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At 105 days, a meditation on sobriety

I've been reflecting on 2019 thus far, and how it's been one of the hardest but one of the most important years of my adult life.

2019 has brought some new lows. I've struggled with suicidal ideation in a way that I haven't since I was a teenager in the immediate aftermath of rape and sexual abuse. And if anything, it's been worse this time, because I would keep thinking, "I’m in my 30′s. Over a decade has passed; my life should be better by now." At this point, I was supposed to have grown out of what happened to me in my youth. I wasn't supposed to be stuck with that trauma's ongoing effects, or trapped in cycles of being re-traumatized by the emotionally abusive relationships that followed. (Because even as survivors of abuse, we often gravitate to the familiar. Control and the diminishment of self by the partners who should care for us is what we know, so it’s easy to mistake that treatment for love. It’s emotional Stockholm Syndrome. And it makes any attempt at healing exponentially harder, because every new relationship like that--and I’ve been in several--opens old wounds over again.) 

I spent the early months of 2019 hysterical with anxiety. I fantasized about suicide. I planned how I'd do it. I’m a writer, so I planned what I might say in my suicide note. (I’ll admit that the part of me who used to like Linkin Park reveled a bit in the emo-ness of this exercise.) It wasn't that I wanted to die. That was the worst part: I very much wanted life. And not just life, a good life, suffused with new and exciting experiences. I had this cliche vision of the “Eat Pray Love” version of myself. Like something out of an Instagram post, this Hannah stood laughing on top of a Colorado mountain that she’d just spent all day climbing, silhouetted against blue sky in a big hat and a sports bra, water bottle in one hand, a joint in the other, glowing with self-actualization. Hannah in a state of hippie nirvana. Hannah breathing in nature, no cares or worries. Just picture-perfect privilege. A juvenile aspiration--like most Internet-inspired fantasies, all shine and little substance--but  if I visualized it long enough, I could almost feel the sunshine on my back. 

But feeling that sunshine was becoming more and more impossible. I'd lost hope. I remember crying on the phone to my mom, "I feel like I have no future." I remember I said that over and over and over again. The simple fact of *being me* was so painful that it seemed unendurable. "It hurts to exist," I also recall saying. It’s a feeling I don’t know how to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it (and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone). I didn't see another way out of that pain and I felt sapped of the considerable energy required to fight it. There was little left except pangs of failure and fear and self-hatred, and the compulsion to escape by any means possible. At 31, I felt old.

All the while, I kept up appearances. If I couldn’t fool myself any more, at least maybe I could fool others into thinking that I was fine. I went to work and tried to stay engaged and personable. I attempted to maintain my social life, even my dating life (though the man I’d been sleeping with lost interest after my facade of the fun-loving, bohemian girl in the sunshine became too exhausting to maintain, and he caught a glimpse of my actual vulnerability). I posted selfies on social media, shopped for new clothes, got my hair done. All the trappings of functional suburban normalcy. But inside I was giving up on the idea that I could access real joy and relief again. When I’d try to smile at people, my face felt like rubber stretched into an unnatural shape. The muscles didn’t want to move that way any more.

And so my drinking, which had already fallen into unhealthy patterns--more and more evenings when I fell asleep fully clothed and still wearing my shoes after too many glasses of Chardonnay--escalated. And escalated some more. In a fucked-up way, it was my weapon against the inevitability of ending it all. It was a last-ditch attempt to break free from the splitting awfulness of being in my own brain. Anything to mitigate the stress before the stress took over completely. If I got enough alcohol inside me, I could feel warm and light, at least for a while. If I was lucky, I could even feel a flicker of sexiness, a fleeting chemical charisma. Late one night around this time, a stranger at a bar said she could tell I have "a beautiful soul." I cried thinking about it later, wishing that I could see myself this way. Beautiful was the opposite of how I felt. Even getting out of bed took a grim amount of effort.

It's only been 3 months and a few days since my last drink, but already what I can see is that the day I decided to quit alcohol was the day I chose life. Quitting drinking was a choice to believe that there *is* hope. That I do have a future, that I am a person worth investing in. I've wondered, too, if the incident that propelled me to stop drinking was my subconscious acting on my suicidal feelings. My "rock bottom" was that I drove home blackout drunk from a bar and crashed my car. That could have killed me. Worse, it could have killed someone else. I was lucky that neither of those things happened. (No one was hurt and my car was fine, apart from a few scrapes and scratches.) Despite the deep, deep shame I felt--and still feel--about having taken this dangerous action, it scared me into realizing that I still had fight in me after all. The thought that I could've died filled me with panic, not longing. That made me determined to piece myself back together, no matter how much more hurt I'd have to get through to do it.

And it does hurt. I've moved through the intervening days feeling like a weird exposed nerve. My emotions are heightened and all over the place. Not to mention that I feel a gnawing restlessness, stripped as I now am of the usual outlet for my self-destructive impulses. It’s hard not to feel manic when you’re struggling for peace against ongoing sensations of frustrated hedonism. The other day I was walking in the woods and first I was smiling because the landscape was beautiful and then there were tears in my eyes because I felt so privileged to be there experiencing it. Profound awe and gratitude, mingled with profound sadness and a loneliness that pervaded every part of my body. And that's probably how it's going to be for a while. 

Quitting drinking hasn't fixed everything overnight. I still often feel at war with myself. I push against the weight of constant anguish just trying to fulfill my basic responsibilities. But sobriety has reminded me that I have agency and that it isn't impossible that I will one day be able to accept myself. Not an Instagrammable, FOMO-inducing, obvious form of self-acceptance, but a quiet feeling of confidence that’s deep and unshakable. Because if I can do this hard thing and stick with it, what else can’t I do? I've been rewatching early episodes of "Game of Thrones," and there are those scenes in the first season where Arya's taking sword-fighting lessons with the Bravosi dude and he tells her, "What do we say to the god of death? Not today."

Deciding to get sober--and, shortly thereafter, seeking professional help to improve my mental health--has been my way of saying to death: "Not today."