(Content warning: Alcoholism, Addiction, Trauma, Gender dysphoria)

Dictacted 11.27.24 from Dane County Jail, Madison, WI

Dear Mom,

Word has made it back to me at the jail that I have readers who don’t know me at all, let alone as well as you know me. In any case, I am starting to feel that I need to back my story up a little bit. The previous entries, in all their brutal detail, are out there, and no longer live in my head rent-free. Recounting them here has exorcised some of the demons. I told you what I needed to say, what was most important to understand from the beginning.  

But while it has done a certain amount of good for me, a trauma dump isn’t the ideal vehicle to communicate my story. So I sat in jail today and thought about where the story should start for the sake of the blog. There are various biographical details in the About Me section, but what about this particular story? My journey from trauma to addiction to the criminal justice system? I thought of a few different ways to start it, before I landed here, a few different methods of trying to get people to understand. 

Here’s what I came up with: I think I start with the combustible liquid powering the ill-fated airplane. We follow the alcohol. Some of this won’t be new to you, but I think some of it will. Because, like I explained before, I’ve never felt this degree of compulsion to bare my soul for the world to see. But perhaps by starting from the beginning and telling it all, we can banish some of the demons that thrive in the darkness.

It’s 2001, and it’s almost Christmas. I’m 13, at home with some of the girls from my swim team.  You were at a holiday party for the Verona Aquatic Club. We found your tequila on the top of the refrigerator and it more or less turned into a free-for-all. Here’s a song you’re not going to know, Mom. It’s called Holidae In, and I can’t remember who sang it [Eli’s elder millennial editors here to remind those who forgot that it was Chingy with some help from Snoop Dogg and Ludacris], but it was definitely rap, and it was definitely bad [the opinions on rap in this blog are those of the author and do not represent the views of TransformDane as a whole], but definitely still really catchy at the same time, and I might listen to it right after I get off the phone [blog] with you. 

We must have listened to that song 30 times while taking shot after shot of that tequila. It was warm, it tasted awful, but it didn’t matter. I remember thinking, “Why would people drink this?” Then the alcohol hit my brain, and I understood immediately. I had been searching for a departure from my reality, marked by trauma that went beyond teenage angst, and it was a distraction I had long been seeking. The distraction was freeing, messy, chaotic, and, in a way, beautiful. It was different from the reality I was experiencing, and that was the only thing that mattered. 

From that point on, I shifted into my newfound alternate reality as often as I could, which took some doing. For one, I had to find the time. Swimming and school took up most of my time. And you and Dad made it hard on me. There just wasn’t a lot around. Dad was a police detective at that point and had been a bit of a hooligan growing up himself. Every trick in the book was known well, and I wasn’t allowed a lot of leeway to obtain this magical substance that took me further and further away from the reality I hated. 

Going forward, with every hardship that came about in life, alcohol was there to soothe the sting. Alcohol was medicine. I watched other people drink, party, have fun, enjoy life more, and feel more social. To an extent, it did that for me sometimes. But above all else, it was medicine. It was a magical elixir, and I used it as such. 

For a totally unrelated reason (just kidding), between my junior year in high school and the beginning of my sophomore year of college at UW-La Crosse, I racked up five underage drinking tickets. You read that correctly, that would be five underage drinking tickets. (For those of you wondering, this was, in fact, disclosed to the Madison Police Department during my background investigation. And for anyone else wondering further, I never wrote a single underage drinking ticket during my eight years of service. It never felt quite just.) 

In any case, alcohol became the reason I got up in the morning. I did other things, I sometimes even did things sober, but the best things, the best experiences, the highlight of every. single. experience I would have in life was always alcohol. No experience seemed as good without it. When people wanted to do things that didn’t have alcohol built into the equation, I was baffled. Given the choice, why wouldn’t they choose to drink? How could I incorporate my drinking into said activity? After all, it made every experience infinitely better. It truly made zero sense to me when drinking was not the center of every experience. 

Sure, I traveled to Spain to study abroad in 2009. I had the experience of a lifetime, living, studying, and traveling around Valladolid. But what were the happiest moments of that experience? It was barhopping in the bars in Spain. I was using my Spanish, not in classrooms, but to meet people in bars. It was the delight in learning that they engaged in something called botellón, which was essentially drinking outside without menacing policía to bother you.

Uon returning to La Crosse at the decadent age of 21, I finally didn’t have to sneak around or court law enforcement censure. Being of age removed one of the last barriers to accessing my self-prescribed medicine, and I found new ways to incorporate binge drinking into every component of my life. Trivia league? Happened in a bar. Fishing? It’s unheard of not to have a beer or ten out on the water. Even coming out and spending time with the LGBTQ+ community encouraged drinking, as I went to gay bars to be with other queer folks. Drinking had long been far more than a hobby, and it was now rapidly subsuming my very identity. 

I returned to Spain to teach elementary school English in the tiny town of Bednar, in Jaen. Between my teaching obligations, there were always more bars, more clubs, more “opportunities to practice my Spanish.” I felt at home within the drinking culture of Spain. Drinking at school lunch break as a teacher was not only socially acceptable but encouraged, and if you got too drunk during lunch to finish teaching for the day, you’d just cancel the end of classes, and the kids had extra recess instead. (They never complained!) On weekends, I’d start by going out for tapas. Tapas can’t be beat: order a beer, get a little appetizer. Then it was out to the clubs. The discoteca stayed open until 7am and it was an all-night drinking fest, 9pm-7am.

Back in Wisconsin, I looked at my ever-increasing body weight and decided it was time to start running, biking, and setting my sights on triathlons. But that didn’t mean cutting back on the alcohol; don’t be silly. I turned my training into an opportunity to incorporate drinking into my life in novel ways. For instance, I did a lot of destination running and biking. Sure, I’d get my miles in running or on a bicycle, but it ended at a bar where I’d celebrate with drinks. I’d earned it, after all.

And thankfully, the land of beer and cheese celebrates such dedication to drunkenness as a virtue. The organizers of these sporting events also chose to reward my athletic pursuits with my favorite carrot, the free drink at the finish line. I signed up for runs, ranging from 5K to marathons. And what did they attach to my bib, Mom? You know the answer because I was always delighted when they did it. A beer ticket, pinned to my bib, a reward for a race well run. 

The first round of Ironman kept me from going off the deep end, or I’m sure I would’ve been a crippling alcoholic before even age 30. But I had training to do, and let’s be honest, I was in no shape to just get up and do a long-distance triathlon. It took a ton of time, energy, and self-restraint. But even then, I was drinking daily while training for the freaking Ironman. 

And I did it; I finished it. The lesson I took from that victory? Alcohol couldn’t be a problem in my life. If my drinking was that bad, could I have completed such a challenging race while drinking every day of training?

However, what was developing in the background, what I was losing control of very quickly, was the realization that hitting these fitness goals wasn’t going to change what was going on in my head and had been for a long time. Even while I sought the “ideal” female body that I thought would alleviate what I now know to be dysphoria, some part of me recognized that I could not, figuratively or literally, outrun the struggles I was having with my assigned gender at birth. And no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t outdrink the trauma associated with my past. 

By the time I did my second Ironman, I was fairly aware that part of the justification for doing so was convincing myself that I did not, in fact, have a drinking problem. (The other part was me striving to take control of a body that did not feel like my own. More on transition later.) Surely, no human being could accomplish two full Ironman races while suffering from extreme alcoholism. But alcoholism it was, alcoholism that was rapidly and obviously spiraling out of control. I was still drinking every day, but now beer wasn’t doing it for me, and I needed hard liquor to counteract the trauma and the dysphoria I was feeling. 

So, I trained for that second Ironman. And I think about four out of six training days a week I started my workout with at least a little extra juice in me. I ran with my head swimming. I biked with my head swimming. Most appropriately, I swam with my head swimming. In fact, the days I swam were the drunkest days because swimming required blessedly little balance. 

Here’s something you didn’t know, Mom: I started my second Ironman still drunk from the night before. Triathlons start with the swim portion, and I was certainly swimming. My body was swimming, my head was swimming. All of me was swimming as I blundered about in both the water of Lake Monona and the whiskey from the previous night. A part of me was in absolute disbelief that I was starting a full Ironman race still under the influence. Another part of me was in very familiar territory, as I had trained the majority of the time in that exact state. It was extremely familiar. And in that way, it was not surprising at all. 

I think I sobered up sometime between the 10 and 20-mile mark of the bike, but I really don’t remember. I do remember running past the very jail from which I dictate these words, in an eerie foreshadowing of things to come. I finished that Ironman, beating my time from 2015 by a full hour. 

Once the Ironman was over, my schedule was open for drinking nonstop. Issues with my gender and trauma were on a crash course, and it was headed directly into the debris field I referenced earlier. I was receiving no therapy, had received no therapy since high school whatsoever. By 2018, when I started on a low dosage of Lexapro, it was too late. I was shutting the gate after the cows had left the barn.

The Lexapro did help. It released the grip of self-hatred and anger enough for me to start seeing transition as a possibility. I began that process in 2019, which meant I had to communicate to most people in my life that I was transitioning. While these conversations were needed, they were not always easy. But thankfully, my old friend alcohol was there to loosen my tongue, to tamp down the awkwardness, and to cope with the aftermath.

I first noticed I was physically addicted to alcohol when my wife at the time and I took a trip to Washington State. We started at Olympic National Park, where I spent my birthday. On September 12, 2020, at age 32, I woke up feeling extremely ill. We were due to drive to Mt. Rainier that day, and despite doing most of the driving up to that point, I had to ride shotgun that day because I was too physically ill to move, open my eyes, or function. 

I was sure it couldn’t be a hangover. Hangovers had long since become a thing of the past at this degree of abuse. This was clearly the flu, but a flu unlike any I had ever had. This flu was pounding every nerve ending in my body into absolute submission and hysteria. We stopped at a Walmart for some Pepto-Bismol and Advil, but it was completely ineffective. I suffered in absolute agony the entire drive. 

I remember finally arriving at a beautiful cabin overlooking Mount Rainier. My wife had gone to the bathroom, and I was alone in the kitchen, staring at a bottle of bourbon. I had sworn up and down I had the flu. I knew I had the flu. I had the worst flu I’d ever had. But in my head, I knew that bourbon was going to fix things. It was going to end the suffering. And with about five or six swigs, it did. 

In reality, I’d probably become physically dependent on alcohol well before then, but that was the absolute confirmation. From then on, I knew that I was going to be very, very sick if I didn’t have alcohol regularly, and drinking very quickly made me well again. From that point on, whenever I went without alcohol, I would experience horrendous withdrawal symptoms. 

In November 2020, during a routine checkup with my primary care doctor (someone I admire almost as much as you, Mom, which says a lot), she saw the cause for alarm and promptly sent me to the local ER, where I registered a BAC of .32. What followed was a blur of inpatient psychiatric care and detox as I tried to safely withdraw from alcohol and get sober. And what’s more, it started to work.  Things were finally looking up, and I finally had the support I needed to start dealing with my alcohol addiction.

But then fate intervened once again. On December 1, 2020 I broke my leg in four places. It was a stupid injury, a freak accident, and the greatest irony is that I wasn’t even drunk at the time. I was trimming lilac bushes with a chainsaw, stepped in a woodchuck hole, and my foot got wrapped around a wild grapevine. In an attempt not to chainsaw my leg off, I shattered my leg in four places, causing damage to my nerves and leaving me with 25% feeling in my leg. I spent the next year re-learning to walk, starting with a hand cart, then shuffling along with the cane that still leans next to the door in my apartment, just in case. I would never run again.

While I slowly and painfully worked to regain my footing, at work the writing was on the wall. I would no longer be able to do the work I was accustomed to. What’s more, blossoming tensions in the world outside were reverberating around police departments across the country. Everything was changing, and it felt like none of it was for the better. I retreated back to the medicine that had always made me feel better, more in control, happier.

Then in 2021, after twenty years of functional alcohol addiction, I finally achieved one of those not-so-treasured Wisconsin rites of passage. I earned my first charge of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. 

Here’s the scene: I was parked on the side of the road, in the driver’s seat, key in the ignition, car running, swigging from a liter bottle of Svedka vodka. The officers on the scene were so concerned about my degree of intoxication that instead of being taken into custody, I was taken to the hospital, where I registered a BAC of .39. 

I had already been looking for other employment – something that didn’t require me to chase down suspects – but the OWI accelerated me from desk duty to resignation seven months early because I was advised there would be a media circus over an active officer receiving an OWI. After eight years, my career in law enforcement had come to a sordid and spectacular conclusion.

Between 2021 and 2022, I tried to keep it together. I worked two factory jobs, and was fired from both due to my alcohol abuse. I worked two towing jobs, and was fired from both due to my alcohol abuse. I took nine separate trips to the state psychiatric hospital under Chapter 51, each one for violating my psychiatric protective order against consuming alcohol. 

I was so physically addicted to alcohol I couldn’t function. I was constantly sick to my stomach, throwing up every morning; and then the seizures began. I was having withdrawal seizures that I was told would become fatal quickly, if not imminently. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department informed me that they had been to my home 54 times between 2021 and 2022, mainly for ambulance trips taking me to the hospital every other week. While there, I would register a BAC usually between a .4 and a .55. I heard from more than one medical professional that my BAC was the highest they’d ever seen. Sometimes they would be hesitant to release me, as my BAC was so high they thought it may be a suicide attempt. And who’s to say it wasn’t, in a way? I hated reality and hated myself so much, Mom. I put so much poison in my body that they thought I was trying to intentionally kill myself. 

As you know, Mom, 2023 came around, and once again, there was hope. I’m going to leave it there though for tonight, it’s going to have to be another post cause this is getting long, and it’s getting late. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’m trying to work up the courage to call, and maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. I’m not sure what I’ll say. I’m not sure that I’ll do it. Either way, Mom, I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving whether I talk to you or not. I hope you’re staying strong; I’m trying to stay strong too. I love you.

Still me

-Eli