You Swear You Won't be Like Your Parents

You’ve watched your parents drink, drink into oblivion.  You swear you’re never going to be like them. 

You know all about drugs of choice. You know all about people whose lives are given into a drug and that drug rules their life, changes their temperament with one drink or one snort. You are a strong woman, you are present, you've earned all A’s.                                                                                                             

You are going off to college and you know you want to be, a writer. In college you work hard. In a Women’s Study class, you get attracted to another woman. You realize it isn’t the first time. You get close to her. Go out to a gay bar, you allow yourself two beers. You never had two beers in row before. Then she buys another round. You accept the third beer. She takes you home with her. This is your big coming out. You’ve secretly thought about this moment for a long time.

The next morning you don’t remember much. You go back to your dorm room. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what the fuck did you do last night. You weren’t present, you didn’t enjoy yourself. But you keep thinking about her so you back to the bar the next night hoping she’ll be there. She’s there. She buys you several of rounds.

After a couple months of going to lesbian bar and drinking with her you two decide to move in together. Now you’re drinking in the morning and on weekends. You drink with her. Your grades start to slip, you don’t call friends. You start buying hard liquor.

You graduate from college with mediocre grades. You’re broke and go out and get the first job that comes along, an Administrative Assistant at a drapery company. It pays the bills. You start smoking pot. You console yourself that it’s to relax in the evenings after working hard. You console yourself smoking pot keeps you from drinking.

You don’t notice your smoking more and more pot with the occasional LSD trip, or cocaine at a party. You tell yourself; it was just a couple of parties. You tell yourself you’ll never do cocaine on your own. You know what it was like to see people checked out of life. See them check out into a drink every day. You weren’t drinking. You joked that drugs cured your alcoholism.

You never told your parents that you drank. You would be embarrassed after all you berated them for their drinking for years. You know you shouldn’t tell your parents that you smoke pot or that you occasionally do drugs. You know they wouldn’t understand because after all their drug of choice is alcohol. You say to yourself that you don’t have a drug problem. You start to deal drugs to supply your habit. Mostly marijuana but you do any drug that is presented to you. This why you go to a lot of parties.

You walk into work one morning so hung over from doing drugs and drinking your boss says to you,

“You must have had a wild night last night.”

You lie to avoid the fact that this was a regular night at home. “Yaa, it was my best friend’s birthday, we went out on the town.”

Things got so bad you lose your job. You start to hustle money in illegal ways. You sell drugs. You scam travelers checks and more. Somehow your lover manages to keep her job and keep drinking. Your lover pays the bills. You do drugs and illegal activities to pay for your habit. You’re journalling habit of years is uninterrupted. You start to write about your addiction. The words you write reflect how helpless you feel.

You finally start limiting your drinking to the weekends. Enough is enough is what you are thinking when do this. But you don’t quit dealing drugs. You justify this because you need the money. First your weekend is Saturday and Sunday. Then you make something up to include Friday; then Thursday; then somehow you justify Wednesday being part of that weekend. You find yourself craving getting high on Monday and Tuesday.

Your lover doesn’t notice, she’s drinking more and more all the time. You substitute alcohol with pot. When the two of you go out to parties, you still find yourself around the people doing drugs, hard drugs not just pot. You join in. You realize things are still out of control when you are you the only person at a kid’s birthday party lighting a joint to get high.

Nothing has become the sum of your life. This is when you have a aha moment.  A moment when you look at your life. A life where you have nothing and you add what you see as possibilities as nothing. You’re not a math wizard but you know nothing plus nothing is nothing. You’ve been surviving in the underbelly of the world of dope dealing. Finally, you’ve had too much.

You’re a college graduate. You write every day you know what you want to be and this isn’t it. You start writing about your spiral of drug use. You write about getting out of the relationship. You write lists of things to do. Save money, cut back on the drinking, don’t do drugs at parties. You know you need to expand your world beyond your lover.

You decide to take a writing class. Cutting back on the drinking isn’t easy. It was easy to quick the drugs. This saved you money. You make friends in your classes. You stop going to the bar with your lover. You use the excuse you have homework. You find yourself drinking and doing drugs alone so no one will see you, make you accountable.

One day you call the gay alcohol and drug treatment center. They’re booked up two months out. You make an appointment. You decide you to use this time to get it all out of your system. Then you’d be ready. Ready for what? You weren’t sure but you didn’t want to be here anymore. In your usual check out way you take off for a road trip with your lover. She was in the same boat, a boat sinking so fast one or both of you were going to drown if something didn’t change. You didn’t tell your lover your plan before you left.

On this trip you took indulging to a whole new level. You digested every kind of drug and drink you could get your hands on. No holds barred. When you returned you couldn’t remember a blow-by-blow account of the road trip. You weren’t honest with yourself that it was because you were fucked up 24/7. You started to withdraw from your lover. You knew if you get sober, you’ll have to leave the relationship.

The day came September 7, 1982. You go down to Stonewall Recovery Center. See a counselor who goes through question after question for induction into treatment. You are humiliated by some of the questions. You wished he’d just asked you if you had a problem instead of asking you all those questions. At the end of the questioning the counselor proclaims, “You’re an alcoholic.” Well da, you think, you could have told him that. That’s why you are here, that’s why you’re putting your whole life on the line. You want to somehow crawl out of this addiction. But in the same moment relieve seeps out of your pores. Your brain dumped years of all the shit you’ve been fighting, into the hands of? You aren’t sure.

You go home to your lover; tell her you are leaving. You walk out with nothing. Homeless and unemployed you hustled a friend, well actually one of your drug customers, who is moving out her apartment. You arrange to pay her the deposit so you can take over the lease without telling the landlord.

You move in with only your bed before she moves out. As soon as the woman moves out you walk the ally the night before garbage day to scavenge furniture. You find a kid’s bed for a couch, a table for the kitchen. You do this several weeks in a row until the apartment feels livable. The fact that the apartment’s heat isn’t enough to prevent the widows from freezing on cold nights doesn’t faze you. You are still numb from using.

The counselor requires you go to three AA meetings and one counseling session with them every week. After a month of this you drop the counselor and go to more AA meetings. You now have six months clean and sober. You get a job at a 7-11. This is step up from the illegal activities you’ve doing to survive.

You write about how you’re crawling out of the underbelly of society. Clawing slowly out of a fog that took years to settle in. You don’t always feel positive about all this but you hold on with dear life. You learn to live a life without drugs and alcohol. This means learning to socialize and know what you did in the morning. This means taking responsibility for what you do. This means making an honest living.

All of this isn’t easy, but you do it one day at time as they tell you in AA. You start getting in touch with your goals before all the using started. Goals like writing, having a healthy relationship, you think you even want children. You learn you have to patient that these goals only come about through paying attention and hard work.

You still go to AA meetings to remind yourself how vulnerable you are. About how you were drowning in destruction. You remind yourself how you’ve turned your life around. You know you can never turn your back on how bad things were when you were using. This important some days to get you through a hard day.

Years later now you feel so blessed to be sober. You have a lover that is your wife. You’ve been together 28 years. Your daughter just 38. You had a good career as an accountant to make money. You never stopped writing. Now in retirement your writing is your life line to being present.