Mid System Turning Point - Where It Broke, and What It Was Missing

After I had already built a lot of those habits, I let myself believe something dangerous.

I had been transferred into a superintendent role in Regina, Saskatchewan. It was not a job I had done before, and after just one fourteen day shift, I was moved out of it again. That hit me hard. Not only because of the job itself, but because of what it stirred up in me.

I did not blame the company or the people there, and I want that to be clear. I blamed myself for not asking enough questions and not figuring things out quickly enough. Inside my own head, there were a lot of negative feelings. Embarrassment. Anger. Self-doubt. The feeling that I did not know how to learn things fast enough. That heavy sense that no matter how hard I was trying to improve, life could still knock me sideways in a moment.

Instead of meeting that pain with gratitude for the opportunity, for what I still had, for the people still in my life, and for the work I had already done to rebuild myself, I let myself narrow. I focused on the blow, the insult, the hurt, and the part of me that wanted relief. Then I told myself a familiar lie.

Just one drink at supper.
You are disciplined now.
You can handle it.

Three days shy of nine months sober, I had a pint of beer with my supper.

That is how dangerous thinking often sounds. Not reckless. Reasonable. Not extreme. Measured.

At first, I kept things under control. I would have a drink with supper now and then. I was not getting drunk. I kept the discipline going in the rest of my life, and for a while I let myself believe that meant I was managing it.

Then I was transferred back to the job I had come from before the superintendent attempt, with the same company.

The biggest difference was that now drinking followed me there.

At night after work, I would have a drink again, sometimes after I had done the bodyweight workout, almost as a reward. Not wildly at first. Just enough that I could tell myself it was still reasonable and controlled. Still different from before.

Deep down, though, I knew better than that.

I had already lived through what happens when drinking starts quietly and then builds in the dark.

On my days off, I had my son. At first, I would not drink when he was there. Then, after some time, it became one drink before bed. Just like the old days.

That is one of the lies alcohol knows how to tell best. That the old days were manageable.

By the end, as he was getting ready to leave on summer vacation with his mom and head east out of Cochrane for two weeks, I had started allowing myself four ounces of my old favourite, Irish whiskey, on the last few nights I had him.

That was enough for me to know the truth. It was growing again. So I made what should have been the right move.

After he and his mom left, I went to the Addiction Recovery and Community Health clinic in Calgary. I asked them for the pills that make you sick if you drink alcohol. They prescribed them. I still have them now, tucked in with my other prescriptions, as a reminder.

Even then, I made one more deal with myself.

Because they were gone for two weeks, I decided I would let alcohol take over again before starting the pills. Even though I had already been having the occasional drink, and sometimes one before bed, a little over a year after my return from rehab, I got really drunk for the first time.

That was the bargain.

One last stretch.
A return to the old version of me.
The last collapse before I really quit again.

Thinking I had learned my lesson.

For those two weeks, I became the old me. Drinking every night. That ended on July 26, 2025.

I have no memory of that day.

Apparently, I started drinking in the morning. At some point, I took the electric scooter I owned out for a ride, probably as a way to avoid drinking and driving. That was the day of the accident.

The e-scooter had a top speed of 42 km/h, which I suspect I had maxed out. I wore no safety gear. Somewhere on the road I had a crash, which I do not know the details about, except for the result. I was found unconscious by three women out walking, who called 911, and an ambulance came and took me away.

The next thing I know, in the memory I have of my own life, I woke up in Foothills Hospital after two weeks in an induced coma. I was obviously not worried about crashing. I had good balance and quick reaction time, so I did not wear a helmet. I was told after I woke up that I had five skull fractures, one of which was very serious and required emergency surgery to reduce the pressure from bleeding in my brain.

I also had thirteen rib fractures across seven ribs, and my right clavicle was broken, along with a lot of bruised and torn muscles. Nothing fun. I am not writing this looking for pity, but if you ever ride an e-scooter, wear a fucking helmet.

My mother had flown out from Newfoundland and was there. My family had been told I would either die or wake up as a different man, with much of my brain gone.

Lucky for me, that was not what happened.

I did not die.

While I did suffer a brain injury, my mind was still mostly there. My recovery of words was weaker. My vocabulary and memory were not what they used to be. As I write this, that recovery is still ongoing.

I spent forty days in hospital and I remember most of that. What I remember most clearly is not the physical weakness or the confusion. Not the strange feeling of waking back up inside a life that had kept moving while I was gone.

It was the emotions. They were loud, fast, and unstable. A thought could hit me and my whole system would move with it. Fear. Anger. Shame. Sadness. Gratitude. Confusion. None of it felt far away. It all felt very close to the surface.

That was frightening in its own way, because I could feel how little control I had over the speed and intensity of what was happening inside me.

Up to that point, I had already learned a lot. Clarity had taught me to stop lying to myself, minus this major failure with booze. Discipline had taught me how to start building better habits and better structure into my life, which also allowed me to convince myself I could handle alcohol.

However, lying in that hospital bed, emotionally raw and mentally shaken, I realized there was still something I needed that those two things alone could not give me.

I needed steadiness. That is what made me remember a word I had first studied in rehab, and begin really learning what was behind it.

Equanimity.

I remember thinking there was something almost darkly ironic about that. The final result of my last drinking day had put me in a place where I now needed to practice something I had already been taught during my first attempt to save myself from drinking.

Back then, equanimity was an idea. Now it was a requirement.

Because when your mind and emotions are running hot, truth alone is not enough. Discipline alone is not enough either. You also need the ability to remain steady enough to think, feel, and act without making the situation worse.

That is what equanimity became for me. Not numbness. Not pretending not to care. Not suppressing emotion.

Equanimity is steadiness under emotional pressure. It is the refusal to let every feeling take command, the ability to feel something fully without immediately obeying it, and the practice of staying level enough that pain does not automatically become more damage.

That mattered more than I can explain. After the crash, life was already serious enough. I did not need to add panic on top of pain. I did not need to add self-destruction on top of regret. I did not need to let fear, shame, or anger turn every hard moment into something even worse.

I had already done enough of that in my life.

Equanimity became the next thing I had to learn. Not because I had become calm. Because I had become aware of how dangerous it was when I was not.

I could not undo what had happened. I could not drink my way back into the day before the crash and make a different choice or force my emotions to disappear just because they were inconvenient.

However, I could start learning how not to let them drive badly.

That is a different kind of strength.

It is not loud, dramatic, or powerful in the movie version of the word.

It is quieter than that. It is the strength to pause, to breathe, to let a feeling rise without handing it the wheel, and to stay in reality even when reality hurts.

Even in that hospital bed, in all that weakness and instability, I knew something else too. I was most grateful to be alive. That my mind, though injured, was still mostly there, that the people who loved me were around me supporting my recovery, and that I had not died on that last drinking day.

That gratitude mattered. Learning how to hold that gratitude with steadiness, instead of letting every emotion pull me apart, would become part of this next section of blog entries too. The details will come later.

For now, this is where equanimity begins. Clarity taught me to see. Discipline taught me to build. Equanimity would teach me how not to collapse when life hit back.

After the hospital, I needed that more than ever.