To know what stopped me from drinking alcohol was when my son was born.

As soon as he was born, I decided I’m going to stop drinking now. And that’s it. I also stopped smoking, I stopped eating crap foods. I signed up for a degree course straightaway. I put aside basically all my childish things in life, and I started living my life. Towards the best possible version of myself, I was 25 years of age. I wish that was true. I didn’t stop drinking until my son was 21 years of age. And I’d moved to a different country at that stage, I left my son in back in Ireland. And I was only seeing my son 3 to 4 times a year. And every time I saw him, we were getting drunk together. I bought him his first pint. And I basically encouraged him to drink. Not that I knew much about it at the time. But that’s that’s the way it was.

And like I say.. I wish it was different. But that’s just not the way it is, you know, and it is what it is. I’m not, I have no regrets about my life. I don’t entertain guilt too much, because it doesn’t serve well. And the only thing I can do from now wanting is to try and be the best possible file that I could be now, the title of this video is fatherhood stop me from drinking alcohol. And that’s true, just took me 20 odd years of fatherhood before I eventually cut onto myself. And I remember, we’re not too far from where I am.

Now, the sea is just down the road here. Where we used to live is down the road. This is where I did a lot of my walking around the hills here, when I first stopped drinking alcohol to try and get me away from alcohol. But I remember I sat there on that morning, when I made the decision to stop drinking, and we’ve been out for a drink the night before. And if you’ve watched any of my videos, you know what happened, it was something to do with the old iPods before the iPhones came along. And he’d lost this iPod in the sand. And he was we were down looking for early in the next morning. And I gave up the ghost, he wanted to look for it more and I was sat in the balcony, looking at him pacing backwards and forwards.

We didn’t have much money, my life was going really backwards, going from owning my own business in Ireland to really being in a place where there wasn’t wasn’t much going on, and didn’t have many prospects. But the big thing that I felt at that moment was just a horrible feeling in my gut, that I wasn’t being such a great dad after all. And all those years that I thought it was being a good dad, I wasn’t. Now when you’re kinder to yourself, and you get past a certain place in your life, when you’ve stopped drinking alcohol, and you’ve got past a certain point where you’re kicking yourself in the ass about all the years that you’ve wasted. That’s when you start getting kind to yourself, then you start to look at your life in a different way.

I can only look at where I am now being a part of where it was in the past, if I hadn’t drank, if I had stopped drinking alcohol when my son was born, maybe something would have happened, and I wouldn’t be here, maybe something would have happened and my son wouldn’t be here. So I have to thank whatever it is out there that it is what it is. I mean, I’m in a much better position. Now my son is in a much better position. Now he’s living with his girlfriend, he has a daughter, my granddaughter. And she’s beautiful. It’s one of those things when you wish for something to change in your past, you’re also wishing for the things in your present to change because if you change any one thing, as any sci-fi book goes, you’re not going to be in the same position that you’re in now. So a lot of other things are gonna change.

But the whole point of this video is that it’s never too late to change. Even as a parent, it’s never too late to change for you and yourself in your own life. It’s never too late to start moving towards your potential. Maybe some of the potential that you had has disappeared. But that’s part of any opportunity cost in life, you have to make choices. And when you take one choice over another choice, then the other choice, by definition, the one that you didn’t take, all that potential is gone. So you’re left with the potential that you’re on the track with, you know, that you’ve made as part of that decision. So moving forward, if you want to live the best possible life that you can live and be the best possible version of yourself with what you’ve got.