It's easy enough to see what went wrong with my life in hindsight. It's simple to understand how a young, American girl can spin out of control...
~from being born into a home of two alcoholic, teenage parents,
~from being left to her own devices with only her own experiences for survival,
~from going boy crazy for attention at a tender age,
~from marrying to escape home at age sixteen,
~from leaving an abusive relationship to travel unfettered around the country,
~from succumbing to drugs and alcohol when she found that nothing on this destructive path had led to a place of safety and security
... Definitely not a study in rocket science, there.
What makes my life now incredible is the overwhelming desire, after decades of rampant alcoholism and a shattered existence, to claw back to the surface for air and life-altering change. What makes my life incredible is that I have joined the ranks of the survivors of the world. Not everyone survives to tell the tale. Unfortunately, I've been privy to the lives of many people like me that did not survive. In fact, a great many people with which I shared my misspent youth did not survive to tell their tale. Maybe my story can speak for them as well. Perhaps if we had all had the tools of today... but I digress.
My backstory: Last November I had all but killed myself wallowing in a pit of self-loathing. I didn't cut my wrists or jump off of a bridge; I was too chicken for that. What I had chosen to do was simply drink myself to death. Life seemed pretty hopeless. Upon waking each day, I felt very little other than waves of abject despair or emotionless detachment regarding my life and my surroundings. I was ashamed of my home, was disgusted with the man that I had once loved, and watched silently as my daughter began to slip through my grasp like a fistful of sand on the beach. I avoided going out of the house, I dressed in rags even when I was sober (as if I didn't have a closet full of nice clothes), I would go on raging binges of drinking that lasted from two to fourteen days. It was only by the paycheck of the very man that I had grown to hate that I kept the lights on and food in the house for our child. I had no real friends left. Family avoided me with the same uneasy energy that I avoided them. I never answered the phone. I would cancel the family's doctor and dental appointments because I was drunk, hungover, or in the throes of a panic attack. My soul was a ruin. I spent the majority of my day on Facebook or listening to haunted music while writing horror stories. Everything was dark... my mood, my spirituality, my thoughts, my persona, my projected attitude. Hell, I wouldn't even turn on the lights half the time, preferring to sit in the dark.
Things weren't always so bad. Yes, my start in life was rocky but after I moved out on my own, for a while I blossomed into a very pretty, intelligent, articulate, and lively young woman. I traveled around the country with a devil-may-care attitude and was seemingly afraid of nothing and no one. Spring would find me in California, Hawaii by Fall. I'd shed old fads for new fads, old friends for new friends, old scenery for new, and quite often I had a blast. Unfortunately, with no one to stop me but myself, I drank hard and heavy the whole, exciting route.
I could drink a lot... a LOT. Drinking made it easy to stroll into a brand new town, a new situation, a new job, a new dance club with ease and grace. I could hold my liquor. People generally saw me as a young, free spirit- maybe a little on the wild side- but a good girl who thoroughly enjoyed her life with an easy confidence. Truth was that I had no idea who I even was minus the alcohol. A lot of the ease and grace was just mimicked behavior that I picked up along the way from people that I admired and wanted to emulate. I was a mask of whoever and whatever I deemed to be cool.
I was actually blessed to live all over the country. It wasn't difficult for me to pack up and follow the next, big train out of town. I was able to talk my way into jobs and careers of which I had little or no experience. I knew how to survive on a dime and make it appear to be a million bucks. I dated fascinating people. I went on endless adventures and was often the life of the party. I had a mind for experiences. I'd try anything just to make a memory. And I was good at it. I didn't see a thing in the world wrong with partying my way through life, and no one really tried to dissuade me. I made sure to surround myself with people who didn't get involved deeply enough to offer well-meaning advice.
Today, even after thoughtful contemplation, I cannot pinpoint when the pendulum began to sway in the other direction. I only know that somewhere along the yellow brick road, I began to become an angry woman. Even though I could scarce admit it to myself, the constant drinking was insidiously turning on me from the inside out. I became dangerously afraid of (and bored with) reality. I began to want to spend all of my time blown out on alcohol and drugs to escape what was happening to me. Friends began to fall away. Sure, I was still the life of the party in early evening, but sometime between the hours of midnight and three a.m., I'd become predatory, combative, argumentative, distrusting, and distrustful. My choice of playmates downgraded steadily over time from those who I chose to hang out with to those who chose to party with me. I wasn't in control of myself or my surroundings.
I began to be used by men. I began putting myself in situations where I could get hurt just to be around drugs and/or alcohol. I began to black out or have only a fuzzy recollection of the night before. I began to binge drink for days on end, finally ending up on the couches of people that were not my kind of people at all. I would wake up on the couch, fork over a little cash to supply more booze, and continue to hang out with bad, lost people until that particular party dried up or I drank myself sober. I would then return to my home and proceed to be chewed out by housemates, friends, roomates, and lovers about my wayward, reckless bahavior.
Disgusted with that, I changed my tactics. I no longer chose to hang out in bars or clubs, preferring to have a solitary lover and a private home in which to carry out my ever-increasing downward spiral into alcoholism. Truth was that I was getting too sloppy to pull off the whole party girl bar scene. It took finesse to find just the right personality of lover who wouldn't mind the binges, the uncontrollable bouts of violent behavior, who would nurse me through a crushing hangover, and also work a full time job to pay the bills. I was no longer employable. Even though I rarely drank 24/7, I would still lose a job or quit within a matter of months because of a hangover or to binge. To keep my family from knowing the extent of my degradation, I'd stay just outside of their contact, relying totally on my lover to fulfill my dark needs and addictions. It's difficult to add up all the years that I spent in this wayward state of mind and existence.
At thirty-three years old, I began to entertain the bright idea that if I was to ever truly change my ways, I'd have to have a child to pull me into an existence of responsibility. I thought that would be my key to finding an even keel. I decided that I was far too weak to change on my own, and that I had lived so selfishly that only the true love of a child could heal me. As yet another relationship dissolved -meaning that another man had had it up to his neck with my bullshit- I took the opportunity to move back to my hometown. I promptly made contact with a young man that I had spent much of my young life dating. He was a good man, had a good job, wasn't married, and had always told me that when I finished sowing my oats, perhaps we could start a family. Little did he know of how far I had fallen from that lively, wild girl he had dated. Little did I know of his own battle with addiction and codependency.
(To Be Continued)
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