21st August is definitely a great day. Today I have accomplished 20% of a personal challenge I started a year ago, which is to stay at least 5 years at 0,0 alcohol — no alcohol at all.
As a kid, I was raised in a broken family with countless deficiencies when it came to emotional awareness, personal well-being, the way we spoke to each other, and the relationships between family members.
One of the many reasons behind that past scene was drug use. It was a very key one in the family environment, because it would lead to a cascade of consequences and effects on each member’s behavior that would be a disaster going forward.
But, somehow, the world would keep going, and computers arrived in Spain — and I was lucky enough to have access to one at home kind of early on. The computer would rapidly become my way to escape my physical reality at home, replacing many learning processes with simply playing games, or eagerly investigating and learning about computers themselves (or at least that was what I thought I was doing back then).
Such was the impact on my life that I decided to go to university to study computer science. A driving decision that would condition the rest of my life. With university a greater learning would come, and the love of my life would come, and it has lasted up until now. But it was during those post-teenage years that I would simply, constantly refuse to take any drugs whatsoever — not that I did not try them. Guess what? My history with my family had of course conditioned me forever.
Then, one day you become an independent adult, you work, you live on your own and you start your own family — and along with those responsibilities there would be an extra one that I would carry as a heavy burden, one I was incapable of getting rid of. Alcohol.
Why? I love craft beers. I love wine. I love many things in life because I love life; but I would also love to find excuses not to defeat the need to enjoy a nice cold craft beer at a Saturday lunch with friends or family, always thinking that a couple of them would not hurt me.
In parallel, my passion for sports had started to develop and intensified even more with my children coming into my life, and after covid I took it very seriously, as well as my work-life balance — so I decided to take it to the next level.
Guess what again? You are overweight, you are eager to improve but constantly hitting your own limits. If you are determined enough you want that to evolve, so you start looking for solutions. In parallel, Friday pizzas were starting to hit me hard, while gluten was no longer being welcomed too well by my body. So I confirmed, clinically, that gluten was not good for me — so there we go, the first important change that gave me new room for improvement. But as I kept training it was still hard to lose weight, and recovery was simply taking too long (for instance 3 to 5 days after a weekly soccer game in a tournament I play).
People that have inspired me? Many, but lately Goggins has been a good one with sports, for instance. I took myself to the accountability mirror and stated loud and clear: You are an alcoholic person. Accept it. You sit down in a bar or a restaurant and you do not have enough balls to say no, and likewise, if “one would not hurt me”, then none would not hurt me either — but you do not do it. Now… what’s wrong with you? Didn’t you have enough of your broken family experience in your childhood to realize that drugs aren’t good? Are you a coward? After all, if I had reached the point I had reached in my life, it was because I had been able to confront many hard decisions and struggles head-on and overcome them. So I wondered: What is it? Are you going to keep hiding behind your own excuses, or face the truth, accept it, and fight for the better version of yourself? Is that the best version of you that you can offer to your kids?
And I said to myself: Fuck alcohol. This is literally stopping me from making good decisions. It is turning me, sometimes, into someone who says things I ruminate about later. I do not feel I am the best version of myself with this. In fact, afterwards, I feel like crap. I sleep like crap. I wake up destroyed and mentally crushed, and emotionally distorted. I am going out there, I am going to tell the world this is David Pelayo, and that I can achieve anything I aim for, and this will be the last day I remember having drunk alcohol.
And to do so, I am going to track every single day of my life — minutes, work, workouts, everything — so I can applaud myself and clap when I need to celebrate the success.
And today is one BIG day of success for me. Not because I managed to “quit” alcohol and it has now been 1 year, but because I finally came to a mindset that is helping me get the best version of myself out every bloody single day, non-stop.
Today, I celebrate every single person on the planet who keeps fighting to get the better version of themselves. I am with you. I feel you. Stay hard!