Drinking

My uncle died on Skid Row. I imagined it to be a place that was always in the nighttime, with the “feed the birds” bag-lady from Mary Poppins and toothless hobos perched on cardboard boxes, their fingerless gloves, outstretched to passersby. The bridge on the beach below our home housed a decent amount of homeless and I was used to it, often waving to the regular of the season. I remember my dad chatting with them at times. It never occurred to me that disease came along with some of it. Alcoholism. Mental Illness. Tragedy. It was all about tragedy to some degree.

I knew my uncle was an alcoholic, and that it was the reason he was on the streets - it wasn’t until I was older that the word “Schizophrenia” became a part of the story. The other part was that he was on the streets because “Reagan had let them all out of the institutions”….My child brain never comprehended how this all, pieced together, worked. We lived in my dad’s childhood home, his mom was gone, and his brother knocked around for a bit, in and out of “the hospitals”. Dad tracked where he was based on the bills that came to the house - and he’d pay them. When there was silence, the news of his death on the streets was confirmed after a search for him, to let him know his father had died.

I started to feel things after Grandad’s death, big, heavy, adult things. I watched the clock and at seven would tell Mom that I was going to get in bed to read. I’d position my book beside me as if I’d been reading and close my eyes to sleep, sleeping away the anxiety, the fear - of all the endings of everything that loomed. More distressingly than that, I don’t remember how the phase ended ...if I knew, I could tell a very big secret.

There was never alcohol in our house growing up. I was raised as a Christian Scientist and as a CS-er you don’t drink, do drugs, have pre-marital sex, take medicine or go to doctors, of any kind.

No sinning. Like anything else.

My friends drank, and when they’d offer I’d whisper “no thank you, it’s against my religion."

After the hilarity calmed, we all got used to it and I was just the girl that didn’t do anything she “wasn’t supposed to”.

In trying to impress a boy one day, I accepted a very bad warm bottle of Rolling Rock.

I don’t know where it came from, but it’s what I had the first time and what I ordered every time, (with the fake id that ended up in my wallet). It was terrible. It was OH so terrible. One bottle lasted a night. If another showed up I’d swap it out discreetly and continue to sip, drinking until the taste disappeared in the warm glow of having no taste at all.

Early exposure to a-non-sober-alocholic, sobered life up pretty quickly. The anger that came with it, the destruction, fear, hurt, inside and out, kept life such that I would stay in fear and danger, immersed in what I thought I could handle, take care of, fix, heal, change. There is no such thing and it was paid for in so many ways.

We didn’t drink in our house growing up or in the family that I married. I will admit now that I was a big fat jerk and accepted refill after refill of a very bad and complimentary house white wine while on a business trip with my soon to be ex husband at the time (who didn’t drink for mostly religious reasons), as a big F-You. If you know me, you’d maybe think it was a little bit funny - but I get that it wasn’t.

My first sober alcoholic relationship ensued, with one who was still a drunk, even though he wasn’t drinking, and that can only make sense to some. I’d always thought an alcoholic was someone who drinks a lot, too much…who can’t stop. I learned that an alcoholic is not 100% okay just because they are not drinking (but then, who is?). I always wondered though, new to the sober alcoholic field, why this one carried a small bottle of mouthwash in his jacket pocket. Why he went to the library to browse the internet instead of the AA meeting he said he was going to every night, and why he insisted on 2 rounds of golf each day on the weekend, or weekends of skiing, without me, why he disappeared for days.

In a nutshell, like the rest of the world, he was a work in progress.

Drinking really wasn’t even a thing for me until I moved to a drinking town. That’s where I really learned to drink. I learned it by hanging out with a guy who really loved to drink, so much that he hated everything else around him. He loved it so much it, it hurt. If you’ve ever been with a mean drinker, you know what I mean. If you have ever known a mean drunk, you know what I mean. If you never have, you don’t want to know. But I still hear his voice and I hear it so very clear.

I hear the question “what is your universal truth?” and just feel like the truths depend on a given moment/life stage - it’s what I believe right then, and sometimes it’s only what I want to believe.

With someone in recovery, I know that “just not drinking” is a huge feat. I have been proud to be a witness, but I also witness that the rest is still there, the hurt, pain, the things that cause us to rely on the alcohol - the reliance on other things, people, addictions. When with an alcoholic, you find that unless they are doing their work, their own personal work, they end up hurting and everything around them. I found that it is impossible to put in effort and love, respect and energy when that happens. But like any human, we ebb and flow in our consciousness - the kind that keeps us moving ahead of where we were before. I am honored to witness that, as often as I do.

I went to a local AA meeting a good handful of times through one year, in support of someone I wanted to be with, someone I wished would be different, for me, so that I could be with him…and realized in the end, that it was so that he could be with me.

My takeaway through witnessing the pain, the dependence, the work, (or sometimes the lack of), the truths, the anger, the gratitude, the wide range of emotions we all feel through our lives in different ways, was that it was no different from mine on any given day. It was there that I heard someone speak up about the work required not only for sobriety, but the work required for life itself.

I remember right then thinking that while I wasn’t having a problem with alcohol, I had a problem with being lazy in my self, in who I really was, the kind of person I wanted to exude, mostly. Taking it to the next level, the right kind of living wasn’t about just the work it took to pass up a glass of something, a bottle, a handle, a swig, it was all the rest of it to move forward as the real true person that I am.

Being with someone in recovery, who comes home with a bottle of wine for my dinner, pushes a cocktail my way, very comfortably, is new. He very blatantly questioned once, “Why do you keep ending up with alcoholics?”

I asked my therapist at my appointment the next week and he laughed and said “well, how about if you try being with someone who isn’t an alcoholic?” That wasn’t negotiable, I was well invested where I was with him, and he was a sober alcoholic who got an A+ in my life. In conclusion: “I just need to find them in their right place for me, I guess.”

My truth has become much more about gathering the strength, the faith, the understanding, the knowing, sadly, the risk, no matter how much I honor and love and admire all the sobriety before me, what is shows me. The emotional value of this is invaluable.

As the one on the other side, it’s comforting to be witness to the cycle of strength through weakness, the constant waves of it. And because of all that comes along with being with an addict, whether they are using or not, whether or not it’s drinking, using, gambling, hunting down flings - there will always be that insecurity. That’s when you wonder if you’re cut out for it, no matter how well someone is at the moment, you accept the risk.

On the messiest of days, whether mine or yours, there’s a gentle awareness - a reminder that perfection is in the work, the little nudge of pain we all feel, no matter what brought it on, no matter the coping method. We forever want to get over it and that gets us through to the next day safely, alone and together. The pain can just “be”, and it is sharp, and then it softens. Tragedy happens and sometimes it’s not survived. Sometimes nothing is seen but grief, and sometimes that is what we are supposed to see and we find at times we don’t have the time to wait around for it to go away.

I stopped the other day for gas station wine and an armload of chips and chocolate, realizing that we, as humans, have nothing to get over. We aren’t supposed to forget things… we just need to clear the noise. We fail if our goal is to get over it. We are supposed to think about the times that we were dying inside, rejoicing, barely surviving, learning, all of it, the yesterday gives us today.

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