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 as he wanted without too many negative consequences. It truly is an art form, life as a functional alcoholic.

In the years since, I’ve learned the inner dialogue of an active alcoholic is — with the exception of some hardcore narcissists — almost always the same:

I’m so stupid. Why do I keep doing this? Why can’t I just have one or two drinks like a normal person? Maybe if I drink wine instead of bourbon. Eat some food with my first glass of wine and get the check before I start the second. Maybe if I just have water between every drink, and supplement with NAC in the morning, I’ll be okay.

I’d be googling wet brain syndrome at night, whilst in the grips of sporadic and bewildering alcohol-fueled insomnia. Other times I’d be trying not to drink by sheer force of will, but waking up in the middle of the night with cold sweats, hearing noises in the kitchen.