My story
You quit drinking and expected everything to get better. It didn't.
For years I read financial statements looking for the one detail that didn't match the story everyone believed. I was good at it. I just never pointed it at myself.
I drank heavily for five years, tried to quit for three, and never made it past two days. I was forgetting conversations, repeating myself, turning into someone I didn't recognize. I tried everything. Self-help books, podcasts, fitness routines, and a 10-day Vipassana silent retreat. I drank at a wedding the night I got out. I held two beliefs at the same time and they were both wrong: I'm fucked, this is the rest of my life. And: it's fine, nothing bad has happened yet so I can keep going. They made me hopeless and stuck.
Then my grandmother died and something broke. The 13-day mourning period was the longest I'd been sober in years. It gave me hope. A few weeks later a friend asked one question that landed differently than everything else had.
"How do you want to be remembered?"
I'd been creating opportunities to change for years. One finally hit.
Quitting was the easy part. I had to figure out who I was without my most supportive crutch. When I stopped, the rest of my life was still the same. The job I didn't care about. The body I'd ignored. Figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. I was sober, stable and completely stuck. Everyone celebrates the quit. Nobody tells you it was both the finish line you were promised and the starting line you weren't ready for.
I rebuilt slowly and without a map, while repairing what was broken. I told my parents after my one-year anniversary because I didn't trust myself not to break it early and give them false hope. Seeing the tears in their eyes is something I'll remember for the rest of my life. Rudra is the remover of sorrow. Destruction before the renewal. That was my Rudra moment.
The pattern underneath was never alcohol. I knew exactly what I needed to do and I still wouldn't do it. The work is closing the gap between who I think I am and what I do. It doesn't close on its own.
I find what's broken in people the way I used to find what's broken in companies.