There were things that I wanted that I never had… I didn’t have them when I was growing up and I was willing to be the person that I needed to be in order to have them. But somehow, I couldn’t make it happen. My insides didn’t match what I wanted to see on the outside, I needed to heal. I needed to change. I needed to release everything that I once was in order to embrace who I knew myself to be.

I’ll never forget that morning, sitting beside her, smoking my cigarette, she over there smoking hers. Not a word was exchanged between us. My son appeared looking for me, the same way I had always looked for her but could never find her because even when she was there, she wasn’t there. I looked at her, how she was sitting, holding her cigarette in one hand and phone in the other, realizing I was sitting the same way. I looked at his face and saw a reflection of my younger self. I put the cigarette out. That was the end.

I never really got around to calling myself an alcoholic but I most certainly was one by any definition of the word. I looked forward to my beer or 3 at the end of my shift. I looked forward to the nights I was child free. I would even quit at times, for blocks of time but I always knew it was on my terms and I could return to it whenever I wanted to. But there came a day where I realized I was carrying on the same cycle as I grew up within. There was nowhere else to go within this cycle. I made new memories, days passed but with alcohol you never move forward.

I didn’t want to keep drowning my pain. I didn’t want to run from whatever it was that I was running from. I didn’t want to dumb myself down so that I could continue to make the same blinded decisions I had been making all the while ignoring how miserable I was. I needed to feel my misery so I could cut off its source. I woke up on the 19th of June with my last ever hang over. It wasn’t the worst hang over I’d ever had, not by any stretch of the means but it was different. It was different because I realized that I wasn’t living. I wasn’t going to have the life I’d wanted carrying on in this way. I had realized that alcohol was taking from me more than it had ever given to me. I realized that what satisfied me in the moment was nothing compared to the personal responsibility that I needed to take for myself and my life. I’d fooled myself into thinking I was having a great time, making crazy memories but all I was going was killing myself slowly with other people who had a whole in their souls too. Alcohol was normalized in my circle, it still is. But I haven’t been ashamed to stand alone the last 15 years sober.

I can’t call addiction a disease. It leads to diseases and illnesses but from my own experience, alcohol and other addictions are merely symptoms of a deeper problem.

What drove me to drink? Pain.
I was in so much pain but I didn’t know that I was in pain because it was normal and it was ignored. I was gaslit about my pain growing up. Frequently I would be told, “So what I was called skinny, toughen up, get over it.” In response to being called fat by family members. I think as a child I turned to food for comfort because I didn’t get the comfort I needed. But I was never fat. A little pookie around the middle but never overweight or fat. She passed her pain to me. Without a second thought about the damage it would do, she passed it to me by picking on me.

I know it may sound silly now but this was only one example of passing the pain. I couldn’t talk about my pain. I couldn’t talk about anything that made me sad because I was out sorrowed. If I expressed hurt, it was immediately met with, “yeah well what about me!?” She never heard me. They never heard me. So I kept all that pain inside. I didn’t realize it at that time, as a child that keeping it in didn’t mean it wasn’t going away. So, as I got older alcohol made the pain go away. Smoking… I realized was a way to relate to them. They always got along when they smoked together and I wanted nothing more than to be accepted and get along with them.

Oh, I’ve thought about all of these things. I know my shadows inside and out and I’m not afraid of them and I’m not afraid of your shadows either. I know why they are the way they are. I’m not angry with them. I don’t blame them, I can just see how we got to where we ended up. And I know that I wouldn’t be sharing this for someone else to read who maybe is having a tough time.

Life is whatever meaning we assign to it. And the meaning I have given the pain that I kept within me for so long, has been excavated so I could heal and so that someone else could too.

I hope this helped someone today
Blessings xx