I reach desperately,

                       for anything.

 

I long to Stand.

 

I Fall.

Again. and Again.

 

Failure echoes,

down empty hallways

held inside my head…

                      screaming,

                  shouting, 

                    shrieking,

“Failure.”

 

The Perpetual, Forever Failure.

 

The kind that pulls your eyes

to cracks in pavement

while you walk.

 

The Forever Failure that rings in our ears,

                                              shuffles your feet,

                                                    weighs on your spine,

crushing, aching, compressing..

Dull.

Forever.

Failure.

 

 

I yearn to breathe again unhindered.

to fill my lungs with early starlight,

and yell up to the moon:

“I am Alive!”

 

but today I sit indoors.

Yellow Wallpaper today, tomorrow…

remembering the day,

when my soul was on fire.

I don’t have a full entry submission in me right now–suffice to say, things have not gone well lately…

I have problems with honesty and transparency.. So, here is a poem I wrote in an AA meeting this week while “listening” to the speaker.. I think it sums up how I feel right now without directly saying anything at all.

Nothingness in the Vastness

I am sand..

I fill and conform to

any container

into which I am poured.

 

 

I am sand..

small, microscopic.

blown away, into the nothingness 

by any small wind.

 

 

always changing,

never consistent,

ever fickle and transitory,

 

brought to new shores

and taken away again

by any tide willing to carry me,

the constant passenger,

without my own direction or deciding..

 

I am sand…

always moveable,

ephemeral,

forgettable,

controllable..

..controlled.

and always, ever, perpetually…

…small.

 

unnoticeable, unseen.

a speck of Earth,

adrift on the currents,

lost at sea.

 

So, I’m eighteen days out from my last relapse (I wrote the last post a few days after my relapse, but didn’t submit it until recently). I believe that I am experiencing what is called, in the alcoholic (and drug/narcotic) community, a “pink cloud” affect. “In addiction recovery, the “pink cloud” is a term used to describe a high-on-life feeling in one’s journey to recovery… a curious but often short-lived phenomenon. Many people, after detoxing, feel too good about their recovery, as they’re finally able to see the real world behind a curtain of pills, drinks, and needles.” (addictionresource.com) This is often a euphoric feeling of happiness and wellbeing. We alcoholics and addicts who are in active addiction or early recovery are so accustomed to feeling sick, horrible, shackled by our disease, devastated, and near to death that, after detox, which I described in my last post, feeling good, healthy, and clear-headed feels super-human. I’m riding high on a combination of pink clouds, springtime sunshine, and caffeine (which I can drink now that my heart isn’t racing, and it doesn’t feel as though I could go into cardiac arrest at any moment). 

 

This sounds great, right? 

 

…It’s not. 

Sure, it’s great right now. I feel amazingly happy and optimistic, but what happens when this feeling inevitably dissipates into the ether, and I am reminded of the long and arduous journey ahead of me, a journey at which I have yet to be successful in any real way? How long until the reality of my life slaps me in the face? I have no job, my husband and I are separated, my social life outside of AA is practically nil, I don’t know what to do with my life, and my health and physical body have taken hits, to say the least.

So what is reality now? I feel one way, hopeful and optimistic, but anyone looking at my life from an outsider’s perspective, would probably assume that I should feel worried, unhappy, and panicked. “Being on a pink cloud can sometimes mean a detachment from reality: people become preoccupied with the good feelings and forget about the journey in front of them.. An addict’s life is a rollercoaster of emotions, and emotions are what trigger an addiction in the first place. Like any roller coaster, it’s not possible to stay joyful and delusional all the time: eventually you’ll come closer to the ground, and that can bring too much disappointment to handle… which can lead to relapse” (addicitionresource.com)

(Is it too weird that I resent rollercoasters now? Looking at them gives me anxiety, because they seem like steel microcosms of my life. [yeah, because it’s rollercoasters’ collective fault that I’m an alcoholic and my life is in shambles.. alcoholism does not come without insane thoughts, although the insanity is there prior to the habit in almost every case])

-sigh-

So what to do, what to do? While I am feeling confident and full of promise, I am trying to implement and habitiualize certain helpful, healthy routines. I wake up every day and immediately make my bed (that way, if I accomplish nothing else that day, and sometimes recovery is so overwhelming that, quite frankly, I don’t) I have at least accomplished that. I go downstairs and feed my cats and turn on the kettle for hot water for either tea or some French pressed coffee. I go to the study or out to the deck and stretch and internally try to recite some uplifting mantras (think “you are good enough” or “you are strong, you will persist” .. you know, the type of Kumbaya bullshit that I would have made fun of someone for a year ago). Then I pray. I have a  list of intentions, individuals or world events for which I pray. If I am feeling particularly empty and ruinous that day, I go with something already written (no sense trying to draw from a dry well, so to speak). I like the prayers below for that (both attributed to St. Therese):

I also say the St. Francis Prayer, daily, to rid myself of the tyranny of self.

 

Then I read a few paragraphs from a daily book of meditations and journal a bit. After that, it’s time for breakfast and the start of the day. I try to call my sponsor daily, I touch base with my family, I go to meetings, I see a therapist, and I try to find ways to be of service to others. 

I also want to get back to going to the gym. Sometimes cardio helps me to burn off my negative thoughts and anxieties, and lifting makes me feel strong and capable. The rush of endorphins doesn’t hurt either; getting back to the gym is my goal for this coming week. 

I’m also trying to reignite my fervor for things and activities that were of interest to me before I began drinking alcoholically. When we alcoholics drink, it is all-consuming. We have no time for any other hobbies, and, quite frankly, we lose interest in everything that isn’t a bottle of some type of spirit or another. Absolutely everything is seconded to our need to consume the drink. We lose our passions and our pastimes, and, eventually, our selves. 

So I am trying to rediscover my leisurely interests in addition to my self, my inner being—who I really am, or, probably more accurately, who I was or will be. 

I am traveling more (to Barcelona, specifically, in a little over a month), rekindling friendships and my relationship with my husband, cooking again and offering in-home cooking classes, reading for pleasure, and gardening a bit. Now that the weather is improving and we are solidly out of winter, I also look forward to spending more time in nature hiking and biking. 

Most importantly, not just for alcoholics but for any human, is reestablishing (or establishing for the first time) a personal, small scale community. To use AA terms, I need to embrace and lean on my “We”. For me, this is my AA family, those with whom I am the closest (including my sponsor, upon whom I should rely the most), my family, my husband, and my friends outside of AA. 

Humans are social beings. It is not good that we should be alone, said the Big Guy (and if you don’t buy into that, the sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists say so too). We are obligatorily communal beings. To quote Merton, a pretty brilliant American writer,  theologian, Trappist Monk, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religions:

So that’s it. I’m trying to fill my life with healthy habits to replace those that were slowly bringing me closer and closer to the threshold of devastation and death, and I hope that these new routines will be enough to keep me sober and relatively happy when that pink cloud decides to evaporate. 

Cheers, to new a new life. 

…And Here I am again. Another relapse. More broken promises. More heartache and disappointment. More time spent terribly, terribly ill. I don’t know why I can’t stop. Something triggers a thought, and the thought becomes totally obsessive, all-consuming, and it won’t go away until I drink. I should know by now that nothing good will come of indulging in the urge to drink, even if it is just to quiet the internal voice screaming to imbibe. One drink turns into a bottle, which turns into another and another. The delusion that I keep feeding myself that I’ll just hunker down and enjoy one night of drinking in secrecy is such a blatant lie, but I can fool even myself (alcoholics are notoriously good liars and manipulators—anything to ensure the next fix). One night will turn into many, until I am so terribly sick from my drinking and hopelessly devastated by falling down again, that I am forced, physically and emotionally, to stop. Then comes the real hell. Any non-alcoholic would be absolutely appalled and totally confused by how and why I continue to drink, despite all the negative repercussions, which are many. To an alcoholic, however, this reality is as natural and as familiar as breathing.

Next are days of shaking, sweating, dizziness, nausea, vomiting until nothing comes up but blood and my throat becomes raw and swollen, insomnia, night terrors, and, perhaps worst of all, dealing with all the wreckage that I have left in my wake. My husband is traumatized, hopeless, and depressed and my parents are terrified. I feel like I’m going to physically die, but I can’t go to a medical detox, because of the accompanying price tag—I’ve spent too much money already trying to quit. At this point, if I die, I die, and that could very well happen. My roommate from rehab is dead from the same cause—alcoholic withdrawal.

I lived—a blessing and a curse.

I’m alive, which I suppose should be considered a blessing, but now I have to live life, and it’s not pretty. It will be a week, if I’m lucky, before I can get a mediocre night of sleep, despite feeling worn down and dog-tired. I’m utterly miserable as I tell everyone that, once again, I relapsed. It was days ago that I acquired my 1 month coin. My parents were there smiling, my husband was ecstatic and got me a gift, and I was actually proud of myself and happy. Things were going so well. Now, I can’t even remember snippets of the days that I spent drinking—five days completely gone from my mind. I feel as though I’ve wasted my life, and the feeling is unbearable. Oozing with shame and guilt, I go back to meetings, and say that I had relapsed, again. The group claps for me, congratulating me and happy that I made it back and that I’m trying again—I feel like a fraud. I want to run, but I am so tired of running, hiding, and making excuses that I remain in my seat and surrender to this medicine called “community”.

I had to own up to everyone, again. I had to start over at step one, again. I had to disappoint my family and friends again. I have devastated myself, again. 

I’m fighting the urge to believe that I am just one of those people who can’t get it. I’ll never get it. I’m going to waste my entire life. I keep waiting for my life to start as the years, six years, pass me by.. I’m going to die to this disease, sooner rather than later, if I don’t stop. I can’t keep hitting .5 BACs without my organs shutting down or eventually stroking out. Most individuals go into a coma at .4 and die at .5. For me, it’s a Tuesday, and the blood running through my veins is 50% vodka.

What choice do I have but to pick myself up and try again? I hate myself, and I truly believe that many peoples’ lives would be improved if I was not on this Earth, but I’m Catholic, and we aren’t allowed to kill ourselves. {easy now, that was my attempt at dark humor} I have enough ties yet in this life, enough people that I love. I can’t do it. I imagine my parents crying, my husband breaking down as he picks out what I would wear for my funeral, my sister holding my niece over my casket, my friends sitting in the chairs, and I know that death is the easy way out.

So here we are. I pick myself up again, dust myself off, take a deep breath, and try, however desperately, again, to achieve sobriety.

I saw Hamilton with my husband last week. So, I thought I’d start with a bit of inspiration from the show:

“Dying is easy, young man, living is harder” (Washington, “Right Hand Man” Lyrics)

These words struck me as I watched the show (not that I hadn’t heard them a million times from the soundtrack), particularly because life has been so hard lately. If I were to rewrite these words, from the stance of an alcoholic, they would read “dying comes naturally to us, young woman, living is next to impossible.” (sorry, I had to get that feminist plug in there, and, yes, I realize that my version isn’t as poetic. What can I say? I’m no Lin-Manuel Miranda.)

As alcoholics, killing ourselves comes naturally. Each year, there are 88,000 deaths in the U.S. related to excessive alcohol use. (cdc.gov) In fact, alcohol is “the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States.” (National Institutes of Health). By the time we admit to being alcoholics, we know that our drinking isn’t just ruining our lives—it is biologically killing us. For many of us, this is not enough reason to put down the glass. By the time our health starts taking hits, we usually do not care about ourselves enough and value ourselves so little that killing ourselves doesn’t seem like such a negative scenario—at this point, what do we have to live for, anyway?

I don’t think I can put into words just how difficult it is to actively live in early sobriety. For years, alcohol ruled our lives. We now have to, literally, relearn how to live in this world; we have to go through a type of resocialization.

First of all, our stress levels are off-the-chart in early sobriety. We dulled our stress for years, and our bodies became acclimated to that numbness as being normal. When stress and anxiety are no longer numbed, they bounce back with a vengeance (seriously, the numbers are much, much higher than those in a normal individual [this isn’t an opinion, the stress hormones, GABA, and all that good stuff have been measured and studied]). Without our brains floating on a lovely cloud of dopamine and serotonin, generated by alcohol, nervousness and irritation run riot. Absolutely nothing could be going wrong, nothing could be happening at all, and we would want nothing more than to rock ourselves back and forth while in the fetal position. (Imagine the anxiety that you feel before a major presentation that your job depends upon/going into labor/getting on stage for the first time.. while you are just sitting alone in your living room with nothing to do.. it’s horrendous and it’s absolutely maddening.)

For me, I drank from the time I woke up until I passed out on the couch (lovely, I know). Now, waking up with the entire day ahead of me, just knowing that I have to exist, that I have to be conscious in this world, fills me with anxiety. This is partly because my own thoughts are so dark and self-damning—I can’t stand to be alone with myself. (which is probably why I distract myself so much and so often with cat videos, but that’s another discussion for a different support group…) Another part of the difficulty in the day-to-day is probably similar to what new retirees feel:  what am I supposed to do with all this free time?! I spent so much time getting drunk, or participating in activities that centered around drinking (going to the bar, getting drinks before/after a movie, happy hours, exploring new breweries, cleaning [for God’s sake], etc) that I have no idea how to structure my day… and what activities even are there for adults that don’t have alcohol as some component?

I have to schedule out my entire day, precariously toeing the line between avoiding downtime while also attempting not to over-burden myself. AA has the saying, “One Day at a Time.” When we project too far into the future, we can overwhelm ourselves, and any significant emotions can weaken our resolves, tilting us toward relapse. For many in early recovery, we have to take things one hour at a time, or ten minutes at a time. The urge to drink is all-consuming. If we begin to think about fighting this war for the next week, month, year, or rest of our lives, the next step is often the liquor store. We end up waving the white flag in the form of chugging from a bottle. I have to make time for prayer, chores, reading, meditation, meetings, self care, exercise, calling my sponsor and others in AA, reflection, and gratitude (even my naps are scheduled). My life is totally focused on the forming of new, healthy habits, and I hate it. Everything feels forced and nothing feels natural.

My best thoughts and actions, however, got me to the ER, psych wards, and a few rehabs. So, for now, I’ll continue to do what my sponsor and the program tell me to do, until these new ways of living become as second nature as drinking had become. Everyone that I’ve met with a good amount of sobriety (a year or more) is much happier, and much more successful at living than I am, so I’m inclined to imitate their success. According to the Big Book, this new life will bring “freedom”, “peace”, “happiness”, and “serenity” (and then there’s that whole “being a better person” shtick). Certainly, my old life was miserable, chaotic, and degrading—I have nothing to lose, except misery, and I have everything to gain.

So, here goes..

 

In true alcoholic fashion, I have been planning on writing this damn blog for about two months; today, I write my first words…

Beginnings have always terrified me–that first sentence of a paper, the initial introduction to a stranger, an introductory trip to the gym after a long hiatus. There is, simply put, something that has always caused a deep, internal panic in me about launching into the unknown. Like all alcoholics, I have myriad hang-ups (this is merely one of many). Indeed, I have never frequented an AA meeting at which, across the board, the attendees have had any issue with labeling themselves as being anxiety-ridden, dysfunctional messes, totally incapable of managing their daily adult lives (until, that is, we have a good bit of sobriety). Something as simple and benign as calling and scheduling a doctor’s appointment, for example, is reason enough to leave us reaching for a bottle in order to cope with the ordeal.

For many of us, that is the reason that we first reached for alcohol in the beginning of our drinking days. Anxiety, depression, feelings in general, (the world, at large, really) frightened and terrified us. We found that alcohol numbed some of our more unpleasant emotions and made life a bit easier, a tad more tolerable. Public speaking was not quite so terrifying with a buzz. Talking to strangers and acquaintances at parties was a bit easier. We even found that, without fear crippling and inhibiting us, being charming and entertaining came naturally, and people liked us more with a drink in hand than when we were sober. Tragedy seemed a bit less heavy and was more manageable when alcohol was there to numb some of the pain. Indeed, The “Big Book,” Alcoholics Anonymous, states that Alcoholics drink for “the effect of alcohol.” (xxviii) We lean on the drink to make us engaging, to calm social anxiety, and to numb our inner critiques of ourselves (the internal voice, which accuses us of being worthless, stupid, ugly, fat, useless, failing, is a bit more forgiving when we imbibe). We drink to forget trauma, to lessen loss, to feel as though we have some control in our lives (i.e. “I can drink this, and I’ll be able to feel better for a time and control my emotional state”). In essence, we drink to make life tolerable, until our drinking increases such that our lives become unbearable, primarily because of our habit. Over time, our self-medicating became self-destruction, and by that time, we were completely unable to let go of the life-preserver that was alcohol, even as we realized fully that it had become a heavy weight, dragging us to deeper and deeper depths.

Soon, as we begin to numb negative emotions and keep the darkness at bay, we come to realize (usually only because someone else, who notices that we are drowning and in danger of death, comes to our aid) that we cannot pick and choose that which we numb. When we were numbing our pain, desperation, embarrassment, failure, anxiety, and self-hatred, we were also anesthetizing our happiness, joy, love, hope, and all the little moments of beauty and humanity in daily life. All the while, we were driving away those who loved and cared for us further and further through our emotional absence, spiritual bankruptcy, and literal lack of presence and attendance. We, as we were, were gone, and had been for some time.

Soon, we found ourselves naught but empty, emotionally vacant, spiritually vacuous shells, blind to any purpose for our lives or for living in this world.  We stood alone at the precipice of death, and near to jumping. We were completely incapable of saving ourselves, despite our deep desire to stop drinking and our objective understanding that we needed to do just that if we ever wanted any semblance of a life worth living. Perhaps at some time in our pasts we could have turned away from this lifestyle–had we had a crystal ball at the time, foretelling of how such a positive thing in our lives could become our very ruin. Many of us who have relapsed time and time again, like myself, have made that jump, finding death preferable to a life spent devastated and alone, a slave to the bottle. For many, however, this utter desperation and misery allowed us to finally let go and reach out to the hand that had been there all along, offering help and patiently waiting for us to accept it.

[enter AA]

“The alcoholic is a very sick person.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, Forward to the First Edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, xiii)

“This physician had repeatedly tried spiritual means to resolve his alcoholic dilemma but had failed. But when the broker gave him Dr. Silkworth’s description of alcoholism and its hopelessness, the physician began to pursue the spiritual remedy for his malady with a willingness he had never before been able to muster. He sobered, never to drink again up to the moment of his death in 1950. This seemed to prove that one alcoholic could affect another as no nonalcoholic could. It also indicated that strenuous work, one alcoholic with another, was vital to permanent recovery.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, Forward to the Second Edition, xvi-xvii)

“But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge.” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 39)

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton