I’m Feelin’ Myself

There are thousands of reasons to drink.  Being the expert that I am on the subject, I can narrow it down to three:

1.       To feel something.

2.       To feel nothing.

3.       To feel any other way than you are feeling in that particular moment.

Drinking to feel something is a noble cause in my opinion.  Your Tinder date drove all the way from Durham, and he paid for the mozzarella sticks you shared.  Using Fireball to persuade your heart into thinking he’s a 7 instead of a 2 is just plain good manners.

Drinking to feel nothing is a concept that needs no explanation.  You know it.  I know it.  It seems to be the reason that drives most people into the AA meetings I frequent, making me the outlier because it was actually not reason #2, but reason #3 that almost put me in the ground.

There are a lot of things wrong with me and I don’t know if it can be attributed to the anxiety, the bi-polar disorder, or whatever caused my phobia of Halloween masks that look like politicians, but I am incapable of sitting with a feeling that I don’t like.  My body reacts to it like intravenous ice water.  And I don’t know if this is propter hoc or una mecum to the fact that I can’t sit with a feeling—but I rarely have a moment in time when I am confident that the way I feel is the way I am supposed to be feeling. 

Maybe “supposed” isn’t supposed to be the right word here but we all know, at least at a surface level, what’s its like to have emotions that are in conflict or complete contradiction to what is expected.  The emotions (or lack there-of) that you might experience at your pervy Uncle’s funeral or your ex’s wedding; one event baits grief and the other baits your explicit blessing, but how your psyche chooses to assign them is entirely out of your control.  You can control the impulse to throw rice at a coffin and at a wedding wail, “but he had his whole life ahead of him!”  Please do so accordingly.

Your mismatched sympathy/disdain for things that happen externally isn’t worth worrying about.  By nature, they can’t get under your skin.  Having your most sincere feelings corrected or ignored entirely by another person is one of those offenses that burrows into you like a chigger.  Some people have the shrewdness to blow it off, but I am not one of those people.  I take it hard and all the way down to the gut.  Whenever I find myself tangled in someone else’s opinion of me, I think about drinking.

For all the stereotypes that are untrue about addicts, we are all in agreement that, “I only had confidence when I was drunk,” and “I only liked myself when I was high,” are verified, authentic experiences.  Say what you will about Drunk Kara, but for all her faults, knee scrapes, collection of ruined parties, and tearful confessions—that bitch had unshakeable self-esteem.  I don’t miss being her and I don’t miss the taste of lukewarm tequila, but when I am suffocating under the heft of criticism, I sure miss being able to use a cocktail straw to draw in some friggin air. 

I suppose I am supposed to give a written pep-talk to myself and all of you now about how resolute I am in sobriety and even though I have thoughts about drinking, I take aim at them with my mental .22 and shoot over their heads until they startle and run off into the night like coyotes.  I’m supposed to say that I don’t let the thoughts take me over because “drinking is not an option.”

  Yeah, you’re not gonna hear me say that “drinking is not an option,” anymore.  Drinking is always an option.  That’s why sobriety is an interminable lifestyle.  I don’t blame the world for my addiction, but I do blame the world for making addiction recovery a lot harder than it needs to be sometimes.  I am a 31-year-old, divorced, alcoholic student-teacher—the last place I want to find myself is in rehab.  Again.  The second-to-last place I want to find myself is on a roller coaster, but life sure does facilitate that illusion sometimes.  It cranks you up, spins you around, and then drops you in a way that makes it feel like your stomach is going to bounce out of your eyeballs.  One day, you’re at the height of your excellence and you think you’ve finally made it.  The next day, you are the Bazooka wad stuck to someone’s shoe.  And if you happen to be someone (me) who already struggles to grasp a sense of yourself, one week on this planet will dissolve your constitution entirely. 

Of course, drinking is an option.  Its an obvious option.  On your worst day, it seems like your best option.  And it’s an easy option, too—no offense to my drug addict friends, but alcohol isn’t just addictive because it’s addictive, it’s addictive because it’s ubiquitous.  If y’all try to give up and go back to meth, you still have to find a slapdash chemist, a dealer, a pipe, and a Bic lighter (which are becoming less and less ubiquitous by the day).  If alcoholics want to forfeit, we just need a Citgo. 

Drinking is always, always, always an option.  Which is why we have to look carefully at all of our other options.  There is no possible void you could be feeling that only alcohol can fill.  You need a self-esteem boost?  Go to a car dealership.  A salesman will tell you that you are a man of discerning taste and that you deserve the best.  You need uncomplicated companionship?  Buy a funnel cake.  Get on a ferry.  You’ll attract a whole flock of non-verbal buddies who want what you have to offer.  You need a hug?  Go see your mother.  You need love?  Get a hooker.  Whatever you think alcohol can give you—go get it somewhere else.  The longer you choose anything but drinking, the sooner you’ll realize that the 3 main reasons to drink have become the 3 main reasons not to drink.

I don’t need alcohol to feel something.  Alcohol made it impossible to feel much at all, other than the craving for more alcohol.  My heart flutters every single day and the causes are guideposts to affirm that I’m heading in the right direction.  John Donne electrifies my sensibilities whenever I devour a poem I’d only skimmed before;

If ‘twere not so, what did become

              Of my heart, when I first saw thee?

I brought a heart into a room,

              But from the room, I carried none with me.    

Hearing my nephew’s voice over the phone and feeling the warmth of knowing that little person exists, and then the frigid urgency to work harder and faster so I can see him again.  The clean smell, wet curls, and tight grip of a fresh-out-of-the-bath 6-year-old who is usually too preoccupied with his many passions to pause for a “goodnight” hug.  Then the ensuing ache of not knowing how many more of those unexpected embraces are going to belong to me.

No, I don’t need to drink to feel something.

Despite the absolute agony of feeling, I don’t want to feel nothing either.  I made it through hell without drinking and I will make it through hell sober again if I have to.  There were times when I had to get in my car, drive out to a farm road, turn the radio all the way up and scream until I gave myself a headache in a place where absolutely no one could hear me.  There was a period where I was sobbing so often that in the few minutes of stoicism, my eyelids would crack and bleed.  I was finished with life and the only thing that stopped me from stopping was that I couldn’t compose a letter that would make my family truly understand why it had to end this way.  And I resented them for it. 

But here I am. And I’d go through it all again before I’d drink my way around it. If you can feel that much, love that hard, thrash and mourn the things you’ve lost with your entire body, you’re not done living.  You just learned what it means to be alive.  You’ll never walk on earth the same way again because you know the stakes and you choose to stay.

You chose to quit drinking, you chose to keep living, why not make both of those things easier on yourself and choose to think in a way that is healthy and correct, instead letting others decide how you should feel about yourself?  The world is going to yank you up and throw you down, that’s a given.  Handling it all with grace and gumption is a choice.  Knowing that the low moments are outliers, and the high moments exemplify who you truly are—that’s actually not a choice, that’s a fact you need to swallow.  And start living and thinking accordingly.

              I said that the world will pull you up and drop you down, but that isn’t quite accurate.  You pull yourself up.  When you get a good grip on the precipice, the worlds steps on your fingers.  You aren’t the person who let go.  You are the person who clambered to the top against all odds, and you are going to clamber to the top again.  The ascent defines you, not the fall.  You are not being appraised by the husband who left you (and quickly replaced you), nor by the man who really wanted to love you but got close enough to see that there was absolutely nothing about you to love or want.  Well.  Oxford wanted you.  I think that’ll do ‘er.  You are not a drunk, you are a recovering addict who scoffed at the statistics and instead got sober and survived.  Those aren’t feelings—those are facts.  Until you are strong enough to slant toward the facts and feel good about yourself, slant away from the bottle.  Don’t fight the temptation in silence because you are worried that other sober people won’t understand the want to go back to feeling nothing.  Its just not true.  Trust me.  We feel ya.