MiTHology (4.0)

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Chapter 4: AA

I didn’t know what AA really was. I was just aware that it existed, that it was a place people went if they had a drinking problem, and that some of my family members had gone to it in the past. So I looked up a meeting list online, and one day I decided to wander on in.

Have you ever been an alcoholic in your first AA meeting? It’s an experience like no other. I was not prepared, lol. They always ask at the beginning of the meeting, “is anyone here for their very first meeting ever?”; and I, sheepish and confused, slowly raised my hand, there in the back row. And suddenly all eyes in this 50+ person meeting were on me, smiling, beaming, and all fifty-plus of these strangers were suddenly treating me like the most important person in the room. Like, they saw how much pain I was in and they truly wanted to help me, like, I was actually being seen. At the end of it, they waved me up to the front of the room to put a white poker chip in my hand, and they gave me a free book, which all the women in the room had signed with their phone numbers, and I was just super overwhelmed and also really moved; because, apparently, this program was about God? I had not known! This was, like, Catholicism for dummies – like, special ed class for church! It was just what I needed! And all of the things that people were saying sounded so relevant to me! I once again felt like I’d found the cure, the medicine I’d needed all along!

But even that didn’t stop me, lol. Because, I mean, I hadn’t walked in here intending to quit. I just wanted to feel like I was addressing the problem. So, I kept on drinking.

At least, for a few more weeks, until I got a sponsor, who I thought was super cool and inspired me to actually try to stop, just to please her. I did all the work, even the stuff I really didn’t want to do, because I wanted her to be happy with me.

But it is clear, in retrospect, that I did not yet actually want to stop drinking.

There’s a rule in AA (not technically a rule, like the Steps, but widely acknowledged to be a rule) that you are not to begin a romantic relationship in your first year of sobriety. And, I didn’t like that. All I wanted in this life, after all, was to find love and get married and have babies; that was the whole point, dammit; that was all I’d been hoping for, all along. I was a couple months sober when I met a guy, and we really hit it off; but, I was trying to be a good little AA, so, on my sponsor’s advice, I told him I couldn’t start a relationship right now. Bitterly, he and I fell apart. I regretted it. I was mad and resentful that I’d taken my sponsor’s advice.

So, when a few months later, I reconnected with a different guy, I wasn’t going to let the same thing happen again. I ditched the sponsor and started dating the guy. By this point, I’d moved: my sponsor had encouraged me to move out of my parents’ house and into my own place, which I had, and it was great; but now I was in a different city, farther away from all my old meetings, and the meetings in this new city did not feel nearly as profound or relatable to me (the first city was a sizeable university town with a lot of culture and arts and a well-educated population; my new town was a real country town, a little truck stop off the interstate, basically the meth capital of the state). They tell you in AA that “every meeting is a good meeting,” but, sorry, that’s simply not true. So, because of this, I just gradually stopped going to meetings.

But I was so happy! I was still on that pink cloud. I was almost a year sober, for the first time. I moved in with the boyfriend, and enjoyed cooking for him in our shiny new apartment. I felt so domestic and normal and healthy. I’d made it.

We got engaged. I started thinking about the wedding. I knew that I had to be skinny in my wedding photos, which meant I’d have to lose some weight (I was, at this point, still thin, a good twenty pounds thinner than I am now, as I write this; but, by my own standards at the time, I was uncomfortably fat, as I was used to being underweight). So, shortly after our engagement, I started starving again, which immediately put me back in the mental place that I’d been at in the past, and soon, drinking felt like the only option. I informed my fiance that I was going to go back to drinking, and he, who’d only really known me well since I was sober, and didn’t understand how bad it could get, was like: “okay, cool.”

Immediately it got way worse than it had ever been. I was deeply unhappy; I lost a ton of weight; I quit my job, and instead applied for an overnight grocery stocking job, where I could stay out of the public eye and not have to talk to anyone; I was becoming a sad little cave troll.

Working an overnight job meant that I drank around the clock, and I never really slept. No one really supervises you, at that kind of job, so I drank in the bathroom all the time, just sitting on the floor for who knows how long, alone in the wee hours of the morning, drinking wine out of those little bottles that I carried in my purse. (For whatever reason, I’d found that my tastes had shifted slightly since relapsing, and now I drank Barefoot, which is also $5/bottle, but a little more tart and fruity, whereas Sutter Home was a little more flat and cardboardy.) But, at this point I was so sick that it didn’t even really taste good anymore, or like much of anything. I just did it to keep myself going. After my shift ended, I bought more wine, and drank it on the drive home. And I kept a closetful of wine at home, which my husband hated (one time, he threw my entire stash in the dumpster, and when I realized what he’d done I blew up at him, raging that he’d thrown away however-much-money worth, my hard-earned money, and I made him pay me back for it; after which I shamelessly went outside and climbed into the dumpster and retrieved the whole stash, anyway). It was madness. Sleeping during the day is hard, so I stayed awake and drank all day long, occasionally passing out for a few hours at a time. It was this weird fog, that I was living in.

I was drinking more than I could afford. I had no choice but to quit my grocery job and go back to the dogs, which paid better than the groceries (and allowed me to be on a more normal schedule). But that didn’t fix the problem either.

It was on the way home from yet another trip to Ireland – which, don’t even get me started on that trip, that’s a whole story in and of itself – that I became ready to quit for real. I was, as they say, sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Chapter 5: The Last Year

So after that trip, I got real. I started keeping these daily logs of everything that I ate; I was super rigid and strict with myself; I took notes, throughout the day, of what I heard in AA meetings or at church, or that I read in books; I became pretty serious about recovering. I got a new sponsor. She was amazing, a really powerful personality, about my mom’s age, and also a member of my church, so we connected over that. I even started seeing a NaPro doctor, because, you know, I thought that I would like to have kids one day (which was how I explained it to people, while inside I was dying from the desire to have kids of my own approximately yesterday), and wanted to get my health in order so that I could do that (little did I know, or perhaps I didn’t want to admit, that all I’d have to do to get my health in order was to gain some weight; I didn’t actually need the hormones they prescribed, but, I wanted to believe I could just take some pills to fix the problem, rather than do the hard work of gaining weight). I once again busted my butt at AA, doing all the steps as best as I could, doing all the hard things my sponsor told me to do, religiously.

After just shy of a year of this rigidity, I burned out. In late 2018, unceremoniously, I went back to drinking yet again.

It wasn’t even the dramatic, hideous rock bottom that it had been in 2017. It was just pathetic and miserable. I was tired; I wanted to die; my husband was trying to get me to stop drinking and stay alive, so naturally I resented my husband and wanted out of the marriage; I gave up on church, and read a lot of secular philosophy and David Foster Wallace, and I think this was the only time of my life that I’ve had true, clinical depression and anxiety. I’ve been sad and down and depressive many times, and frequently very anxious, but what I had during this time was like nothing else; I truly understand why people with clinical depression and anxiety kill themselves. It’s simply not possible to live like that. I was chemically dependent on the alcohol; drinking myself to oblivion at night was the only time I felt even slightly human. I was once again locked in this “starve-drink-binge-purge-drink some more-pass out” pattern every single day. It was just a mess all around.

I guess one night, when my husband and I were fighting about my drinking yet again, I drunkenly confessed to him that all I’d ever wanted was to be a mother. I was 29 now, and thirty was in sight, and it was just looking hopeless. My husband gave me an ultimatum. We could get real about trying for a kid, he said, but only if I quit drinking and throwing up and actually got healthy. And, if we did have a kid, if I ever went back to drinking after that, he would leave me and take the kid with him.

Getting healthy? Ugh, that sounded awful. But, I really wanted a kid, so I agreed – deciding in my head that I’d give it one year’s effort. If after one year, I was still this miserable and still not pregnant, I’d throw myself right back into my old ways and drink myself to death. I actually mathed it out: I didn’t want to be an “old” mom, and my own mom had had me when she was 32 years and 8 months old, so I knew that I had to have my first kid before I was 32 years and 8 months or else I’d be hopelessly old and what would be the point (this made sense to my drunken mind, at the time, lol). So I knew the exact date by which I had to be pregnant or else I’d give up.

Chapter 6: Sobriety

You may be saying: Mith, this is terrible; this is neither a solid foundation for parenthood, nor for sobriety. Wanting a kid won’t keep you sober, you may be saying – you have to want it for yourself; nor is it healthy to have a kid when you’re fresh from an addiction!

I agree that, in retrospect, it sounds really bad; but, six years in, it’s actually worked out. No one is really ready, to be a parent, no matter how healthy they are. You become ready as you do it.

And furthermore, I would argue that, sometimes, the whole “you have to work on loving yourself first” thing is BS. Sometimes, going down that path just leads you to live alone, gazing at your navel, still sad, trying to convince yourself that you’re doing okay with your little hobbies and your “self-care” and whatnot. Sometimes, a person really needs something to live for. People are designed to live with partners, in families, and it’s only natural for a person to suffer if they don’t have that. Sometimes other people actually are necessary; they can inspire us to change and be better.

My very last drink was in March of 2019, on the way home from an out-of-state event with my husband and his friends, at which I’d been secretly drinking all day. We’d stopped on the way down at a gas station, where I’d snuck off and bought an off-brand bottle of pink wine and a bottle of pink Vitamin Water, and out back behind the store, sneakily dumped out the Vitamin Water and filled the bottle with wine, and sipped on this all day long at the event. It didn’t even really help or feel great; there was no high. By the end of the day, I was just tired and sad and drained and kinda knew it was over.

There was no grandiosity or solemnity or celebration or spirit of resolution, about my first day sober. It was just kind of a grim “here we go again, ugh, let’s see if this works this time.” I didn’t go to meetings or therapy or church or read any quit lit; I just survived, just slogged through, dragging my feet, watching the clock. I forced myself to fill the void left by alcohol with things like food (in healthy quantities) and music and creative writing, which has always been my favorite form of distraction (it was around this time that I poured my absolute heart and soul into the mini-novel that is probably my favorite thing that I’ve ever written, and is for me what I’ve sometimes heard writers call “the book of my heart”). It wasn’t so bad. And actual sleep was nice. I kept chugging along.

I’d been doing this for about two and a half months when we found out I was pregnant.

Like I was saying, I wasn’t ready, but I became ready. And now, almost six years sober and getting ready to have baby #4, I daresay I’ve been doing a decent job as a mom, raising my kids in the traditional Catholic faith. Not that I think I’m a perfect parent, by any means, or that I don’t have areas where I need to improve. I definitely mess up. But, my kids are happy, healthy, cared-for, smart, and know that they are loved.

Do I miss alcohol? Yes. Very much, sometimes. Sometimes I just get in these moods or situations where the only thing that would help is a drink. So what do I do instead? The same thing I’ve been doing. I just trudge through and survive on distractions, when I need to. Time passes. It sounds unglamorous and dull, and tbh, it is. But, that’s only sometimes. Most of the time, life is amazing; I mean, look at me: my dream came true, not once, but three, soon to be four times over. It’s certainly infinitely better than it was. I think it’s just the fate of any alcoholic, to always miss alcohol and always want it, on some level. It was my soul mate, after all; it was the only thing that’s ever cured my broken personality, the only thing that ever really made me feel like I could really just be a person; and I guess I’ll never really be over it. But, it’s truly a small price to pay for my family and the life that I have now.

Later this month will be my six-year sobriety anniversary, so in honor of that, I thought I’d share my little story here, for anyone who might be curious. Even though my story is so stupid and pathetic and unexciting that it’s embarrassing to even write out and post, I like to think that this might be helpful for someone, at some point, in some capacity. Who knows.

In AA, there’s this huge emphasis on “sharing your story,” it’s seen as a thing of great value; in fact, some meetings are entirely focused on a single person narrating the story of their addiction and getting sober, like you all just sit and listen to one member talk, for the better part of an hour (they’re called “speaker meetings”). And the Big Book, which is basically AA’s Bible, has a massive section of personal stories. Share your story, they said, it will be helpful, they said. Share your story, share your story! Fine. Here is mine:

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Chapter 1: Irish Whiskey

The first time I tried alcohol it was like discovering magic. I felt like I’d met my soul mate, the handsome fairytale prince who had come to save me. It was like the cure to everything that was wrong with me (i.e. my then-undiagnosed personality disorder). I thought to myself: “wow, so all I need to do is just drink all the time!” And immediately after that I thought: “huh, I am probably going to be an alcoholic one day!” But that did not stop me.

I was, at the time, sixteen or seventeen or so, and at home with my parents and sister. My family of origin loves to drink, and alcoholism definitely runs in the family. When I was growing up, alcohol was always present, and my parents drank daily in the evenings to wind down after work. They were never drunk or poorly behaved or anything; it was just how they relaxed. As a little kid, I always thought it was annoying, because the stuff smelled bad, and was a constant spill risk, and why were they so obsessed with it, anyway; and I knew I’d never want to drink that gross stuff; my exact words were, “why would you want to drink something that makes you stupider?” If only I’d retained that innocence!

This chapter of my story is called Irish Whiskey, but actually, my first drink was not whiskey. It was rum. Around the holidays, my parents always kept Gosling’s dark rum around, for mixing into eggnog, and one night my sister offered to mix me a cocktail of rum and juices – which I coolly accepted, but was quietly thrilled about, because by this point I was an angsty teenager and curious about alcohol, but also characteristically, pathologically passive, and always waiting for someone else to approach me first. So this was great. It was a festive wintry night, we were all sitting around playing Scrabble and watching TV in the living room, and I remember its murky purplish color and exactly which glass it was in and everything. It was delicious; it was the cure to all my problems. I’d finally found it. With this, I could do anything.

.

This is where the whiskey comes in. Like I said, the rum was only a seasonal specialty, around my house. Whiskey was more of a regular item. Then, in the spring when I was seventeen, my family went on our first trip abroad, on a long-awaited trip to Ireland. Suffice it to say that whiskey was a big part of that trip. The legal drinking age for liquor over there is eighteen, but people in restaurants didn’t really care, so, basically, I was drinking all over that country, along with my family, both in public and in private. We were all having quite a lot of Jameson’s. This was where I developed a real taste for the stuff.

At this point, I was not yet drinking every day, nor suffering from hangovers or any other negative consequences. It wss purely fun, and I looked forward to it but didn’t yet require it to survive the day.

I think this phase lasted about a year, for me. That summer, I got into a situationship with an older guy who was a very sick alcoholic, and he and I would drink a lot of whiskey together (he is dead now — I found his obit while googling him randomly nine years later; God rest his soul), and long story short it was a very sad and messy and I came to associate whiskey with that guy, so after it ended, I found I’d lost my taste for whiskey. Now the smell of it made me sick. But that also did not stop me.

Chapter 2: Vodka

Around this age, eighteen or so, I got into vodka. It didn’t have that cloying stink of the brown liquors. It was clear, and mixed well with diet lemon-lime soda, my drink of choice – plus, Burnett’s came in all kinds of fun flavors, like pink lemonade, strawberry, even birthday cake! I’d come with my Dad to the liquor store and point out the flavor I wanted, and he’d buy it for me. Drinking was a lot of fun, at this point.

Usually I drank alone, just sitting around at home listening to my music and zoning out like I like to do. But I’d also drink with friends, sometimes, at this point, like I’d pack a mixed drink in a thermos to go see people in town, or for hanging out with my little friends from the grocery store where I worked part-time after school. We had some fun and questionable times together. Alcohol made it possible for me to be fun and social and romantic and impulsive. Like a kid that age was, I assumed, supposed to be.

But I have always been terrified of getting in trouble, so I also played it fairly safe. I never had a fake ID or anything. I never did any drugs, simply because no one ever offered them to me; if anyone had, I would have jumped on it; again, the pathological passivity. I waited until my twenty-first birthday to go to the liquor store and buy vodka with my own money; I took it home to my little efficiency apartment and drank alone while I did my homework, and that was my 21^st birthday.

I never went out to frat parties (those weren’t my people – I didn’t have “people”). I would, however, get drunk before hanging out with the guy that I was seeing my junior year, and he often said that I seemed to have a problem and should stop. And I adored that guy, and would do anything to make him like me, but even that didn’t stop me. He didn’t understand; I had to drink, in order to get around in the world at all. If not for alcohol I couldn’t even be here! This was my medicine.

This time period overlapped with one of the worst restrictive phases of my ED, as well, so I was very skinny, and it didn’t take a lot for me to get completely shitfaced. The college administration saw that I was unwell and forced me to see a counselor and a nutritionist, and told me they’d expel me if I didn’t get up to a healthy weight. (This was a small, private, insular, prestigious liberal arts school where everyone knew everyone and there was nowhere to hide.) The nutritionist they sent me to could clearly see that I was unwilling to actually recover, and agreed to meet me where I was: to help me get to a “healthy” BMI and maintain the bare minimum that the school required in order for me to stay a student. So she and I met weekly to track my calories and weight and help me achieve and maintain that bare minimum number. She was pretty confused and concerned each week when she read my food diaries and saw that I used so much of my daily caloric allowance on vodka (3 Tbsp = 100 calories; I measured out all my portions, but made sure I got a healthy dose). She said I might want to think about that. But that didn’t stop me.

My vodka phase lasted about five years and saw me through a lot of gross and sad situations; that guy dumped me, I was crushed and couldn’t take it anymore, etc., I dropped out of that college, I came home and got a job and did a lot of unwholesome “partying” with various connections outside of work, all fueled by vodka. I also was taking a lot of Zoloft around this time, which, in combination with alcohol, is really not great for you. I was a hot mess, and my parents told me I needed to stop dicking around and go back to college and finish my degree.

So, browsing the internet with drink in hand, I found a new college, one that was the complete opposite of the one I’d been at before (big, out-of-state, culturally-diverse fine art school in a big city), and moved there, and very quickly became obsessed with the club scene there.

I was 22, far from home, in a whole new place, and in the early days, made a Herculean effort to refashion my whole identity. I tried to be social. I glommed onto some of the first people that I met, and we went out to lots of clubs together: there were tons of clubs within walking distance of the dorms, and in this part of downtown, you were allowed to get your drinks in a plastic cup “to-go” and just wander the city with them! I did a lot of drunken dancing. I met a lot of people. I did some dangerous and creepy stuff, and messed up many a potential relationship, and got my dumb self hurt. My roommate, as well as the guy that I was casually talking to, both told me I needed to lay off the drinking – but they didn’t understand. Large chunks of that era are, mercifully, missing from my memory.

The “clubbing” phase was a strange and sad time. A few months into it, I started to feel the consequences, and started trying to quit.

Thus began the roller coaster: white-knuckling it through a few days, trying to be all wholesome and pure, then binging for a few weeks. I remember one time, on one of my early attempts to quit, I thought I’d try replacing drinking with reading, so I started reading novels all the time, just keeping myself immersed in a novel virtually every second of the day that I wasn’t in class; and I remember one time I was sitting in a classroom waiting for the professor to arrive, with a massive fresh stack of library books on my desk, and one of my classmates commented: “you read a lot!” to which I replied: “yeah, I decided to try reading instead of drinking!” and I could see him doing the mental math about how much I must have been drinking, and he got this weird look that was at once horrified and impressed, and backed away, lol. None of my attempts to quit lasted. I started trying to go to church, and feigning devoutness and asceticism during my very brief stretches of sobriety. I started to experience things like real hangovers and crippling hangxiety. I really started to become the classic “Jekyll and Hyde” figure, wracked with guilt and shame during the day and an unhinged drunken basket case by night, in a vicious self-perpetuating cycle. But, it was still so early in the game, and none of that stopped me.

Chapter 3: Wine

I guess it was around this time, that I was realizing I had a problem with liquor, that I decided to switch to wine. My mom was a wine drinker, after all, and she was always so balanced, so healthy, and never ungraceful; she had been telling me for some time that perhaps I should switch to wine, as wine doesn’t get you trashed as quickly. Plus, I’d already been drinking pink lemonade Burnett’s with diet 7-Up for some time, and sometimes I’d even mix it with wine, if there were wine around – so it was pretty natural for me to transition to sparkling sweet wines, and from there I discovered Sutter Home pink moscato ($5/bottle), which became my drink of choice in my last year of college.

Needless to say, switching to wine did not make anything better. It was just a different era, and I still drank liquor when I went out on occasion; but, the vast majority of the time, I’d drink wine in my parked car. That year, I shared a suite in a dormitory with some very sweet, sane, healthy, well-rounded girls who seemed to genuinely care about me, so, obviously I couldn’t drink in the dorm or keep alcohol there. So, I’d walk to the grocery store at some point during the day, between classes or after, and buy a few bottles of wine and carry them around in my backpack with my laptop and books, and after class I’d go sit in my parked car and listen to music and drink wine out of grocery store Styrofoam cups while the city around me got dark. That became my thing.

So, drinking had become really easy, at this point. Because wine didn’t hit as hard as liquor, I found that I could day drink. I frequently drank in my car before classes, especially if I had something scary in class like a presentation or a group project. (I carried mouthwash, now, too, out of paranoia that people would be able to smell it on me.) Basically, I drank all the time now, and my friendships all suffered greatly because of it. Because of my nasty, isolationist behavior, I’d already had a falling out with a friend/former roommate, a girl I really loved and admired and wanted to stay friends with (to this day I still deeply regret losing her); and I was becoming resentful and bitter and closing myself off from people who cared about me, I guess as a protective measure so that wouldn’t happen again.

This is where I was at when I graduated college. I was sick and shaky with hangxiety throughout my graduation ceremony; I barely remember it; I only started to feel calm and happy at brunch afterwards, drinking white wine at a restaurant with my family.

But nothing would slow me down!

I came home, and got a job, and lived at home and worked for a while, and kept on drinking a ton of wine every evening until I passed out. I was also super bulimic at this point. The job that I’d gotten, as a dog grooming trainee, was hard; it was really hard, I did not have a natural knack for it, and I was simply not cut out for it, and as a former “gifted child” and Phi Beta Kappa and all that, I did not take well to not being good at a thing. But I seemed to have no other options; so I drank more and more in the evenings (which is pretty normalized, in that workplace culture; there was a running joke in that salon that dog groomers are all either on antidepressants, or alcoholics, or both). Not that I blame the job, or anything else. It was, of course, always me all along.

Alcohol was really holding me back, now. I was trying to be religious; after much waffling, I’d finally joined the Catholic Church, and now that I was accountable before God, it really weighed on me that I had a problem. A few months after joining the church, I found myself tangled up in yet another problematic situationship (two, if I’m being honest), and just constantly hungover and anxious during the day, getting drunker and drunker at night, spending more and more on wine, and my parents were mad at me and ashamed of me, and so yeah, with the help of the Church, I became aware that I had to address the problem.

continued