I had an insight recently that I’m still trying to piece together. I think it’s a rather useful one, and this blog feels like the perfect place for me to flesh it out.

It started with a thought I had while driving home from work one day, a thought that actually made me feel… afraid. It was sparked after I rewatched the movie Oblivion over the weekend (sue me, I’m on a Tom Cruise binge lately). But I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

The thought is one you’ve probably heard before, especially if you spend any time in personal development or self-help circles. It’s more of a question, really:

Who would you be without your story?

But that wasn’t the part that haunted me. It started with a thought experiment: A magic genie appears and gives you the opportunity to wipe your memory. Do you take it?

I think many people’s knee-jerk reaction would be exactly what mine was: No fucking way. More specifically, my first thought was, “In exchange for what?” But instead of adding a caveat, I let the question sit as is. You have the opportunity to wipe your memory. Do you take it?

What haunted me was what came after. What if I said yes? Obviously, the initial resistance starts to fade when you realize you’d also be erasing all the bad, awkward, shameful, or painful memories. Sure, you’d lose the good ones too, but compared to the idea of a clean slate? Maybe the question deserves more pause than we give it.

It also led me down the rabbit hole of how much of who I am has been shaped by my memory and how much has been shaped by genetics. If I wiped everything clean, would I ultimately come to some of the same conclusions about the world as I have now?

In the movie Oblivion, this is the central idea. If you haven’t seen it, major spoilers ahead—so stop reading if you want to avoid them.

Tom Cruise’s character, Jack Harper, believes he’s had a mandatory memory wipe and is working as part of a cleanup crew on Earth, awaiting his chance to rejoin the survivors on Titan after a devastating alien invasion. But what he discovers is that he isn’t really Jack Harper—he’s a clone, created by the alien invaders to carry out their work. And yet, when he comes across a copy of Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay and reads the poem Horatius, something stirs in him. He starts to become the man he was cloned from.

This is what led me to my insight. My first reaction to the genie’s question was fear, because I would be afraid of who I might become without my memories. I have so many of them. I remember growing up in an old country house, raised by two flawed parents who loved me very much.

I remember the feeling that they favored my brother over me. I remember that my mother desperately wanted a girl—so much so that she argued with the doctor who told her I was a boy. I remember how my mother’s side of the family was made up mostly of women, many of whom had a fairly negative opinion of men. And I remember how that shaped the shame I felt about anything that made me feel like a “man” growing up.

I have a memory of sitting in the car when I was around twelve years old, watching a woman walk past. I was staring at her ass, and my mom caught me. “What were you staring at?” she asked angrily. I remember feeling so ashamed in that moment.

Maybe I’m a loner because my brother demanded so much of her attention. She used to tell me that I needed to be more aggressive in asking for what I needed, but I’ve never been that kind of person. So I spent a lot of time alone, reading comics, mystery novels, and watching TV.

There’s more I could talk about, but in the interest of brevity, you get the point. These memories—these experiences—shape who I am. Do I like who I am today? For the most part, yes. There are things I wish were different. And maybe, without those memories, I could have become that different version of myself.

But what if I became a douche? What if those same experiences also cultivated my better qualities. My ability to listen and really hear people, my desire to find common ground, my instinct to mediate between opposing sides? You get the picture.

Ultimately, I concluded that I wouldn’t want the memory wipe, mostly because of my kids. I wouldn’t be the same father to them. And honestly, I’d be too scared that I wouldn’t be a good father without those experiences and memories to draw from.

But that line of thinking brought me to the deeper insight—one I think is particularly relevant to alcoholism. It’s the idea that our memories and experiences get codified in our psyche in much the same way computer code runs beneath the surface of a program.

To put it more simply: our minds are constantly running “tapes” in the background, and those tapes are driven by the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Once you realize that, it becomes a profound insight. Because if you want to interrupt a behavior or habit, you have to interrupt the tape playing underneath it.

This struck me in relation to my sobriety. Today—July 2, 2025—is the exact midpoint of the year. And at noon today, I realized I’ve had more sober moments this year than drunk ones. Even if I fall off the wagon tomorrow, I’ll still have been sober more than not. And that makes two years in a row where that’s true for me.

But I’ve also started to notice how my addict brain tries to find new ways to lure me back into drinking. More importantly, I’ve begun to recognize how I unconsciously set up my own self-sabotage in advance. I wasn’t aware of this before sobriety.

When you fall off the wagon, it can feel like something that happened that day triggered it. But the truth is, you’ve often been setting yourself up for a while. The incident is just the excuse.

I’ve noticed myself drifting back into old, negative thought patterns. Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of hating the world, and then it hits me: Oh… this is just that tape I like to play before I justify doing something reckless. And that tape is rooted in those same old memories, the story I keep telling myself.

So the way to interrupt the pattern? You practice the pause. When you catch yourself falling into an outdated mindset, stop. Take a breath. Let it go.

As I was typing this, I got a reply to a joke I made in a meme comment on Facebook. Someone—who clearly didn’t get the joke—called me a “stupid bitch.” My first instinct was to fire back. But I put down my phone, took a breath, and said, “Naw.”

Because it’s not worth it. That guy might be a bot, or part of a troll farm trying to rile people up. But even if he’s just some angry dude online, responding only drags me into a negative cycle. And that cycle is no good for me or my sobriety.

At the end of the day, you have to guard against those old negative patterns that fuel your addiction in the first place. For me, it all goes back to the dynamic between my mother, my brother, and me. The feeling that I had to become something I wasn’t just to get my mother’s attention.

But just because I can’t erase my memories doesn’t mean I can’t change the way I relate to them. I’ve made peace with that childhood version of myself, with my mother, and with my brother. They were all doing the best they could with what they had. None of them were thinking about the long-term impact. And I was just a kid—naive, vulnerable, and not equipped to handle it all.

So now I can write a new story. Maybe that peace is easier to come by now because both my mother and brother are gone. And I’d give anything to see them again—to have just one more conversation.

But here’s the truth: I am still talking to them. Every time I choose to pause instead of react, every time I rewrite the old tape playing in my head, I’m having that conversation. Not with who they were, but with who I’ve become.

Because healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about reclaiming it. It’s about looking at the pain and the patterns, and saying: You don’t get to run the show anymore.

I may never be free of the story. But I get to decide how it ends. And that’s enough.