An anniversary?
It's been a year of not drinking.
And, holy shit, it’s been a year. A lot has happened, both good and bad, and for the last 365 nights, I somehow managed to not return to the ritual that once gave me so much pleasure, so much peace.
I miss it.
I miss sitting outside in the dim solitude and accessing my deepest thoughts, the ones I was too scared to see in the sober light of day. I miss writing the trauma in dark weird fictions, where women had the strength to shock and disturb with the truth. Two of the stories in my upcoming collection were born inside the midnight madness of my mind. One of them drafted through a thick veil of tears because the truth had slammed into me, releasing a moment from my childhood that I inserted into the life of a young mother, navigating the start of the #metoo movement and the recollection of a sexual assault – the suffocating realisation gripping the back of her neck.
Not all the stories in BREATHING IS HOW SOME PEOPLE STAY ALIVE were written in that darkness, because unlike John Cheever and Dorothy Parker, the writing produced during the wee hours of drunken loneliness, was not very good. It is interesting though that the stories in my current work-in-progress are (so far) funny (still dark), twisted tales that don’t explore the madness of women trapped by circumstance, trauma, fear, and the hopelessness of…hope.
I wish I could have a few beers to test my theory that drinking (my kind of drinking anyway) dragged me into a darkness, not for a peaceful chance to shine a light but, to make things worse. My personality tends to make things better for everyone else, but worse for myself.
But I can’t.
I can never drink again.
And it’s not because I’m afraid of the darkness (my daytime self is still very good at dragging me down rabbit holes filled with hurt and pain), I am afraid of cigarettes. As a person whose drinking involved counting the beers, lining them up and returning to the refrigerator every few minutes to make sure I was on “schedule” and that one of the beers hadn’t disappeared while I wasn’t looking, a person who lifted the secret basket down from the shelf to count the cigarettes, a person who checked the lighter a dozen times to make sure there was juice enough for the exact number of smokes to match the exact number of beers I planned on drinking – it’s because drinking was a part of a strict routine (it’s why I didn’t often drink socially, why I didn’t drink on vacation, why I didn’t like drinking outside my own home, and if I did, I most certainly didn’t drink beer, unless I could smoke.) – my drinking always included beers, and smoking.
It is the same behaviour that made me run 10km every day for two years until a genius doctor told me running was a symptom of my OCD and that I should cut back and see if I can manage my anxiety in other ways. I quit running (how afraid I was that the doctor thought I was crazy) and that’s when my bulimia came back. Then a social worker suggested my ritualized eating disorder would benefit from Prozac. Then another doctor told me to change my routine. And another doctor told me he didn’t know how to help me because I appeared healthier than the words coming out of my mouth, the tears falling out of my eyes. Then I started drinking every other day. Then the bulimia stopped. For a couple of years, I thought I’d figured it out (I’m lying). I’ve known all along that I needed to find another healthy way to exercise my obsessive compulsive behaviour and that drinking was only making things worse – and that smoking was going to kill me sooner than anticipated.
Anyway, here I am, 365 days into a new routine. I go to bed at 10:00 pm. and I wake up at 7:00 a.m. (sometimes earlier if my mind interrupts, sometimes a little later, if the brain allows). I eat toast and peanut butter every morning with instant coffee. I have the same thing for dinner every night. I sometimes walk. I sometimes swim. I sometimes stare off into space and sit inside that emptiness. I sometimes close my eyes in the middle of the day and let the darkness leak into the madness. I sometimes worry that people don’t like me. I sometimes wring my hands when the cortisol pops instead of running face first into a wall. I sometimes worry about the woman who drank eight beers every other night and smoked eight cigarettes and played eight online scrabble games and scrolled through twitter and typed stories into a notes app and who wrote an email from an account she made called anoninmiss to a man who shouldn’t get away with what he did…because that woman is still inside me and I hope she knows I’m trying my best to care for her in ways I was never able.
I am here, and I don’t plan on changing my routine because other people think I might be crazy. I’m just going to keep trying.
For anyone out there struggling with their disordered drinking or eating, I strongly recommend talking to your doctor, but if you’ve had as much luck as I did with doctors, grab a memoir written by someone whose lived experiences match yours. Community might not help you quit, but it sure as fuck feels less lonely, which might in turn help you quit. And if you ever want to just talk about how fucked up it is that society has sketched this very fine line between “good” drinking and “bad” drinking, between “healthy” eating and “unhealthy” eating, between “fun” exercise and “obsessive” exercise, and how the fuck do we know where we stand, send me a note. While we’re all trying to manage our own madness, nobody needs to live according to another’s definition of a happy life.
I love you.
Stick to it!