ONE YEAR ON....by Liz G. by Liz G.
I came across a quote today which says “Too many people think the grass is greener somewhere else, but the grass is green where you water it. Remember that.” And it got me thinking about drinking and about not drinking and about how when you are drinking you think to yourself, this is it now, life is about to start . Hold on to your proverbial seatbelt this is where it all gets good, where it all kicks off. This is when things happen, the nitty gritty, the long, profound conversations, the instant bonding, the sneaky glances evolving into amorous relationships, the endless possibilities of the unknown. Things seemed attainable with a glass in hand that only ever seemed out of reach without one. The grass most definitely seemed greener with a glass of something alcoholic in my hand . Until it didn’t . Until the next day dawned and you awoke into the land of the living dead . The land where you desperately try to recall every second of the conversation of the night before to see if there was any damage done. You examine every action, repeatedly, looking for any clue of what may have occurred. You have constant playback going on in the background of your mind while the foreground examines your words and your actions under a microscope turning them this way and that. Of course, no matter how much searching you do or how much scrutinizing occurs it will never be enough to get to the bottom of it because, for the most part, your mind is a blank. You cannot remember what you said or to whom or what you did or where you did it because you, somewhere along the night, had a blackout. For me being addicted to an addictive substance in this case alcohol looked something like this: There was the looking forward to the night out (and in later years the trepidation about it too). The planning of it. The What are you going to wear to it? The getting nervous about it. All the dressing that goes with it, like a salad, to dress it up, to disguise what it really is ; a binge drinking fiasco. And then there is the worrying about it. When will we have our first drink? When will we have the second? Will people notice I’m drinking much faster than them? God why do people drink so slowly around here? Now I’m talking to random strangers. Isn’t this fun? I’m so popular, wait where’s everyone going, home God - boring no I’ll stay for a bit I’ve met some friends over here. Another one yeah great! And from this point and let’s face it, from the very first sip of anything alcoholic I have lost the ability to say no to a drink . T here is no off button. My brain has no defense against alcohol , once it has been consumed it takes on a life of its own and it owns me. I am not myself and for a while, that feels good, I am having so much fun, but the fun doesn’t last, and then it is just sad. Having established I was indeed home after the event, I pressed the mental self-torture button. Once this kicks in there is no defeating it but I pressed to repeat next weekend. So, when I saw this quote this morning about the grass being greener and how if you water what you have it may just become green enough I thought, gotcha. Gone are the days when I thought I had to preen and prance around to be accepted. Where I had to make myself visible to be noticed. Where I thought normal life was boring just something that had to be put up with in order to get to the good stuff, the drinking.
On the 1st of August, it was my first sober birthda y, and what a celebration that has been. It may not be an obvious celebration and had no apparent signs. I may not have dined out in a fancy restaurant surrounded by friends. I did not cut the cake (but I will definitely ate some). I did not receive copious amounts of well- wrapped gifts nor was I whisked off to far-flung places. However, the celebration was loud and clear and shining with fireworks going off in my head. It was a dignified celebration and one that wreaks no havoc in its wake. One year since definitively leaving down the glass, one year since deciding to pack it all in, and one year since making the decision not to do this to me again. Since deciding I am worth more than looking desperately from where the next drink s coming from. From arousing from sleep only to awaken into a wasteland of destruction and desolation. What continues to amaze me is how long it took to arrive at this decision . Even after all the despair and all the hurt and anguish I would go right back out there and do the same thing again. It amazes me how much of hold alcohol has over us and how entrenched it is in many aspects of our lives. How it pops up at every social occasion feeling like the guest of honour and how it raises an eyebrow when you decline its attempts to lure you in. And how you may hear a whisper of oh she can’t handle it. Well, now I can throw my hands up in the air and say no I can not handle it. And how are we supposed to handle it? Is it something fragile, something explosive that needs the training to be handled? I have tried to handle it and failed miserably. Now I just need to handle that and for the record, I do not need explosives in my life!! So here we are nearly one year on and I have found that the pastures in sobriety were green all along. I just did not know how to look for them. I did not know they needed tending and watering to flourish and grow. I did not know I had been given so much but that being addicted to an addictive substance had tried its best to steal it from me. It had tried to hide and conceal the truth so it took me much longer to appreciate what had already been there. I believe that the years of drinking severely stunted my emotional growth leaving me unable to manage many situations. I was left unarmed, without the tools of resilience, self-acceptance, self-confidence, and self-love and I needed alcohol as a social crutch to get me through. Like many things in life, it was a chain of incidences that allowed me to arrive at the decision to give up alcohol for good. Having sworn off alcohol many times when this final opportunity arose, I was ready for it. I was aware of the signs. My father in one of our last conversations had said to me “Don’t waste your life”. Wow, I thought to myself how do I do that? I took note of this but filed it away with things to be looked at later and it wasn’t until one year later when the binge drinking started to rear its ugly head again, showing up more often in my life and I found myself once again without an off button and with the reappearance of the self-torture APP, newly installed, I realized that here I was heading for disaster again.
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