crazychef

You guys made it a lot harder to log on since the last time. Kind of reached the breaking point. I'm a chef and have spent the last 15 years on yachts, restaurants, lodges, in the best places in the world. !0 years in the Caribbean drinking Caribbean wine(rum and coke) Its been the same old thing that I'm sure most of you have done. Hiding bottles, planning on buying bottles, a fun cycle. its getting old, my body and more important is my mind is getting ****** up. And the bad part of it is I just don't care

Dee74

I think you must care a bit or you wouldn't haven't posted at all CC.

Wouldn't it feel good to leave the madness behind?
Wouldn't it be worth the effort?

D

MariahGayle

Glad you are here and posting

crazychef

Yeah, taking a leap, stupid or not, told my boss I need to take this for real. He wants me to stay on the boat, But its hard with a full bar 50 ft away at all times and cook with white, red wine, penne ala vodka, bananas foster with rum. Alcohol is always on my fingertips working

crazychef

taking this serious for the first time at 41, boss wants me to stay and a good paying job but need to get my sh#t together, now or never, any good outpatient advice? Plan on a meeting a day at AA of the start, not really my thing but have meet some really cool people in the past with the same struggles

Dee74

Yep - you can always get other jobs but we only get one life, man.

D

brighterday1234

I learned that I had to make my sobriety and recovery no1 priority in my life. I’m now in the best paying job I’ve ever had thanks to that knowledge.

Steely

No job is worth it, and I am not impressed with your boss for wanting you to stay aboard after you've expressed to him your need.

Stay onboard here.

We actually care.

Jump ship, I say.

Surrendered19

Welcome back CC. The environment of yachts, exec chefs, resorts, high-end excessive consumption, a never-ending celebration in the next room - that would be an incredibly hard situation to get sober and begin a healthy sustained recovery. I could have never done it.

I think you need to take your skills and work elsewhere. How about working as an exec chef at a high-end in-patient rehab program? You could still do what you do but without the crushing environment awash in high-end booze constantly around you.

Keep posting and let us know how you are getting on.

DriGuy

It sounds like a glamour job because of the boat, but the chef part you can do lots of other places. I would be torn leaving, but that brings the topic back to something that all of us face, the choices we need to make to stay sober, and some of them are hard choices too. I'm not saying you have to quit that job, but I'm not going to tell you can keep it and stay sober. That is for you decide. I know people that have sobered up under what I call extreme circumstances. It's just a lot harder. I don't know if I had that in me. I felt like I needed to control my sober environment, and that meant controlling it by avoiding parts of it. Don't rush to a decision just yet. Just think about whether you can do it or not. If you try to do both and then fail, you have learned something, and you can either make necessary adjustments or leave it behind.

biminiblue

It seems like the same story different day, chef.

Same thread (or same theme) from years ago.

Is there some reason why you can't take (say) six months away from the job to get yourself straightened out? I believe you can live the life you're living without drinking, I did something similar for years and it is a dream job for a chef so I can see not wanting to let it go. There are also lots of land-based jobs in tropical paradise.

You can go back to it and stay sober, but I feel like you may need to sort out the drinking part without being in the job. After a few months sober, all of this will make a lot more sense. I hope you do something this time.

If your current employer has all this money would he/she be willing to help you sober up by sponsoring you into a rehab and then giving you your job back?

advbike

You live an adventurous life, it makes it hard to quit. I've had a pretty good taste of it myself and still travel a lot most years, but sober now. So much better, wish I had tried it earlier. The worst stress was when I was your age and still drinking - yikes. Talk about a lack of judgement. I think I got ptsd from some of the craziness, lol. I started trying to quit seriously in my early 40's but I kept the party going way too long and wish I had quit a decade sooner. Just find a peaceful healthy place where you can meditate, swim/run, live a simple, structured existence for awhile and make the break with alcohol. There are some awesome rehabs in Thailand, probably the Caribbean too.

D122y

If you can manage to quit, your performance and enjoyment of your job will increase 10x.

If your boss likes you as a drunk chef, he will love you as a sober chef. Eventually, you will love yourself as a sober person more than you can imagine.

Obviously the gotcha is if your boss wants you to drink with him/her. Then you might have to pretend drink. Drunks really don't care if anyone else is drinking. I can fake being drunk pretty easy.

It was tough at first. My job didn't care, my wife didn't really care. I was left on my own with loads of access to all the booze I wanted. But, I look at booze like it is poison.

Booze is an insidious CNS altering toxin. It causes mental/physical pain to go away for a short time. Then it saps the immune system and causes mental/physical anguish until more is ingested.

It was tough at first, for the first month, months, year. But after that, you will have so many little victories and feelings of all encompassing natural dopamine and endorphins.

I know I am on the path designed for humans. Humans don't drink booze and thrive. It is a unnaturally created toxin accidentally discovered.

The addiction for some can be immediate. Education is the way out. It is analysis vs emotion.

That is all I got for now.

Love love love.

Thanks.

BettyP

Hey CC - I'm a lifelong restaurant person and at 45 I'd say that of all my chef friends, they are either sober now or circling the drain from addiction. It's a brutal profession for alcoholics and addicts. But there are lots and lots of chefs just like you who have made it to sobriety https://wearechefs.com/the-growing-t...nary-industry/
It's such an isolating industry, especially for chefs. There are lots of sober chefs out there - find some - you are not alone! I don't know if you're a meetings person, but even if just to find other people in the industry who are sober they would be worth checking out. In that link I posted, there is an industry alcoholism help page with links to daily meetings: https://www.bensfriendshope.com/cities
Stay the course - you can do this. Quitting drinking is a radical act and you will reap the creativity and success that comes with being sober in the kitchen :-)

nez

It is doable. I am still doing it after 18 years including stints on boats and in Caribbean. I thought I was a good/creative/highly performing chef when I was drinking. Sobriety has shown how much better I could be in all aspects as a chef.

When I sobered up, a lot of people with similar histories told me I needed to change professions if I ever wanted to stay sober. They were incorrect. What needed to change was me, not my profession. I have completely changed over the years and I like the changes. My love of food, the culinary arts, and the hospitality industry has not changed.

The industry was not at fault any more than a souffle is at fault for not rising or a bernaise for breaking. I can look for problems (they are easy to find) or I can look for solutions.

Aellyce

I don't know anything about being a chef, but was also quite attached to a seemingly glamorous, adventurous, eccentric lifestyle in a sort of elitist bubble, in my younger years. Being surrounded with super ambitious high achievers, traveling around the world, living in very different places, not getting tied to anything, doing things with no perceived limits... with a sense of invincibility. The alcoholism changed a lot of that for me (made me realize hardcore limits big time) and led to a pretty intense crash and existential crisis in my mid-to-late 30s. No other way out but changing it, and I modified many things except that I still would not quit drinking for quite a while. Now I live much more low key, not because I have to but I choose to, already a few years before finally getting sober. The unhealthy and extreme parts of that eccentricity are gone and I don't even desire it beyond some fleeting moments of nostalgia (I guess we can say that's part of how my AV talks to me now) and appreciate simpler things and calm. Aging might be part of it for me as well. I do still maintain a good dose of unconventionality that I don't plan to give up and doubt I even could, but these are no longer dangerous, extreme choices and behaviors, more just patterns in thinking and some interests. I believe there is a middle ground and, like others suggested, you can find a compromise.