Lately, I’ve found myself talking to a few folks struggling with the start of sobriety. Well, it’s something that I encounter anyway, going to recovery meetings. But I’ve been talking to more people and talking to them in more depth than I used to.
It means I talk about my personal experience recovering from alcoholism more often. It means I examine what I’m doing to maintain my sobriety more often. It means I think about my experiences before I stopped drinking more often. All of these are a big part of the point of helping others. Few things better illustrate what helping others does for you than helping someone with something you’ve both been through.
So I thought today I’d drop a little bit of my own personal story here. I’ve shared parts of my story here and there with this person or this meeting full of people before, so it’s not like this is a grand revelation of any sort.
I’ve just been thinking on my past a bit lately and some of it wanted out. As a former drinker, I have long acquaintance with things like that happening. Typing feels better than vomiting, I have to tell you. Much more civilized.
Years ago, I thought I had recovered from alcoholism. Well, that’s not quite right. I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic. I thought I had had a heck of a drinking problem, and I had solved it. Around age 21 I stumbled step by step into being a daily, constant drinker. I went through a succession of roomies, woke up puking, fought nausea long enough to force down some breakfast and lunch. As soon as I started to feel a little bit better and didn’t feel like I was about to puke any second… which was usually late afternoon… it was time to go find something to drink. It would hit my stomach, which would wisely revolt, and I’d fight back vomit until I got enough of whatever I was drinking down my neck to numb the sickness.
Then I’d drink until I blacked out, and passed out. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This was my life, revolving around drinking alcohol and vomiting, until just before my 25th birthday. I ended up in the hospital, which was a good thing. Because when they hauled me away in an ambulance, I probably had half a day, maybe a whole one, to go before I ended up a corpse. I nearly did anyway. My liver failed. I began to bleed from my mucous membranes and from the walls of random capillaries. I had advanced pancreatitis. I was bleeding steadily from an ulcer severe enough it needed to be cauterized. I was hallucinating wildly from alcohol withdrawal, having stopped drinking alcohol a day or so earlier when I began vomiting blood. As the DTs advanced and my body shut down, I stopped breathing on my own and spent some time on a respirator.
I spent 28 days in that hospital. For 25 of them, I was fed through an IV– my body could not handle digesting food. It was a fairly unpleasant experience.
Coming out of the hospital, I figured I was cured. The pain, the fear, the nastiness of the whole experience and the way I got into it… I thought I’d never forget. Nobody could go through that kind of thing and go back to drinking. Yeah, I was cured.
So I went about my business for nearly 5 years, never touching a drop. Never speaking to anyone about my experience unless they already knew about it, and then only in the vaguest terms. Never telling anyone that for the first few months, I had craved a drink. Badly. Constantly. With the memories fresh in my mind, with every thought of taking a drink of alcohol conjuring up the memory of the taste of half-digested blood spewing out of my mouth, I craved a drink.
I denied it, buried it, ignored it until it faded. A habit you don’t indulge, an obsession you don’t indulge will fade a bit. Even if the only tool you use is denial.
That’s tricky. Damn tricky. Because it felt like I was doing something. And I *was* doing something. Just not very much of it. Fighting an addiction with denial and sheer force of personal will, alone and isolated and without support is like growing a garden without fertilizing it or weeding it. You can keep it up for a long time. It will bear fruit. It just won’t bear much. The fruit will be small, and they will get fewer and smaller every year.
If you’re stubborn enough, and if you depend on that garden for food, you can keep telling yourself you’re doing the right thing until you starve.
Five years after walking out of the hospital, I edged back toward drinking. I had some alcohol-removed champagne. If you haven’t had a drink in 5 years and drink the whole bottle in half an hour, there’s enough alcohol left in there to give you the ghost of a buzz.
So a few days later I had a beer. It tasted like the memory of the blood I vomited.
So I had another to wash the taste out of my mouth.
I’d keep trying for years.
That’s enough for now, so I’ll leave you right here until I get around to writing part 2.
Peace, friends.
