By Staff WriterOriginal Source: soberinfo.comCraig Schmell is exceptionally good at not being Craig Schmell. In fact, he spent a sizable portion of his adult life getting himself into places he had absolutely no business being.“The most exciting place I ever talked my way into would be the Grammy Awards in 1988,” Schmell recently told ABC, as pictures of the relative nobody standing proudly next to Steven Tyler and Billy Joel filled the screen. The kicker: Schmell, not content to merely attend one of the most exclusive functions our society offers, went a step further and somehow got himself on stage and into the broadcast.There are dozens of stories, which would be unbelievable if they weren’t so : Schmell has sipped champagne from the Stanley Cup in a room full of hockey players he didn’t know. He once talked his way into a presidential motorcade. But for Schmell, the most impressive story would come much later, with little fanfare.He got sober.Eventually, Schmell began to realize that his high-wire social escapades were merely masking a larger problem: “I had low self-esteem…My adventures filled me up and made me feel good.” That realization came with some help — particularly from his mother and father, who burst into his apartment one Saturday morning to confront Schmell about his booze- and drug-fueled lifestyle. That confrontation led Schmell to therapy, and the realization that what he thought was a voluntary lifestyle of partying was actually a self-defense mechanism he used to hide the fact that he was uncomfortable in his own skin.Twenty-seven years of sobriety later, Schmell is a father of two, a veteran of Wall Street, a successful business owner, and now an author. His book. The Uninvited: How I Crashed My Way Into Finding Myself, was released in November 2017. The book is one way Schmell is attempting to give back: “I wrote this book for people who are lost, who want to find some kind of hope that you can change your life.”