myself for this one.
I’ve even vomited blood on multiple occasions. That’s all I’ll say about that.
Armchair psychology suggests that alcoholism is a way, for some, to repress homosexuality. And for me, that was true. That was only a very small part of the story. I am also a creature of habit. And there is a fine line between habit and addiction. I smudged those lines. I not only smudged those lines. I made absolute chaos of them.
Being a creature of habit helped me lose 75 pounds and it gave me the discipline to land a job in the entertainment industry that allows me to pay rent in Los Angeles, a feat that many have difficulty in accomplishing. That unstoppable determination would be used in “different” ways during my alcoholism adventures. In other words, I used these powers for bad instead of good.
Alcohol is poison. When it comes down to it, alcohol is ethanol and ethanol is technically classified as a poison.When we drink alcohol, we are literally drinking poison. Granted, the poison is a pretty, tasty poison, but it is a poison nonetheless.
Everyone has a right to drink alcohol and have fun while doing it. But when it becomes irresponsible and dangerous — that’s when it becomes a problem. And sometimes you need someone else to tell you.
I wanted to poison myself.
During my alcoholic era, I did not want to exist. Writing that on to paper and saying that out loud is simultaneously morbid and cathartic because it was a wildly low and devastating period of my life. I was grinning and bearing it all. The poison made it easier to handle. The poison made the silent struggle easier to cry through.
It’s difficult to like the Dino who was in college because, like Mariah said about J. Lo, I don’t know her.
It’s difficult for me to reconnect with anything associated with that era because I wasn’t able to live a formative time in my life as who I really was. Trying not to hold resentment for that era is difficult.
I feel sad for Dino from the past and I want to be there for him.
Suicide was always there but I never acted on it. I pictured it. I entertained it. Even now, that monster in the cage continues to live in the corner of the recesses of my mind. Sometimes he sneak out and he is a bitch to stuff back into the cage.
Back then, the monster often manifested itself in the form of alcohol.
I wanted to kill myself and that’s exactly what I was doing – by drinking drops of the pretty poison. I was drinking as much as I can and as fast as I can. Fuck hanging myself. Fuck slitting my wrists. Fuck carbon monoxide poisoning. I wanted to literally drink myself to death... and I wanted everyone to watch.
With every shot of Jägermeister; every shot of Goldschläger; every vodka tonic; every bottle of Bartles of James; every bottle of MD 20/20; every bottle of Strawberry Hill; every bottle of Mickey’s — I was killing myself in plain sight. It was a cry for help. (For the record, I was young and my taste in alcohol was very bad).
I was such a cliché.
I mean, why didn’t I go for a heroin addiction? Or crack? Or just go full meth? Meth would have made for much more of a juicy and robust novel. I mean, it worked for Nic Sheff and Tweak. But no. I have to settle for alcoholism. It’s the missionary position of addiction.
Addiction is a biproduct of loneliness. Loneliness is the absence of connection. Therefore, connection is a cure for addiction.
Like that? I got it from a TED Talk. I haven’t heard that explained better.
Self-hatred and suicide often like to talk to each other in the world of addiction. They liked to discuss what was best for me, without discussing with me first and they used alcohol as the messenger. It was as if every drop of alcohol I drank was a form of a lashing with a whip or a form of cutting.
And it was a punishment for being gay.
As with many Gen X’ers and older millennials of the immigrant family ilk, homosexuality wasn’t exactly embraced. Now add being raised Catholic, in a military family, and living in Texas to the mix. That just pushed me further into the deepest, darkest depths of the closet.
In the ‘80s, ‘90s and well into ‘00s, moms and dads of queer kids weren’t rushing the streets to wave rainbow flags for their kids during Pride month. My family, friends, my Filipino community, and the culture at large were telling me that the LGBTQ community was a joke. Queer people were less than.
I was feminine.
People were telling me that men could not be feminine because femininity was demeaning. Films and TV series were showing me corrupted and distorted views of the gay, queer, and trans community. The world wanted me to subscribe to a binary that I know now does not exist.
I was being taught, by people that I loved, that being gay was wrong.
With each “joke” and homophobic remark I heard when I was younger from a friend or family member, I felt less and less human. That being me was wrong. No words can explain living in your own home and not feeling safe because you can’t be who you are around your own family.
Thank God my family accepts me today. Other families are not that accepting.
The Trevor Project’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People found that 39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide. Roughly half of them identified as trans or non-binary.
There also should be no surprise that there is a correlation between suicide and substance abuse in the LGBTQ+ community. The Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Mental Health’s Research Brief found that rates of substance use and suicide deaths have increased in the U.S. over the last 10 years among youth and young adults.
“Those with substance use disorder are at seven times greater odds of dying by suicide compared to those who do not have a substance use disorder.”*
I hated alcohol. I hated the way it made me feel. I hated the way it tasted. I hated how expensive it was. I hate how it made me acted. But at the same time, I was devastatingly grateful because it numbed me at a time when I didn’t want to be myself. It made me forget who I was. That was what I was addicted to.
There are angry drunks. There are messy drunks. There are loud drunks. There are violent drunks. There are too-comfortable-for-their-own-good drunks. And then there are fun drunks.
I was a fun drunk.
I was known to dance very well at the club when I was drunk. For being drunk, I was quite good at choreo. I could perform a good portion of the dance from Jordan Knight’s “Give it To You” music video as well as the chorus from Britney Spears’ “Drive Me Crazy”. I was also droppin’ it low and shakin’ that shit during the era of No Limit and always answered the siren call of the iconic “Back That Azz Up” string intro.
Needless to say, all of my dancing was a clear sign that I was homosexual.
Alcohol, like many drugs of the world, loosens your inhibitions and it loosened me up just enough to make people like me. I never had any black-out sexual escapades because, well, I was not sexually confident, so I had no concerns in that department.
But I had an unhealthy need for everyone to like me – especially in my college closeted years. The more I drank, the more fun I was and the more people liked me. And I really wanted everyone to like me.
I was being the Dino they wanted me to be.
And I was.
I can’t imagine where I’d be if I continued to be the Dino I wanted them to be… or if I would be here at all.
I love hearing the words “The world is better with you in it,” and I’ve learned to believe those words more and more each day.
Beautiful. Thanks Dino.