Embracing the Wreckage

Embracing the Wreckage

I'm sad tonight and struggling not to feel sorry for myself.  Over the past couple of months I have had levels of serenity that I had only dreamed of in my past life, but today I am feeling sorry for myself.  I guess I can't get it right all the time and I have to learn to be kind to myself along the way and allow feelings of sorrow, frustration and remorse be explored before I can rise above them again.  Tonight I am missing my former existence, missing the chaos of my crazy, loving extended family, missing little voices needing my help with something small and missing the man of my life.
So let's explore the main reason that I am where I am.  Let's explore the other side to my former existence.  Let's talk some more about addiction.  I stumbled across a new word the other day that struck me as nearly prefect.  Ataxia.  Ataxia is the loss of the ability to control the movements your body makes.  It is a neurological disease that has nothing to do with addiction, but it made me think of it none-the-less.  There is no way to adequately explain what happens when your mind turns on you, when your useage of alcohol (or other drugs) switches from recreational to addictive.  It feels like your have a split personality, like you are looking down on someone else moving your body and doing things that you would never have dreamt of doing before; literally it feels like an out-of-body experience.  You begin to think naturally of things normally absurd.
In the throws of my addiction when we lived in Annapolis, I would drop my kids off at school and go directly to the liquor store to buy a bottle of chilled white wine.  Bear in mind that this was at 8:00 in the morning.  I would then head to McDonald's and buy a large Sprite.  I would park the car, dump out the Sprite, pull a corkscrew out of my purse, open the bottle, fill the large soda cup (a bottle of wine fits perfectly in a large soda cup from McDonald's, only an alcoholic would figure that out) and then I would throw the bottle away in the dumpster.  Once this elaborate piece of theatre was over, I would head to the grocery store to get the shopping done because I simply could not get through the process without the wine. It sickens me to relay that to you now, but at the time it made perfect sense to me.
During this period of time, my behavior was understandably erratic and therefore I returned to therapy and began seeing a psychiatrist.  I went to one therapist who asked me about my drinking and told me that I needed to go to rehab, I dropped her the next day because I could not face the idea of telling anyone that I was and on an even baser level, it would mean that I would have to stop drinking.  I started with a new therapist and merely touched on my drinking and lied to both her and my psychiatrist.  I had myself half-convinced that all my craziness had nothing to do with my drinking.  I showed up for some of those sessions carrying a coffee thermos full of alcohol and when the subject of my drinking came up, I looked her in the eye and told her that it was completely under control.  How she didn't smell it on me is a mystery to this day.
Toward the very end, it got so bad that I would awake in the middle of the night sweating, gagging and shaking and would have to drink to make it through the rest of the night.  I would then set my alarm to get up at 5:00 in the morning in order to have a few whiskeys before the kids got up so that I would be able to make them breakfast without my hands shaking, which only worked half of the time.  The lunacy of it all was overwhelming.  I gave in one morning and told Frank that I was actually having a breakdown.  I lay in the guest room crying, gagging, sweating and shaking.  He got the kids to school and came home asking if he should take me to the hospital.  I told him I thought I needed to go to a psychiatric hospital and that is exactly where  I went.  I checked myself in for five days, was strip searched and committed.  Only half of my brain knew this was alcohol related, but that half reasoned that I would dry out on the psych ward.  It reasoned that people would think less of an alcoholic than a mental patient.  I dangerously told none of the doctors there that I was having the DTs.  I found out in rehab later that it is more serious to detox from alcohol than most other drugs as you can seize.
I did dry out and came home only to drink again four days later.  You can't tell me that isn't some level of insanity.  Reading what I have just written I can't imagine that I (or anyone for that matter) would ever want to be there again, yet I have relapsed since embarking on recovery more than once.  If I have a drink now, all bets are off, I will trip the neurotransmitters in my brain that don't exist in people without this problem.  I will turn into Mrs. Hyde.
I wrote in my story for the kids that my red dragon tells me lies.  It does, it is like the red devil in cartoons sitting on my shoulder that calls to me and says it will make everything better.  It tells me I can be normal again and drink like other people.  It whitewashes the past and tries to allow me to feel it really wasn't that bad after all and offers sweet oblivion from the mayhem in my head.  That is why I write about this.  That is why I am laying it all on the table.  I know that what I write about is shocking, it disgusts me, but I have to embrace the wreckage of my past in order to learn from it.  If I don't examine it over and over, I will start to listen to the red dragon again, worse, I will start to believe its lies.  I am so scared of returning to this former state of bottom-of-the-pond existence, that I risk losing the respect of others.  Today it is worth that risk in order to retain respect for myself.