17 Years Sober Today...

I knew I was an alcoholic by the age of fifteen or sixteen. I knew because I knew what an alcoholic was; someone who couldn’t stop drinking once they started, or someone who drank even when they knew it was bad for them, or someone who blacked out when they drank, or someone who became someone else when they drank, or someone who craved alcohol nearly all the time - all of those things really, and all of those things were me.  I knew there were two types of alcoholics, one type that didn’t drink all the time but when they did they went nuts on it (binge drinkers), or the other type that couldn’t go without it (daily drinkers).  At times, I’ve been both. 

It's kind of funny (weird funny not funny ha,ha) because I despised alcohol.  As a child I’d watched what it did to the adults around me. Not all of them; some of them would only have one or two drinks and not change a single bit.  Others, would change into entirely different people.  The violence, the shouting, the crying, things being thrown at walls or at people, arguments, screaming, chaos, and of course the next-day-apologies and the lack of funds for anything worthwhile like the electricity bills and food in the fridge.  I knew at eight about all of these things and I knew it was the alcohol that did it and I despised alcohol and drinking because of it. 

Come my teenage years though, all the trauma, my own insecurities, feelings of inadequacy, low self esteem and an unquenchable desire to fit in made me think ‘if you can’t beat them join them’, plus it kind of made other peoples drinking more tolerable if I was drunk. It’s hard to be drunk and scared.  Alcohol made me feel like I didn’t care.  It gave me confidence, bravado, it took away my anxiety and feelings of inadequacy and made me feel like I could set the world on fire. I could talk to strangers without feeling like a complete idiot.  I could approach boys.  I could face my bullies.  I could say what I really thought without feeling like I wanted the earth to swallow me whole.  So much confidence.  So little fear or regret.  It was incredible.  The only downside was the cost.  Not the dollars, but the inevitable price I would pay. Every time I drank, I’d black out and there was no way humanly possible to predict which drunk I would turn into. I could be the crying, sorry drunk, apologising for everything I’d ever done wrong in my life.  I could be the promiscuous drunk, so desperate for attention I’d do just about anything to get it without a single thought about how my behaviour affected others or myself or even be remotely inline with how I felt sober. I could be violent, abusive, wreckless, and downright dangerous.  I’ve done things that in the light of the following day made me ill to my stomach, things that filled my hollow, empty, anxiety ridden shell with more guilt and shame that I could carry, dramatically intensifying the desire to escape myself that much more it was like pouring gasoline on an already blazing fire. 

The cycle was firmly embedded in my psyche and my life by seventeen.  Drink to escape the guilt and shame, get so drunk I’d do things that would fill me with even more guilt and shame, wake remorseful and full of regret, live with that for as long as I could without drinking until I couldn’t live with it anymore and then drink to try and escape it all.  On and on it would go.  Every morning I woke with a feeling of dread. “What have I done?”, the script would play.  Sometimes I would have glimpses, foggy memories of some scattered scene, playing out in my head.  Sometimes there would be absolutely nothing.  No memory at all.  Often there would be a mix of the two.  The standard would be to start drinking around 7pm, be drunk by 8pm, have sketchy random flashes until around 10 and then not a single memory between 10 and 2am - sometimes a few cloudy moments of a cab, or getting home but mostly nothing at all until the next day.  Then having someone, or several people fill in the gaps throughout the week “do you remember doing this?”, and the blanks were never filled with “do you remember that nice thing you did for the lady in the parking lot”, no, of course not, they were filled with things that should have been reserved for bad guy turns good action movies where the hero was a loser trying to really mess up his life. Only it wasn’t Bruce Willis, it was me, and it was bloody embarrassing. Even worse, I couldn’t stop. 

Fast forward a few years (may as well, they all looked the same), and at 19 I got sober.  For ten months.  For ten whole arduous months I stopped drinking, I went to meetings, I white-knuckled sobriety, and switched out drinking my pain away with going to the gym and trying to burn it off.  I knew in my bones I was an alcoholic but I wasn’t finished drinking yet. I still had to try a little harder to ‘drink like a normal person’.  God I tried.  I tried everything.  I tried only having one or two (but without fail two led to twenty).  I tried only having light beer, only having beer, only having white-wine coolers (but after a few my will power gave out and I’d add vodka to the wine coolers). I tried keeping pace with the other drinkers at the table (mind you, I was still in my teens or early twenties and I was drinking with men in their thirties), I’d wait for the round, I’d sit on my hands so I wouldn’t drink so fast, I’d try so hard to pace myself and eventually my patience would run out and I’d end up drinking like I normally did - fast and furiously. I tried drinking water in between.  I tried drinking only on the weekends. I tried not drinking unless it was a ‘special occasion’ (way to stuff up anything special).  The results were always the same.  I was itchy on the inside.  If there was something exciting happening in my life, I’d be so excited I’d need to drink to take the edge off.  If there was something sad happening I’d need to drink to take the edge off.  If there was something making me feel anything at all I’d have to drink to take the… you get the gist.  I had no way to manage my emotions and every single emotion was a reason for me to drink.  

When my son was born I finally had someone in my life worth living for.  I wasn’t worth giving up drinking - I felt like I deserved all the horror I caused.  My guilt and remorse was well deserved.  But him? He was innocent. Pure as the driven snow.  The most gorgeous critter I’d ever seen.  Light blonde hair, light blue eyes, even his cries were cute.  

I managed to stay sober while I was pregnant but once he was born and I could get a babysitter I had free range to drink on my ‘night off’.  Sometimes I would say it’s his fathers turn and he’d stay sober while I got drunk.  One particular night I was sitting out on the front porch after returning from work, I was having a couple of beers with my uncles and decided to have ‘two more’, just to make sure I’d actually go to sleep instead of lying there wide awake with my thoughts.  That’s where the memory ends.  It wasn’t two more. Apparently it was many more including a full bottle of drambuie and whatever else was in the liquor cabinet.

Before I fill in the blanks though, let me take you back a couple of weeks.  Not three weeks prior my mother had told me a story about a man who came home from the pub one night and was playing with his baby son.  The man picked his baby up out of his cot, and as he normally did, threw him in the air to catch him, but because he’d been drinking, he didn’t catch him properly and the baby fell to the floor and devastatingly, that baby died.  That man ran away and never returned. I don’t know the storys origin or how he came to share his story but that horrifying story was fresh in my head. So naturally I had sworn to never enter my sons room if I’d been drinking - it would be his fathers responsibility to take care of him if I was ‘having a night off’. Nevertheless, my drinking made me entirely unpredictable. 

I still recall my sons father filling in the gaps from the night before and I sat in horror as he recalled the missing details.  “Last night Jack woke up and you tried to go and get him”.  My stomach lurched. I immediately felt ill. I thought about that harrowing story as he continued, “You were so drunk you couldn’t make it up the hallway. You kept hitting the walls and zigzagging trying to walk. You’re lucky I woke up and cut you off”.  Imagine. Imagine the fear and the horror.  Oh. My. God.  He then told me that not only did I try to go in spite of him telling me not to, that I then proceeded to call him every name under the sun when he stopped me.  I flashed back to my childhood. To the things I had witnessed.  To the fights and the drunkenness. In that solitary moment I knew without any skerrick of doubt  that I was becoming the same person that I’d been running from my whole life.  I would be the one causing the trauma, creating the chaos, perpetuating the whole cycle all over again and doing to my son what had been done to me.  I knew in that instant I had to get help.  I also knew that come lunch time I’d have some bullshit story to convince myself I didn’t need help so I said that out loud too.  I pleaded with my partner.  “I need help. I need to get help today. I can’t stop this by myself, I know because I’ve tried.  I know that by lunch time I’ll be trying to convince myself that I can do it on my own. Please don’t let me do that.  Please make sure I get help”.  I was so desperate because I had had this one glimmer of pure honest truth - a window of opportunity and I wanted to take it. I wanted more than this for my son. 

That day I did get help.  I was willing to do whatever it took to get sober, and stay sober. So willing that I did do the suggested things and I kept doing them.  I haven’t had a drink since and that was seventeen years ago today. My son is eighteen now and he’s never seen me drink.  He’s seen me lose my shit, he’s seen me cry, and yell, and have anxiety and panic attacks but he’s never ever seen the things that I saw when I was growing up.  No fist fights, no drunken brawls.  He hasn’t had to spend countless hours dealing with drunks in bars because I wouldn’t go home.  He’s seen me apologise and be accountable for my shitty behaviours.  He’s seen me ask for help when I need it (because at times, I still need it, I am after all human and I’m a big advocate for putting your hand up when you need help).  He’s seen me go through a horrific chronic pain condition and recover from it. He’s seen me start over several times, chase my dreams, keep showing up, fall flat on my face and pick myself up and go again.  But he’s never seen me drink. 

I don’t think that there’s anything I’m more proud of than that. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for him that’s more important than that. 

Over the course of seventeen years of sobriety life has sure had its ups and downs, I separated from his father, I remarried years later, I divorced years after that, we’ve moved around a fair bit,  I’ve been through a pandemic and losing all streams of income several times, a few house floods, having to go to welfare services to put food on the table, take several jobs at once to keep the roof over our head.  I’ve been hospitalised twice for my anxiety (I highly recommend it, by the way). I’ve also released albums, built businesses from scratch, had songs played on the radio, written over eighty songs in the last three years and built a community of people around me that I absolutely love.  I’ve learnt to like the person I am.  I’ve learnt to front up, fully, warts and all because I believe strongly that perfection is not only a myth but an incredibly harmful one.  I’ve learnt to say sorry and repair relationships and be accountable for my behaviour. . I’ve learnt to share my stories, my struggles and my triumphs and I’ve witnessed how that can help others.  I am proud of who I am because not only is that person a good, caring, kind, deeply empathetic person (I’ve always been that even if my actions haven’t been in alignment with it) but because I do the things that the person I used to be couldn’t do: in spite of whatever I’m going through, I don’t run away from life anymore. Whatever knock backs, or hurdles that get thrown at me, if when it’s difficult or it feels unbearable I keep showing up.