Shaking Hands with an Alcoholic

Photo by  Tuva Mathilde Løland  on  Unsplash   Sometimes when I'm newly sober (let's face it, there have been more times than I can count at this point), I don't so much as want to give shelter to a single thought about drinking. This time, I can hardly control my hunger to consume the stories of others who have alcohol use disorder. Every day, I search out the books, the blog posts, the interviews, and the podcasts. I do so to remind me of my  why . Perhaps I've been looking in the wrong places, but I've had a hard time finding the stories of the people like me. What I need right now are to hear the voices of the women who have consumed alcohol at the levels I did and survived, who were hard drunk 24/7 every day and found lasting sobriety. While scouring the internet resources, I've noticed a disturbing trend. It used to be that folks would engage in othering to avoid being categorized as alcoholics, "Sure I drink a lot, but I've never had vodka in my

Photo by  Boudewijn Huysmans  on  Unsplash Before I'd left elementary school, I realized there were polarizing forces within me. Half of me violently hoped to never be like my mother. The other half felt resigned to the same destruction she created. My mother was an alcoholic. I hated her. There was a time before I severed tied with her that I tried desperately to find out why, to find out how. How did it happen to her? How did she get lost to alcohol? When did it start? And why? From the few people I had available to ask, it seemed that her drinking started in high school. She was the prettiest. She was the most popular. The alcohol amplified her glow and covered for her lack of self-esteem. She got trapped in the banal way that so many do. The path from party girl to alcoholic is imperceptibly downhill and paved with black ice. The drinks made socializing silkier. The drinks made problems fuzzy. The drinks felt warm. The drinks made her forget. Sip and swallow, then again. One da

Photo by  Bhavyesh Acharya  on  Unsplash Things I've Done While Drunk 1. A home yoga class with a large bottle of gin next to me. 2. Arrived to a breakfast meeting with a VIP an hour early so that I could juice up and settle down before sitting with her. I made sure to tote a bottle of tincture into the meeting and note that it helped me with menstrual cramps. This was merely a cover in case she noticed any alcohol on my breath. 3. Danced in a way that left people telling the story for years. 4*. Vomitted voluminously in my own bed then continued to sleep in it because I was passed out. 5.  Had a fit of anger and pounded on my computer until it was mostly nonfunctional. 6*. Forgotten to drink anything but alcohol for so long that I required intraveneous fluids. 7*. Neglected to eat for so long that I was left with nutritional deficiencies that caused physical impairments like numbness and tingling, trouble with muscle coordination, diminished eyesight. 8*. Rode my bike. This is how

  Photo by  Roman Mager  on  Unsplash Since I have an actual recorded quit date for my latest round of sobriety, I decided to download a sobriety tracking app. With no work on my end, it can tell me how many days I've been sober. The app even gives me virtual chips for each month without alcohol. Additionally, my sobriety app follows how much money I've saved and units of alcohol I've not consumed while sober. This last calculation delivered a surprise to me. I already knew that I was consuming insane amounts of hard alcohol. I was drunk 24/7, quite literally. Check this out. Today I'm 2 months and 5 days sober, according to my app. Calculating at the rate I was drinking, I would have consumed 1558 units in that time. Divide that by the 14 units we're advised to not exceed in a week, and you get 111 weeks. Divide 111 weeks by 52 weeks in a year, and you'll see that the alcohol consumption I've saved in two months is equal to what is recommended I not exceed

Photo by  Nik Shuliahin  on  Unsplash Day One of Sobriety: the Aftermath, aka I Feel Like Roadkill The 7th of January, my first day sober, didn't dawn as a joyful new era in life with a bouncy red ball of sun bursting into the sky, birds singing with joy, and pep in my step. Rather, it was the first day of my stepping into the light after a long illness that had left my physically and psychologically beaten. I was not filled with optimism or determination. I was exhausted and depressed and knew I had to face those things and my old foe of insomnia without my drug of choice.  Day one of recovery looked less like waking up in Oz and more like coming to my senses after a tornado had ripped through my life. Habits, Health There was no immediate drama in the wake of the storm. I realized that I'd trashed my body and needed to care for it gently to return to health. The first step was to learn how to drink fluids again. I leaned heavily on icy cold sports drinks because that was the

Photo by  Ahmad Odeh  on  Unsplash Or Should I Say, My Latest Dance? I'm now two months sober. But I've been through this too many times to say with even a shred of believable confidence that I won't slip up again. Don't get me wrong. I want this sobriety. I wanted it with equal sincerity every time in the past, too.  What did my last day of drinking look like? It was January 6, the day of the insurrection in the US. My quitting on that date was merely coincidence. Rather handy, though, as I've never previously taken note of my last day. My quitting didn't come on the heels of a big epiphany. You see, I couldn't go cold turkey. I was so interminably dependent upon alcohol that even after I knew to my bones that I could no longer drink, I had to continue to do so in order to prevent myself dying from the withdrawal. I had to agonizingly cut back for weeks before I could cease entirely, which felt like sharing a bed with someone I knew wanted to kill me. What

  Photo by  Kristina Flour  on  Unsplash I'm an alcoholic. But I've never said those words out loud. I drink alone. I hide. I shame myself. I'm just like the mother I loathed and judged. I was never a party animal, never a connoisseur, never a social drinker. The alcohol quieted my swelling tides of depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Soothing as a lullaby, it entranced me into lowering the defenses I'd built as the child of an alcoholic. Every time I threw it a treat, it grew a bit stronger, learned from my slips. Over time, that innocent thing which had given me comfort like a kitten morphed into a monster I had to wrestle for my life. Today, I am two months sober. I've tried to get clean before, more times than I can count. I won't be guilty of using magical thinking this time.  There are, however, two things that are different about this go-round. This time, I came within a blade's edge of killing myself. I could feel my body disintegrating rapidly day by