How one moment of shamelessness saved Andrew Zimmern’s life 

I used to be a user of people and a taker of things

I used to be as self-absorbed as anyone that I've ever known. 14 years of evolving from a pretty nice kid into an irredeemable person

In 1974, my mother had some minor plastic surgery because the bikini lines dropped and she had an old appendix scar

They cut off the oxygen supply to her brain during the anesthesia process and she woke up a vegetable

She lived into her 80s, but she was never the same. Her physical looks changed, her intelligence, her mental capacities, her emotional capacities all changed

So when I came home from summer camp to find that, and my father gave me the talk on the walk from the hospital back to our apartment

telling me that this was the one time we would talk about this and we would never mention it again

instinctively I knew that's how we dealt with things in our house. The problem was I was in horrific pain

I had just lost my mother, and I just became an anger and resentment machine

That early perception of myself and then the actions that resulted were essentially what almost killed me

my alcoholism my addictions are a direct result of both nature and nurture coping with life

absent drugs and alcohol became impossible for me once I knew that drugs and alcohol existed

Growing up in the 60s in New York City, I had a very, very lucky childhood

Private schools, everyone had a second home. I been around the world two or three times by the time I was 13 years old I had a loving and creative mother People ask me when I knew I was going to get into food and the answer is I never not known

My father would lower me between these boulders the size of houses on Georgica Beach in East Hampton

to pull up big ropes of mussels that we would clean and steam over a pot for dinner

We crabbed, we went ealing, we went clamming. I never knew a lifestyle that didn't place a high priority on food, on travel, on adventure

Our household was a wonderful place to grow up in in many ways, but in many ways it had a lot of deficits

I was the recipient of so much carried shame. There was never talk about real feelings or real events in people's lives

In fact, quite the opposite. My dad had lived a closeted life as a young man

So that carried shame was already inside me. I was obsessed with not getting what I thought I needed, not having what I wanted, and that you were always getting the stuff that I deserved

I didn't want to feel the feelings that I was feeling, and I also knew I couldn't talk about them

By the time I was 14, I was a daily pot smoker, daily drinker, daily pill user

it became my higher power. There is not a moral line that I had in the sand that I didn't cross

as an addict and alcoholic. I would be running some of the best restaurants in New York and

pretty successfully snorting speedballs, doing three, four, five days in a row. And then when

I'd have my two or three days off, that's when I had this other life. I would have brief moments

of clarity once a week where I would just be like, holy I just stole from my grandmother medicine cabinet I just broke into a friend home I just rolled someone outside of a nightclub At one point when I physically wasn able to steal anymore

I actually had a guy in a nightclub who wanted to pay me money to jerk him off in the alley

And I said, sure, because I wanted the money. Every decision is being dictated by the need to get high

absolutely everything. When I couldn't hold down a job at all, I became homeless and was living on

the streets. That's when things got a lot worse. The more you continue to use, the more consequences

you have. And that creates a greater cycle of shame and anxiety and magnifies your own traumas

All I wanted to do was die. And so in January of 1992, I stole a bunch of jewelry from my godmother

hocked it, watched across the street to the liquor store, bought a case of vodka

bought a handful of barbiturates, and tried to kill myself. When I woke up, you know, less than 48 hours later

I wasn't dead. I called one of my friends, and I said the words that I had never used before in my life

which was, can you help me? That turning point in my life

is probably the most profound hinge event I've experienced in six-plus decades of walking around planet Earth

I did nothing, nothing to deserve that pause in the shame cycle of my life

that allowed me 30 seconds of clarity to actually know what to say

let alone say the words, can you help me? But yet it happened I knew somehow on some level that if I didn get sober then I was done for After sleeping at Clark on his couch for a couple nights

I wound up walking in to what I thought was a cup of coffee

with my friend Pamela. And I walked into what was an intervention

And I just said, what time's my plane? I got involved in a 12 step program

in as deep a way as I've ever gotten involved anything in my whole life. It turns out that my lifestyle before sobering up dulled a lot of my

abilities. So I found success pretty instantaneously. I left day-to-day restaurant operations and got

into TV, writing, radio. I think oftentimes people want to know, well, what was it like

What made you make this decision? I don't try to seek the answer to a lot of these questions. I simply accept them as being true. I had a transformative experience that cannot be explained by my own behavior or my own thinking

I'm learning things now at age 63 that I think a lot of people learn in their 20s

I don't ask what I can take from a situation. I ask what I can give to it

The perspective shift for me away from putting me first really began after I realized that

asking for help was a sign of strength, not of weakness. that's what happens when you sprinkle a human being

who's irredeemable with love and dignity and respect if we give them enough of that

human beings can recover from anything and I am living proof of it