2007-06-19

Now we are five.

I am five years sober today.

Depending on how one sees it, in some ways � emotionally speaking � I am either five years old (life begins when you put down the bottle), or twenty-three years old (the theory being that one stops growing when one begins drinking alcoholically; I was eighteen). There�s not a lot of difference there, really. Five or twenty-three. You have a little more freedom, a little more responsibility. Couple years out of diapers, couple years out of college. Either way, you�re now being held more or less accountable for your shit. But you�re still indiscriminately sticking things in various orifices. And you think you know everything.

I�m not a fan, by and large, of �drunkalogues.� I don�t tell my story much. I prefer to keep a sort of mental Rolodex and flip to a random memory when I need to. There are only a couple of people who know how really bad it got for me, and even then, they couldn�t crawl into my head and see what a dark, dark place it had become. Fear, anger, and unfathomable self-pity were my constant companions. At the end, I couldn�t do much of anything except drink. And I couldn�t stop drinking.

There were many evenings where I�d be alone in the house, terrified because I was almost out of whatever I�d bought on my way home from work, and I still wasn�t where I needed to be (my feelings of personal safety were directly proportional to the level of liquid in the bottle). And on those nights I would comfort myself by taking the phonebook, and looking up the phone numbers for The Samaritans, and for AA. I would never actually CALL either of those numbers, but somehow I felt that just by opening the phonebook and seeing those numbers, I was �doing something.� And then I�d pass out. Sometimes I�d make it into my bed, but other nights the houseboy would come home and find me on the couch, or on the floor. And in the morning, after I�d thrown up, I�d apologize....but. But. My drinking was out of hand, but I was depressed. I was getting outlandishly plastered by myself every night, but my job was stressing me out.

On New Year�s Day 2002 I woke up with a hangover that I could feel in my back molars. I had been to a party the night before. If memory serves, I had a pretty good time, and hadn�t done anything bad. I didn�t make an ass of myself, I didn�t find some intangible something to get angry about, I didn�t launch into a screaming tirade in the car on the way home. Given my track record, this was a wildly successful evening. But I spent most of what was left of that day (since I didn�t wake up, or � rather - come to, until 1 or 2 in the afternoon) feeling sad and just unbelievably tired. And like so many nights before, I opened up the phone book and looked at the number for AA. Only this time I actually called it.

I can�t tell you that everything fell into place that first night, that I went to a meeting and immediately figured everything out. It was six months between that first meeting and June 19th, 2002 � six months of getting some time together, and then drinking again...stumbling and starting over and stumbling again. I�m here to tell you that once you�ve come to some understanding that you can�t drink anymore, the act of drinking becomes even LESS enjoyable than it was before you arrived at that understanding. If I was lucky, I�d get that initial, artificial relief....for about 5 minutes. And then the ceiling would cave in on me, and I�d be hysterical with a grief for which I had no name.

Early on I heard someone say: �When things get painful enough, you will change.� That was one of the first things I heard that made sense to me. The other was �terminal uniqueness.� When you�re in the throes of self-pity, you�re quite certain that nobody else in the world has it as bad as you do, that your situation is different and therefore unsolvable. The same person from whom I first heard that term was also the person who, about a year later, cut me off in the middle of a litany of perceived injustices to my person and said, �Oh, Cinderella....your life is just SO HARD.� I was speechless for about five seconds, and then I burst out laughing. I simply can�t afford these bouts of self-absorbed defeatism, and I need people to tell me this. My best and closest friends tend to be the ones who give me the most crap.

When I was still drinking, I�d look out the kitchen window at our back porch, and think how nice it would be to fix it up with some chairs and a little table. It would make a nice place to �unwind� with a glass of wine on a summer evening. There were a number of problems with this little fantasy of mine. One was that I seldom drank wine. Another was that most nights I dispensed altogether with such niceties as pouring my liquor into a glass. I would sit in the middle room on the futon couch and listen to the same two or three songs over and over, and drink until I passed out. I was about a year sober when I actually went out onto the porch, swept off years of accumulated grit and dead leaves, and then went out and bought chairs and plants and made a nice little urban oasis for myself. In five years, I have never had anything stronger than silver needle tea on that porch. The analogy here being that I spent a lot of time in my own head, making all kinds of wonderful plans that never came about because the outcome in my thoroughly-addled imagination was far more satisfying (or so I thought) because I never actually had to DO anything to achieve it. I was the Queen of Expectations, sincerely believing that everyone around me should just automatically intuit my needs and wants and act accordingly. These days I�m more like the court jester.

I am by no means �fixed.� There�s no graduation ceremony as far as all of this is concerned. There are days when I really do feel like I�m five years old. I want somebody to tell me to take a nap, to remind me that it�s easier in the long run to just rip the bandage off rather than peel it back millimeter by millimeter. I want to pitch a temper tantrum and make sure everybody knows how upset I am. I look at what�s ahead, and the decisions that I will have to make and I want to shut down and have a cookie and wait for everything to magically resolve itself. I realize how ridiculous this is. I�d rather not be a five year old.

But then this past Sunday my five-year-old niece whacked her head on the swingset. She cried and everything was epic tragedy for about five minutes until she came back outside with a paper cup full of green JELLO, prattling away. You�d never know that anything happened. And I thought, well, you know, there�s something to be said sometimes for being five. The bad moment passes, and then there�s JELLO.

lisamcc at 7:29 a.m.



4 comments so far
cardiogirl
2007-06-19 07:26:16
Congratulations on FIVE YEARS! That's a huge accomplishment. Look how vast the differences are between a newborn baby and a 5-year-old. That IS pretty epic.
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lj lindhurst
2007-06-19 10:20:46
That's a huge accomplishment. Congratulations! You should be so proud.
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vikkitikkitavi
2007-06-19 11:46:13
My brother, who is fifteen years sober, told me that I had said to him once during his drinking years that, essentially, there was nothing poetic about his situation. And that it really stuck with him because he had kinda convinced himself that there was. What's funny is that although I said it to him, I should've said it to myself. I'm not an alcoholic, but I've got plenty of bullshit destructive coping mechanisms that I should have pitched a long long time ago. Hey, I'm working on them. Congratulations, baby.
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buzzgirl
2007-06-19 20:41:46
Congratulations. Sincerely.
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