The Power I Found in Losing Everything

Turning My Lowest Point into a New Chapter

Rehabitus: Personal Growth in Life After Addiction

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750 Words / 3-minute read

When I lost everything, and I mean everything apart from the clothes on my back and a burner phone, I didn’t realise the monumental change that was about to begin.

These were the only possessions to my name when I was released from prison.

Between 2019 and 2022, I hit rock bottom more times than I can count. I’d faced a few tough times in my long-standing drinking career before, but this was the era when things got serious. There were points when I thought life couldn’t get any worse, and yet it still did. Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, another trap door opens.

Which, in hindsight, shouldn’t have been surprising. A typical day for me involved necking two litres of vodka. If I could get my hands on any class-A stimulants, then that was just the cherry on top of my toxic cocktail. In fact, the class-As meant I could drink longer and harder.

Of course, there was a slight catch to my body adapting to drinking this much: if I didn’t keep enough alcohol in my system, I’d start having withdrawal seizures. And that really is a buzzkill.

I was on a merry-go-round in and out of hospital for alcohol-related problems, including seizures from the times when I hadn’t drunk enough.

Consultants were warning me about my liver and my shocking memory loss. My Liver Function Tests (LFTs) were off the charts, and an ultrasound confirmed I had early liver disease. My liver was deteriorating and teetering on the cusp of permanent damage. My feet were totally numb from alcoholic peripheral neuropathy. One time I was so delirious from withdrawals that I had to be sedated and watched by a team of security. I only know all this because I kept my discharge records like souvenirs from a demented theme park.

On one arrest, the police were laughing with me over my breathalyser results because they couldn’t believe I was still standing, let alone conscious.

Oddly enough, I recall this one —and I didn’t think I was that drunk.

I went to prison three times at the peak of my addiction. By the third time, I got myself arrested on purpose. I breached my community order for somewhere to stay and some medical attention.

I was sick of drinking and going through stints of homelessness. It was an endless cycle of drinking myself out of withdrawals, drowning in shame and hopelessness, and then right back into my favourite state: black-out oblivion.

You can’t drink (easily) in prison, and they don’t kick you out until you’re done. They’ll feed you, too, so I viewed it as an upgrade to how my life was going.

Prison wasn’t a deterrent for me, and it certainly wasn’t rehabilitative.

I’m not telling you this to impress you, but to impress upon you how bad my addiction and my choices were.

Eventually, the courts mandated me to attend alcohol rehabilitation.

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There’s a Power in Losing Everything

What I didn’t realise at the time was that alcohol and a string of disastrous choices were dismantling me, stripping away every last layer of who I thought I was.

But here’s the thing: when you’re reduced to nothing, you’re free to rebuild everything about yourself.

I pieced my life together one fragment at a time; choice by choice, habit by habit, strength by strength. I might not have much by many people’s standards, but I know I have the power and ability to shape my reality, which is something I never fully appreciated before. And with that, there’s still so much more to give and to gain from life.

The real strength isn’t just surviving the depths and the filth of rock bottom. It’s patiently building a solid foundation right there in the dirt. From that foundation grows an unshakeable resilience and a newfound sense of agency. You become both the marble and the sculptor.

Losing everything and rebuilding from the ground up triggers something empowering. Call it a ‘rock bottom superpower.’

You get to choose who you become. You get to know your fucking self.

You build an inner strength you never knew existed. You come away knowing you can survive whatever comes next because you’ve already proven it to yourself.

If there’s something worth having back in your life, you’ll find a way to get it back. If you never needed it, then it can stay gone.

I urge you to choose that power now instead of hitting rock bottom to find it was always there.

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If you are a new subscriber, feel free to check out some of my previous articles.

Become Aware. Become Agentic

Balancing the Drive to Improve With Inner Peace

The Purpose of Recovery is to Become Recovered

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