I Can't Do This Alone - With Uncle Satan

Positively Terrible

This week's Decent Fucking Human is Uncle Satan. His fucked up story is about anxiety and teenage drug/alcohol abuse.

I'm having a hard time not naming this episode Uncle Satan, the Punk Rock Archaeologist. That feels a little too click-baity for me, even if those words contain no lies. We did interview an Uncle Satan, he is an archeologist who came up in the punk crowd, and he does suffer from anxiety. See? All true. But the real story here is the anxiety, with a little bit of teenage addiction sprinkled in.

The anxiety started early. Uncle Satan's parents divorced when he was young, and that fucked things up in the ways divorces sometimes do. First was the custody battle, and then his parents found new relationships. Those aren't situations that kids plan to find themselves in. Most don't have the coping skills to handle that without help. His preferred help was to start drinking and doing drugs. By the time he was told he was dropping out of high school (yes told), he was a daily drinker. So now we're at Uncle Satan, the (Anxious/Alcohol-addicted) Punk Rock Archeologist/High School Dropout.

Guess what Uncle Satan did then? He got his shit together. He got sober and got a high school diploma, went to college, went to more college, and continued to do still more college. He's an archeologist now, doing all kinds of archaeologist things. We didn't get too deep into what being an archaeologist entails, but one can only assume it includes things like raiding lost arks and doing final crusades (before crusading some more a couple of decades later). It's basically all of the boring stuff archaeologists strive to leave behind when they finally land a sweet office job or something. It's not a bad gig though.

That doesn't mean all was well. The anxiety he was treating with alcohol back in high school didn't magically disappear, and since he's a Decent Fucking Human - not a Perfect Fucking Human - he fucked up. I'm not going to go into the details since he covers them in the episode, but I will point out that he's the one who used the word creep to describe how he acted toward a friend and colleague with whom he desired a romantic relationship. The consequences and shame got so bad that he contemplated taking his life over all of the fallout within his friend group. Instead of following through with his suicidal thoughts, he decided to learn and grow from his actions, and aimed to understand why he did the things he did. And that Terrible Listeners, is how he became the man known as Uncle Satan, the (Anxious/Alcohol-addicted)Punk Rock Archaeologist/High School Dropout/Decent Fucking Human.

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