It Bears Repeating

I have been accused of not being a real alcoholic.

Real alcoholics pass out in bathrooms. Real alcoholics lose their jobs. Real alcoholics destroy their marriages. Real alcoholics drink all day long every day without ceasing. Real alcoholics drink at work. Real alcoholics can't freely make the choice to quit. Real alcoholics have rock bottoms that sit next door to death.

The intimation is that my alcoholism doesn't look like chronic severe alcoholism, which actually constitutes, by some measures, only 9% of those considered to be alcoholics. There are those who consider anything less to be hardly of any note. The hardcore alcoholic has it worse, so I have no right to talk about what I know.

This all reminds me of when I had a breakdown about three years ago after suffering through an abusive job for a few years and going through a hysterectomy due to cervical cancer and watching the Palinode suffer with severe pain and a broken back. Something in me fractured after all of that, and I could barely leave the house. When the Palinode came home from work, he would often walk all over the apartment calling my name because he was unable to see me under all the blankets I used to conceal myself. I was certain that my heart would simply stop in my chest one day soon and allow me to die. I felt like an ailing plant sick from diseased soil.

I made it out to drink, of course. I would bathe and plaster on a smile, knowing that I only had to work at it for about an hour before I was drunk enough to numb out the pain and soldier on. On a couple of those occasions, a particular friend leaned over and said "You're not doing that bad, you know. I've seen worse. You're not in the hospital. You're okay."

Having had friends who did things like drive their cars off overpasses without having ever once been hospitalized, I knew full well that his measuring stick didn't work, and his words immediately made me feel sick. I felt erased. When was I going to be ill enough to get better?

Something switched over in my head, though, when that friend told me that the breakdown that had me unable to eat or sleep or think or breathe or work properly was really nothing. Something changed, because I knew for once that he was wrong, and that the only person who could know my heart and mind and was ME. I knew that I was ill no matter what he thought it looked like from the outside.

My general view of humanity was a little more worse for wear, but faith in myself began to put down roots.

I took and adapted two lessons from my friend's comment about my breakdown which later became invaluable in getting me to acknowledge and deal with my alcoholism:

1. Don't leave it up to anyone else, not even a professional, to tell you whether your breakdown or addiction or heartbreak is a mountain or a molehill. No one lives in your heart and mind with you. It's a mountain, because it's YOUR mountain.


2. Don't fall into the trap of comparing your breakdown or addiction or heartbreak to the worst case scenarios you've seen in life or on television. It is never true that everyone is doing just fine right up until the second that they find themselves sleeping behind a dumpster. They were ill well before that scenario.

At my worst, I've been the drunk driver. I've hidden liquor under my bed just to find the will to wake up again. I've crapped my own pants at work after a long night out. I've plotted my suicide with the belief that life could only ever be what it was at the time. I've forced myself to throw up my last drinks in a vain effort to hide my lack of control. I've cried and fought with myself and burned with shame and truly believed that the Palinode would be better off without my malignant existence.

Even at my worst, though, measuring myself against worst case scenarios and trying to believe the people who told me I was really doing alright kept me from admitting to my alcoholism for over a decade. I didn't want to know the truth of the matter, and it was easier to believe that, as long as I wasn't one of those people, I wasn't that bad off. At least I wasn't that guy grubbing through cigarette butts in the planter, right?

Last August, though, I put aside what other people said and worst case scenarios, I grabbed a hold of what clarity and courage I could muster, and I saw a long-time alcoholic. I saw someone who ordered most of her life around getting drunk and ordered what was left over around hiding that fact. I saw someone who had been very sick and very sad for a long time who was becoming increasingly suicidal. I didn't have to look like that guy passed out in a pool of his own urine to be that person, either.

When people tell you that your breakdown or addiction or heartbreak is not what you know it to be, that you are not suffering in the way the you know you are, they don't usually mean to be dismissive or enabling. They are often in denial of their own suffering, and if they admit to yours, then they just might have to admit to their own. That's tough to ask of anyone.

This is why it is up to you to believe in what you know. Believe yourself. Believe your own voice. If your heart and your mind tell you that you are sick, you are sick, whether you are hiding behind a dumpster in an alley or under a pile of blankets in a corner of the living room.

I have been accused of not being a real alcoholic, and there was a time when I would have believed that, but, thankfully, I no longer do, and this faith in my own voice is what has afforded me the ability to choose to save my own life.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: What does alcoholism look like? Sometimes it looks like me.

Ask Schmutzie: How Do You Deal With The Urge To Drink?

I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my second answer in response to your questions. You can read my first question and answer here.



The addictions I'm battling are unhealthy mental/emotional reactions. I've been using cognitive behavioral therapy to help re-program my automatic negative responses. How have you dealt with the instant impluses or cravings you might have?
     — musingwoman

What do you do , when, at some moments, you recall the warm, liquidness of your body when you've had a good, full glass of wine? What do you do when that siren's call is so strong...the gold warmthness of a glass of wine at the end of the day? What do you do?
     — alexandra

How do I deal with my urge to drink? Good question.

It really depends on the situation and the mood that accompanies the craving. It is much easier to deal with when I am out in public with friends, because I have been open with them about my sobriety, and I have an inbred compulsion to appear composed and collected at all times when in front of other people.

Even while I was drinking, I had a strict set of private rules I would not allow myself to break that, when followed carefully, made me appear to be very together and not at all a deeply sad basket case. I kept little if any alcohol in the apartment. I only drank if in the company of other people. I kept a tight focus on my level of inebriation so that I could pour myself into a cab and head home before I blacked out.

I was adept at the art of appearing not completely fucked up. I was a middling con artist with compulsive tendencies.

Strangely, those compulsive tendencies that turned me into such a successful functional alcoholic are the same ones that are helping me to avoid it now, but while my behaviour can make me look externally as though I am handling everything with aplomb, internally I can be quite the mess of emotions and impulses.

That mess of emotions and impulses is slowly easing up over time, though. In the beginning they were constantly in the background when they weren't in the foreground, hammering away at me to JUST LEAVE THE APARTMENT AND GO HAVE A DRINK ALREADY. Now, they pop in, say hello, and mess around with my well-being intermittently rather than incessantly. It is such a relief to have the space to think about other things, because it was not terribly inspiring to spend all my time pouring my energy into not doing something.

To answer your questions more directly, here are ten of the things I do to distract myself in the moment when I fondly recall my favourite pint or want to drown my emotions in an entire vat of the stuff:

1. Eat chocolate ice cream or potatoes or popcorn.


2. Talk to the Palinode in run-on sentences rife with non sequiturs.


3. Crawl back under the covers and declare it a Mental Health Day.


4. Soak in a hot bath as a form of gentle physical restraint.


5. Cry into my fists. I know that a pillow would be a whole lot more comfortable, but fists add that extra bit of drama.


6. Examine my feelings in that moment and trace them back to their truer origin, the real trigger that predates the kneejerk response to drink.


7. Get lost in movies from my teens and twenties like Party Girl and Sixteen Candles.


8. Breathe as slowly and deeply as is comfortable while imagining my breath pooling into my belly and flushing through my extremities.


9. Dive into my design work and cut and paste and erase and adjust until my eyes refuse to focus anymore.


10. Write a weblog entry.

Basically, I do anything but drink when the urge hits, and I allow myself to do whatever feels most natural to me in that moment. Sometimes none of those things work, and I just sit on the couch and practice Not Getting Up. This activity involves much tensing of the muscles and low-level grumbling and is not at all relaxing.

It doesn't sound fantastic, and it isn't, but I get through, and, in these early months of re-learning how to feel my emotions from beginning to end and how to socialize without feeling high and how to make it through my day not because there are several pints of beer at the end of it but because I actually want to be there in that day, I'll take it. As long as I'm still sober, I'll take it.

Distractions only take me so far, though. The rest is this:
I make a decision every day when I wake that I am not going to drink, and then I stick by that decision, because that decision is very much like a small child. I have to be firm yet nurturing with it to keep it steady.

I can live with this, or I can live with that, and this is proving to be immensely more satisfying than anaesthetizing myself into blackouts, living with a near-constant hangover, and being distanced from everything that could touch my heart. Funny thing, that.

There is no way out but through, I'm learning, and the longer I am sober the easier it gets to go through things rather than numb myself and push them aside. It is becoming more and more natural to choose the better of two options rather than the lesser of two evils. It's a relief to exercise my power to make decisions rather than follow all paths to the local pub.

I am learning how to be free.

Ask Schmutzie: Is There A Point Where It Won't Feel Like I Should Just Give In?

Yesterday, I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my first answer in response.

13 days sober here. I did some serious binge drinking in the weeks leading up to quitting, way beyond my then-normal nightly drunk. I was using alcohol as a crutch after finding out my mom, (my best friend), has pancreatic cancer and is now receiving end-of-life care. Ended up scaring myself into quitting. But the pain that the alcohol took away is ever-present. Is there a point where it won't feel like I should just give in to the easy abyss of drinking?
     — Scared

Scared, before I say anything else, please know that I have been carrying you in my heart since you commented yesterday. And I don't mean that in an angels-and-daily-affirmations way. I mean that in a deep and honest and meaty way. Your emotional load is truly heavy and terrible, and I wish I could lift some of it from you.

First, and I'm going to assume that you're still sober since yesterday, fingers crossed, congratulations on your first two weeks sober. It's a bittersweet thing to say, because gaining your sobriety, especially in the earliest days, is a hard place to be, even without the other pain you are carrying right now.

You must know that you have immense strength to be able to choose your sobriety at this point. You maybe don't feel it, but you do, because you did it and you are here. You made that choice and you have come this far. That is powerful. Over the first few weeks of my sobriety, I knew logically that this was an ongoing act of strength I did not know I'd had before, but I felt naked and vulnerable. Nothing filled me up. I'd stripped away the only coping mechanism I thought I had.

I want to point out that I'd stripped away the only coping mechanism I thought I had. I found out that I had underestimated myself and my ability to find new ways to cope.

At the beginning, I was a raw nerve. I had so much sadness and anger and self-loathing inside me, and I spent a lot of time trying to eat or sleep it away. I had only ever felt joy when I was drunk, and I had no faith in my ability to find it sober. Something happened, though, during those first few weeks as I crawled out from under the hazy cycle of drinking and hangovers. Maybe it was that my body was finally stabilizing itself or that my brain was learning new ways to deal with the world, but my initially unbearable anxiety and depression started to loosen its grip on me. I still felt roundly terrible, but there was hope at the edges and something akin to happiness.

I remember the first time I felt really good, good in a way that drunk couldn't even do. It was late September. I had been sober for maybe a month, and I was up early in the morning, a first for me in a long time, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. Sunlight suddenly broke out from behind a building and hit me through the window, and I felt that light. I felt it there in my chest where the horrible tightness usually sat. I felt the joy that I thought I would never feel, that I thought I didn't have the ability to feel.

That first month was hard times, and then out of nowhere I had strong feelings completely unconnected to alcohol or the pain I used it to hide from. It felt brilliant.

It does get better. It absolutely does.

What I'm about to say sounds like it could be complete bullshit, but it isn't: actually feeling the pains in your life, genuinely touching them and wrestling with them head on while not numbing them out, makes your life a happier and richer place to be.

There is so much guilt and shame and weight that comes along with drinking it away, and what I'm slowly learning is that it is almost a relief to feel it all and even collapse under the heft of it sometimes, because then that pain is allowed to change, to mature, to become something else, and even occasionally to leave me. When I was pushing it all down with alcohol, none of the pain had a chance to become anything better. I was keeping it all for myself and stunting its natural movement through and out of my life.

I want to tell you that right now, right away, things will be easier, but I won't. It's going to be hard and it's going to be painful in ways that surprise you without the veil of alcohol to dumb it down, but this is how you get to the brilliant parts. This is how you start to find your way to genuine joy.

You are not alone in finding your way through, and there is a strong community of sober people out there if you look for them. If you haven't already and you feel you need more support, please check out Alcoholics Anonymous or Secular Organizations for Sobriety groups in your area, whichever group best suits your needs. Go to your doctor and talk about options for dealing with your new sobriety and the emotions that come with it. Reach out. I had no idea how rampant alcoholism was until I wrote about it publicly, and, believe me, we are everywhere. You can find us, and we will support you.

To answer your original question, at over seven months sober, I do still crave a binge now and again, but not all the time. The pull to do so is weaker already than I thought it could be, and it is completely out-matched by the happiness I'm finding outside the pint glass. There is a point where it won't feel like you should just give in to the easy abyss of drinking. There truly and honestly is.

And, on behalf of me, and I'm sure everyone else here, I'm sending what good thoughts I can to you and your mother. Be well.