A Vision of Hell
An exercise in detailing a future to avoid, and how close I came to mine
I stumbled upon something this week. An exercise that I had conducted back in 2019, as I sat jobless, freshly moved to a new state and seemingly on the precipice of tipping myself over an edge that would plunge me into the depths of hell in my final battle with alcoholism.
It shocked me to read. I never shared this work with anybody, and therefore I wrote the truth. And I knew. I knew that I had a problem with alcohol, but I wasn’t willing to admit it. Not to friends, family and definitely not to any stranger. But when prompted to write out “The Future You Want to Avoid”, this came pouring out.
This was written with no revisits for grammatical errors, no formatting was allowed and we were instructed to just write without ever going back to edit. The only changes I made are to formatting, where I’ve created paragraphs to make it a little more digestible. But I am not modifying anything else from the original output.
I want to stress - this is my vision of the future back in July of 2019. It was all a projection from that time forward. This is not easy to read, and could be a rough way to open your weekend.
So what’s the takeaway? For me, it’s shocking to know how deep down I really did know I had a problem with alcohol. From writing this to first uttering the words, ‘I’m Kyle and I’m an alcoholic’ was nearly four years!
I beg you, if you have any inclination that you might be an alcoholic, and you have similar visions of what a hellish future could look like that feel even remotely possible, don’t let four years pass. Reach out, talk to another alcoholic now. What scares me most in reading this is how close to reality some of this came.
Write about a future that you want to avoid:
My most undesirable future is one in which I continue to go to alcohol when I have anxiety or stress and I decide to cope by numbing the pain versus facing up to it and confronting it. In the months from now, I continue going to alcohol as my job search continues to drag out. I'm exhausted, chronically stressed, and dependent on booze by the time something finally comes to be with the job search.
During the entire time of my joblessness, Alyssa and my relationship starts to deteriorate because of the mental strain and outlook that the alcohol is causing me to have long term. I'm not longer joyous or playful. Doing difficult things have lost their appeal. I stop working out, exploring Idaho and practicing some of the skills that I believe are beneficial in life.
I begin putting on weight, the stress also takes a toll on other physical characteristics. My hair starts thinning, my skin becomes unhealthy. My daily movements make me fear that I am bringing on an early demise. Alyssa and I continue to lose touch with each other, even as I start working. Because I know that the role I get is not going to be a perfect fit, I let the stress and anxiety of a new job pull me deeper into alcoholism and despair. I refuse to get or seek help because I don't want to deal with it.
The weight continues to compound and maybe one day I go in drunk or hungover to work. What if I hit someone while drinking? A DUI or OWI would be welcomed, but there is an injury, or even death so the penalty will be severe. I have to sit and wait in jail just for my hearing to occur.
My job is gone. Alyssa and I don't stand a chance because I refuse to seek help through any of this. I don't want anyone's help, and I spin further down into despair as I think about my future behind bars and carrying the weight of destroying, or severely modifying, someone else's life. There's a court date and a conviction. I've lost Alyssa, my next few years of free life, my passions, my relationship with my family.
The years pass in jail, and they decide my time has come to leave. I leave knowing full well that I will have no chance of every getting back to the status or level of career that I had years before. No one reaches back out to me and I don't want to reach out to anyone else. I drop back into the routine of alcoholism and find some meaningless job that doesn't afford me any freedom, pays minimum wage and causes me to spin deeper down.
Depression, despair and loneliness come to be my only companions in life until I decide to drink and continue drinking until everything goes away. I probably wouldn't die from this, at least the first time. Maybe I wake up in the hospital in a detox unit. Part of my brain has ceased functioning and I can hardly string sentences together.
Now I'm hardly qualified for my minimum wage job and I now have to depend on the state and the support of others to make it through life. The same thing happens, although slower this time - I'm released, work for a bit at righting my life, but ultimately find myself surrounded by depression, despair and loneliness once again. I take to the alcohol again and since drinking didn't do the trick the last time, I take it one step closer and drink until I'm blind and then emerge out into the world searching out some accident or incident that could finally bring this all to a close.
I have no one at this point, I have pushed away every single person that tried to help me or challenge me to be better along the way and I let my own mind grip me into the hole of alcoholism because of some petty fears or feelings of anxiety early in my life. Maybe I think about a daughter I dreamed of having some day or a son who wanted to explore the mountains with me.
Instead, because that is no longer even a remote possibility in my life right now, I walk out into that world looking for some way to bring myself down and rid the world of someone strapped down with depression, despair and loneliness. Maybe by removing them, I would make the world better by removing those three demons.
Throughout all of this, I never owned up to decisions I made along the way and I NEVER pushed myself to be mentally strong. Giving into the alcohol each time was the easy choice in the moment but in the long run all it did was dig myself a deeper hole to get out of. The problem was that the man stuck in the deeper hole was made weaker every time he dug deeper, so there was less strength and energy remaining to climb out. Someway, somehow, all alone in the world, my worst self takes his life.
I can’t say I fully avoided all of this. Relationships have been forever altered, and I got way too close for comfort in wanting to end it all at points. Thank God there was a different plan.
That’s all I’ve got, all the best.
Kyle