TW: Self-Harm, Addiction
Hi friends - it's been a while.
It's been over 6 months since we last chatted and there’s been some changes in my life I’d like to catch you up on. The initial reason I disappeared was a superficial desire to work on other projects (shameless plug to check out Whelmed Reading). However, while working on my other projects I hit a very dark place in my life. I started depression medication earlier this year and while it initially helped, this May I began to self-harm again. This isn't the first time I've relapsed in self-harm but it is the first time since I was a teenager where I realized that cutting myself wouldn't be enough. While I never got to a point of having an actual plan of killing myself, and deep down I don't think I would have done it, I had this overwhelming feeling of just not wanting to exist anymore. I called my Dad in tears and admitted to him that I fantasized about getting hit by a car and being able to just be in a coma.
Now there's something else that you should know about this time in my life, I was drinking a lot. After my breakup last year, I started to drink more than I used to, I had originally started drinking again as a fuck you to my ex because he hated it when I would drink. But then I began to depend on it, a glass of wine at night (that would often turn into three), going out with friends at least once a week and getting trashed, and eventually blacking out. I kept telling myself that I was going to back off from drinking, both because I was tired of hangovers but also because I felt like I was gaining a bunch of weight from it. Never did I consider not drinking anymore because it felt like I was having a problem, but the fact that no matter what I said or what I did I couldn't get myself to stop. That week in May when I relapsed into self-harm I was on a four-day drinking binge, drinking with co-workers, drinking with roommates, all types of drinking that in my mind felt healthy. But I knew it wasn't.
I was drunk when I cut myself again. Really drunk. Crying on my bed with the tweezers in my hands (I don't keep razors in the house because of my past with self-harm.) The night after I cut myself I got drunk again with co-workers, stumbled into my room, and dug the tweezers out of the trash can that I threw them in the night before because I thought it was just a one-time relapse. I cried as I cut myself that night. Then I got up and wrote on my whiteboard in purple marker - the color is important because I chose four different colors to write my message in, wanting to make sure that I would see it when I woke up. I wrote, "Christy!!! You need to stop drinking! Pls!! Pls! <3, Drunk Christy" Spoiler Alert: I didn't stop drinking. Two days later, on Memorial Day, I had a couple of drinks again, I couldn't even tell you what I had that day all I remember was my last drink of that day was a White Claw. I called my Dad the next day in tears and told him I didn't want to exist anymore, he told me that I needed to stop drinking and I told him that I didn't think I could and he told me that I needed to go to a meeting and get real help. That was the permission I didn't realize I needed to go and get real help, the permission to admit that this really was a problem. The next day I stepped into my first AA meeting in tears. Memorial Day was the last time I had a drink. That was 120 days ago.
Getting sober was one of the hardest things I've ever done. The first 15 days I was in complete denial but knew that I needed to at least try. I was so angry, almost irrationally angry. The only person in my life who knew I was getting sober was my Dad and I felt myself getting annoyed with everyone around me, everyone who kept offering me drinks, and everyone who was able to drink like normal while I was suffering. All my brain could think about was drinking, I craved it. I craved it like a true addict and that was such a hard thing to come to terms with. I didn't want to call myself an addict but how could I not when it was all I could think about? I slowly started to tell people in my life, my roommates, my sister, my other friends. I got a sponsor, I built a community within AA, I started to attend meetings regularly, and I started to work the steps.
Sobriety hasn't solved all my problems, I'm not healed yet, and I'm writing this post right now because I'm really fucking sad right now. I feel lonely, overwhelmed, and exhausted. You see, all my issues didn't go away just because I got sober. I didn't cut myself because I was drinking, drinking just broke down the barriers I've built up to fight my negative thoughts which is what pushed me to pick up the tweezers. But I'm still fighting those negative thoughts. Now I'm fighting those negative thoughts and also fighting the urge to drink, fighting the urge to not jump back to my usual coping mechanism because while drinking did lower those barriers for a brief couple hours drinking brought me peace, numbness, and oblivion.
Not having that escape has been hard, but it has also pushed me to find a different kind of peace within myself. I'm more in touch with myself than I have been in my life, I know who I am now and what I want. On the best days, I don't stress about the little things the way I used to. I don't feel as though my life is as out of control as it used to be. I also feel a contentedness in myself that wasn't there before. I still go to parties and clubs and bars and social events and I order a mocktail and I still feel like I'm fun. I connect with my friends and strangers and I still do dumb things and make mistakes and say stupid stuff but all of it is coming from me and not the alcohol.
This isn't the path that I would have imagined that I would be on the last time we talked, actually if you told me in February that I'd be spending my upcoming 28th birthday sober I'd laugh in your face and say that there was no fucking way. But given that my word of the year was reclamation I think it's kind of perfect. Getting sober saved my life. It hasn't fixed all my problems but I know that it's keeping me alive and that's all I can ask for right now. I don't know if I'll be sober forever and I'm realizing that I don't need to know that right now, all I know is that I'm not going to have a drink today and I'm okay with that.
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