Being an alcoholic

I had stopped drinking out and started drinking in. I don’t recall this becoming a conscious decision. I recall going out to work drinks and often having too many and because my drinking had got quite out of control I had lost bladder control. Getting a late train home with pee stained tights or trousers and with commuters looking at you was humiliating, being drunk it didn’t matter, the shame came the following morning when you had to commute back in and had no idea which of those you were sitting next too saw you the night before. Had you puked on any of them? Had you tried to go home with any? Commuting became a shameful experience and I would never get the same train in or sit in the same carriage to try and maintain my anonymity. I became afraid of not being able to control myself and worrying, and also getting fed up of having to explain myself either why I was in different clothes (luckily in London a lot of shops are open late), or why I was texting at 2am and then pretending everything was fine at 7am. It was exhausting and yet at the same time seemed like the only way I could exist.

Drinking at home had benefits, in some ways cheaper and in a lot of ways safer. It looked like this ….I’d go out after work or with people and maybe have 1 or 2 drinks, I could control myself that much which to this day amazes me. I’d make some excuse about why I had to leave and buy several bottles of wine to drink on the way home. I’d even buy cigarettes. That moment of getting into my flat, away from people and their judgement, opening the bottle pouring the drink, sitting down and taking that first sip and toke. Wow I can feel it now, I can feel all those emotions from other people and myself disappearing into the wine where I did not have to process, think or interact. I could just sit in my stale mess for as long as I wanted. I can still feel the relief and easing of tension in my body now as I write this almost 8 years since my last drink. It seems so obvious now that I could have just talked to any number of people in my life and said three simple words “ I need help” and it is not that I did not know I needed it, by this point I knew my behaviour was no longer normal but to ask for help – who would I ask? I didn’t have a special someone. Relationships with friends were compromised now by my behaviour, and I couldn’t trust that anyone would just listen and help because underneath all that alcohol was a young woman who felt deeply to her core that she was no longer worthy of love.

I expect this might have gone on forever or not. It’s hard to know. And then my Mum died. In 2008. I was already well on my way with the journey above but this loss, this catastrophic and sudden loss I suppose put the nail in the coffin of my behaviour. My family were of course as devastated as I but I had lost the one person who I expect could have rescued me from this because she would have seen it. My brothers were both married, my Dad fell off the edge but then quickly found someone else and I was more alone than I can ever recall being. This is all with hindsight right, at the time I just felt sad, and angry and then happy and then drunk. I didn’t realise how sad and lonely I was because I was not processing any emotional content in my life at all. I stopped. I had no-one to process it with really, not that I felt really understood me because they saw the version of me I was presenting, not the one that woke up with sick in her hair 4 hours prior and a load of texts to numbers she didn’t know. Imagine a day where you experience some emotional content, I mean basically any kind of day and it make you feel things and you either cannot or do not want to process those emotions. So you go home, drink a bit, forget, or experience some of those emotions in the extreme and with a layer of Chablis on top and then pass out. In the morning you feel as though you have processed the day before but you have not. You have not moved a single inch forwards and you are still alone with those feelings if you have long enough to think about it. Emotions are hugely powerful and the fear I had of experiencing them with any kind of volume was enough to just mute the world, permanently.

The abject loneliness of this existence is not well described by the actions I was undertaking. I was pouring wine into an empty human vessel, devoid of meaningful connections, unable to communicate effectively and totally disassociated with the person I wanted to be. I would close my door on Friday night with not a single human knowing what or where I would be until Monday morning. I would drink Saturday morning, sleep, drink in the afternoon, sleep till Sunday and then if I could manage it make it to Church Sunday night and then drink just enough to get me through until Monday. I’d buy my drink from different shops so that the owners didn’t know how much I was drinking. I would lie about where I was to everyone and about what I was doing and although I never got caught in the lies it was hard work so I just started cutting some people out. Which I think suited them fine as I was hard work by this point.

At home I could do what I wanted, I could drink, be sick, eat, order in, stay up, sleep in. Whatever. As long as I managed to keep the “day job” going I could carry on like this forever.

So let’s talk about shame at this point because that’s the bit that is the absolute hardest for me to deal with – how can I possibly every forgive myself for the things that I have done? How can I love the person who has committed the most awful acts against myself and how can I trust myself? Every time I am making a big decision I have to double check myself because who knows if this decision will be the one that leads me down a path where I’m back in that bleak situation. Because I cannot go back to that place, I can and must do better. I remember a friend saying he didn’t want me to fear drinking and it has stuck with me for years – I do fear it and rightly so. That fear now keeps me going without it I might be led to believe I could drink again, I could falsely believe that I could control my addiction but I cannot. Now that fear is my friend and it’s a powerful ally but it is one I have to keep in check.

For me what addiction took was the ability to be yourself truly, openly and with confidence. So when you become sober people will say you have changed, but you haven’t, the change was the addicted person, I became more myself sober because I was in charge of my destiny and I had taken control.

I could write you a list of the things I did – my shame show, and I did and then I deleted it because I don’t need to share that with you because your journey will not be the same a mine. You may take something from one-night stands that I did not, dancing on tables and getting barred from venues might not bother you even once you have recovered. My shame stays with me – those snap shots I see or those feelings that arrive in my mind, take my breath away and reduce me to a shadow of myself will never leave. They will not have the same impact on me as they used too and that will change over time, like grief, I cannot erase what has happened and in becoming sober it has been so important to integrate all those parts of me into this version. I have to work to love the person that committed those acts because she was ill, she was sad, if I remain angry and disappointed at such a huge part of myself I’ve not really grown at all.

Being an alcoholic is a hard existence and unfortunately still carries with it so much blame and misunderstanding. In sharing this story I hope people will realise that people all around us are struggling all the time just to get through each and every day and for some it is a bit too much. As a society we are still so far from being able to accept and talk about our emotional context in a healthy way that I am trying to do my part to try and rectify that – it is not easy writing or sharing this information. It is very easy to laugh about it and crack a joke, but to really talk about the pain of loneliness and isolation, to talk about an inability to control myself and my addiction, to share that there are huge parts of me that I still hide away from and yet still have a driving force in my life hopefully allows you, dear reader to know that you are not alone and much like any single person reading this you have value, are worthy of love and above all of that are completely and perfectly human.