Fifteen Years

On the messy beauty of a sober life

Fifteen years ago today, I stopped fighting everyone and everything, including myself. I started fighting shame, perhaps, by asking for help despite my crippling feelings of unworthiness. I thought I was pathetic. My inner dialogue was brutal.

I am such a piece of shit. I can’t believe I did that again. What did I say? What happened? Why am I sore? Did I hit my head? Where did these bruises come from? How did I get home? Can they tell? How am I going to explain (lie)? Am I going to turn out like XXX? Wouldn’t be so bad, would it? (Inner dread.) Should I just kill myself? How? Where? How can I make sure not to traumatize my mom / boyfriend / neighbor with my dead body?

Fifteen years ago, I was 26 years old, and my actual long-term plan was to escape to Thailand or India once I got down to my last $1000 in the bank (I wasn’t far from it). The shame and irrevocability of my life being a disaster would be so great by then that I may as well fly halfway around the world, get drunk enough to try heroin, definitely and purposely take too much of it, and wade into the ocean for a swim. They would blame my death on partying too hard. Mom wouldn’t have to see the body, I hoped.

That was my best thinking in 2009.

I lived with a boyfriend at the time. He was a drunk too, but less disastrous than I was, at least in terms of his life’s manageability. He’d had a decade more experience than me tweaking his life so that he could drink as much…