Guest Speaker: Matt Bocchi

On Friday January 13, Matt Bocchi visited Suffield. Matt’s father passed away on 9/11, on the 105th story of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, when Matt was nine years old. He learned from his mom that the last words his father said to her were, “I love my life and I’ll love you forever.” But there were so many missing pieces of the story and questions that he didn’t have answers to that haunted him. A particularly intrusive one was wondering if his father jumped that day, after Matt saw a clip of someone jumping or falling from one of the buildings on 9/11. In the aftermath he tried to find his dad in photos and videos from the tragedy online, and asked his family what they thought happened to him. His spiraling thoughts about the loss of his father gave way to anxiety and depression, which he tried to hide as the oldest of four boys in his home—the new man of the house. Intensifying his mental health struggle, an uncle he had looked up to as a father figure sexually assaulted him, and he felt he had nowhere to turn after this.

He used drugs and alcohol in high school to avoid his feelings following his childhood trauma, and was able to hide the start of his addiction because he was strong both academically and athletically. As he entered college he used harder drugs to numb his pain and ended up graduating a full-blown addict. It wasn’t until he went to a friend’s funeral high that he acknowledged he had a problem and entered a detox program for the first time. But it took several tries for him to get sober, as the allure of the drugs ruled his life. It wasn’t until he sat outside one day in his early twenties with the threat of three felonies hanging over his head that he found himself at his tipping point. It was beautiful outside, reminiscent of the day in 2001 that he lost his father, and he looked up at the sky and cried to his dad for help. He got the sign he was looking for and once again entered detox, beginning the true road to his recovery in July 2015. Matt admitted, “For me getting sober was a start. It was the easy part.” Therapy, family support, and writing his book Sway have all contributed to helping keep him on his sober living journey, allowing him to heal and move forward following his personal challenges. After years of ignoring the ways he felt, Matt shared that now, “I feel all of the things I went through. In my heart, I know it’s better to feel something than nothing at all.”