It was during my senior year of high-school in Floyds Knobs, Indiana when I started wearing makeup. I’d just relocated to live with my aunt and cousins who welcomed me in after a year-long dispute launched when I was outed as gay to my parents. My relationship with alcohol started a few years earlier – chugging Bacardi 151 beside a campfire after sneaking out to the fort my friends and I built in the woods. One - a form of self-expression, the other - a coping mechanism.
It’s interesting how some things we believe empower us, actually take away our power. In an interview with Queer Kentucky in 2019, I said, “the story I told myself was that I needed it [alcohol] to be social, needed it to show-up in the way I wanted, needed it to belong. In fact, it undermined all of those things.”
Over the past few years, my relationship to the “Run for the Roses” on the first Saturday in May has changed. I grew up watching it on TV, and now the Kentucky Derby is the anniversary of my sobriety from drinking alcohol. It’s been four years since I had my last Mint Julep at the track, and while I miss a dirty martini or cabernet every once in a while, I don’t miss what it did to my body and my mind.
Why did I stop drinking? Beyond my brain’s jump from tipsy to blackout, it was a “meeting of the minds” while standing on the bridge over the creek at Theo’s parents house in Eastern Kentucky. My subconscious made a list of the things I’m proud of and want to excel at and honor (like relationships), and a list of the things in my life that could undermine what I’m working toward. My unhealthy relationship with alcohol was at the top of the list.
Derby day 2018 (left photo above) was my last day of drinking. It was a great day! I enjoyed a Mint Julep, spent time with Derby Diversity & Business Summit (now Derby Diversity Week) attendees, and enjoyed fashion at the track - that was it. No drama, no blackout. I recognize how fortunate I am that it was not because of a DUI (or worse) that I stopped, I’m grateful that it didn’t take something like that to help me reevaluate how to move forward in my relationship with drinking.
Flash forward to this year, and I’ve broken from another addiction – caffeine. My first sips as a kid wanting to participate in my grandpa’s morning ritual. And in the fall and winter this past year, finding myself drinking four cups a day, crashing in the afternoon, and rocking a consistent eye twitch.
Needless to say – I’ve been thinking a lot about the rituals and practices that are part of our lives. The ones that make us better people – healthier, happier, more productive, more at peace, more creative. For me, combining photography, outdoor adventures and fashion to create Wearable Photos™. And the ones that don’t, but we tell ourselves are necessary, and that we can’t live without them.
As Finn Janning wrote in The Happiness of Burnout, “Breaking a habit stresses that learning relates to the future. Basically, one breaks a habit not only because it has caused conflicts; for instance, the habit of doing everything according to achieving a specific goal. Rather one breaks with habits where one is capable of producing new meaning, new values that free one from the imprisonment of blindly following the herd.”
Have a great week - and thanks to everyone who is actively seeking to make the spaces they are creating welcoming and inclusive to people who don't drink (alcohol, caffeine, etc.).
With gratitude -
Josh
Photos above: Left - Kentucky Derby 2018 drinking a Mint Julep; Right - Kentucky Derby 2019 drinking an alcohol-free cocktail (mocktail) with The Mocktail Project. Both outfits by Gunnar Deatherage.
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About: Josh Miller is a queer changemaker, public speaker, photographer, and outdoor explorer. He is the owner of Josh Miller Ventures and the co-founder + CEO of IDEAS xLab—an organization that uses the art of storytelling and community collaboration to impact public health. Miller’s work has been featured by The New York Times, the Aspen Institute, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is a Soros Equality Fellow, received the 2022 Nonprofit Visionary Leader Award from Louisville Business First, and was selected for Business Equality Magazine’s Forty LGBTQ+ Leaders under 40 and Louisville Business First's Forty under 40. Miller is a two-time TEDx speaker and has been described as a "force in our community.” He holds an MBA from Indiana University and an undergraduate degree from Bellarmine University. Previously, he served as an advisor to the Derby Diversity & Business Summit and co-chair for the Louisville Health advisory board’s communications committee.