Drafting with Demons: How Fantasy Football Helped Me Win My Life Back

My name is Matt Donnelly, and I am a recovering alcoholic.

They say it's never a good thing to replace one addiction with another, but in this particular circumstance, it is. More than 20 years ago, I simply went through life. Nothing had much meaning; all that seemed to matter was when that next drink would appear. Deep down, I knew I had a problem; the most challenging part was to admit it.

I even looked at my fantasy football leagues as an excuse to, well, drink. Now, there is nothing wrong with those who can have a drink here and there and continue with their lives. I am one of the unfortunate ones that can not do that. I would hit the bottle 6 or 7 times a week, and the truth is there are parts of my life I can not recall even today. If I were being honest with myself, I'm not sure how I am still alive to this day. 

You can't force someone to give up an addiction. I should know. I tried to do that once to appease the courts. No, you have to want to stop. For me, I had to hit "my" rock bottom. After a series of events that led to my rock bottom, I was finally able to seek the help I needed. However, that was just the start of my battle.

When you give up something that has become so much of who you thought you were, you hit a point where you don't recognize the blank stare looking back at you in the mirror. After years of never knowing, trying to figure out who I was was a battle one could not prepare for. When I drank, I could be anyone. When you drank as much as I did, anyone was better than who I was.

They say idle hands are the Devil's playground. So, how did fantasy football change my life? When alcohol consumes one's life as it had mine, once you remove that, it's essential to fill that void. Fill it so that addiction has no place to come back to. You have to build your life all over again. Being inside your head can lead down paths that ensure failure. Luckily, content creation leaves me with very little time to get stuck in my thoughts.

I had to change my old mindset. I had to distance myself from many of my old friends if I was to succeed in my recovery. When you do that, life can become dark. This world and everything around you may make it feel like you are suffocating. Loneliness, depression, negativity, pain, and despair become unwanted companionship. I struggled with that. To this day, I still suffer from imposter syndrome when creating content. It's something I know that I have to overcome daily. 

That's where the fantasy community comes in. It was nothing like I had previously experienced. All my preconceived notions of who people were had changed in a short matter of interactions with many of those whom I looked up to. Sometimes, it's okay to meet your heroes; some of them eventually become your friends.

My son's smile told me how proud he was of the man I've become.

Imagine being stuck in that dark pit of despair, if you will. It's pitch black, with boulders and broken branches all around, which you could use to build a ladder towards this little pinhole of light you see at the top. You use these items to roll these boulders into place, and every time you lift one on top of the other, you feel more beaten down than the last. Yet you continue to stack rock upon rock, getting closer to the top until you finally run out of stones and branches, leaving you short of being able to escape. You climb back down, mentally worn down, physically unable to continue, knowing you have gone as far as you can with what you have available. I then gathered what little I had left and ascended again. This time, fantasy football provided a rope of hope for me to get out.

In this fantasy football community, I found a place where I belonged. As I became more engulfed in the community, I wanted to become a more significant part of it. I had been searching for something I could identify myself with. Fantasy football became part of who I was. Instead of searching for that next beverage, I now look for that next sleeper, that subsequent bust, that next stat or model in hopes of changing how we look at the game we all love to play. Rather than going out, I now express myself through writing or video content. Networking has developed new friendships that have since replaced the ones I felt I had lost.

Fantasy football plays a role in my life—one that gives me that high I once sought at the bottom of the bottle. Every morning, I wake up looking forward to Matthew Berry's Fantasy Life and The Football Guy's daily newsletter, as they have become part of my morning routine. I have met some of my best friends through this community, many of whom have become like family.

If not for diving into the world of fantasy sports, there is a chance that addiction may have crept back into my life. A life that is better today than I could have ever imagined. Now, faith, family, and fantasy football fill my cup. 

My friend Bob Harris and I at the Fantasy Football Expo

The road to recovery is long, a journey in which the destination is ever-changing. They say some of the critical components in an addict's recovery are communication skills, creative thinking, self-awareness, problem-solving, self-control, and resiliency. Does that sound familiar to you? Those are also six crucial components of being a great content creator. I may not have mastered any of them yet, but as I release each new piece of content, I continue to work on each skill.

Everyone has a story, so I leave you with this Brene Brown quote, “One day, you’ll tell your story of how you overcame what you went through, and it will be someone else’s survival guide.”