Six Months Sober

A gesture to the world, myself, and my lineage.

This is about substance abuse and mentions suicide. Please proceed carefully.

One of the last drinks I had was in Edinburgh— a fancy drink that filled a glass topper with a shroud of elderberry scented fog. My friend Claire bought it for me, and we enjoyed our drinks in a dark speakeasy. She was also the last person I hugged, pre-pandemic. I remember wondering if I should hug her. It was only a day or two after Trump’s travel ban, and I was set to fly to Iceland, then home, to Seattle.

In Edinburgh I also stopped in to a pub by myself and had a glass of Lagavulin, my favorite Scotch. I drank it and watched the news as others, mostly in groups, talked around me. I wrote in my journal. They are talking about the U.S. election on BBC, giving it much more airtime than any news outlet in the U.S. would give to U.K. news.

I only had one drink at that pub. Since quitting drinking for five months back in 2015, my relationship to alcohol had slowly been changing, but really it was that alcohol, like my bulimia, didn’t work for me anymore. It didn’t soothe me to sleep but kept me awake, accentuating the already noisy thrum of my heartbeat, which I could hear almost all the time due to my C-PTSD.

Despite my changed relationship to alcohol, I decided to stop drinking in support of my cousin, who had been sober-curious for years. I knew quitting would be easy. I didn’t really like alcohol anymore. I also knew that, just as my relationship to booze had change positively, it could veer away again into the uncontrollable mess it had been for over a decade.

I first started drinking when I was thirteen. I’d steal Zima from the Drug Emporium near the house I shared with my mom and stepdad in Renton, WA. I also huffed paint thinner, smoked weed, and at fourteen I started doing what was then called crystal meth. This, along with my bulimia, kept me alive. It sounds counterintuitive, but my ability to suppress memories and erase my human experience both damaged and sustained me. My mom and stepdad locked up the household chemicals and the liquor cabinet. I got in trouble when they found pictures of me on our living-room couch, smoking from a bong. I’d been coming home after school with my friends and partying.

So, I started going out. My mom had married my stepdad when I was thirteen. Before that, I spent a lot of time alone. After, not much changed; there was someone new to tell me a was a piece of shit. I’d run away for the first time at twelve, then thirteen, fourteen. I stopped running away when I made friends. Then we moved again. They had a new client for their small business. In Olympia I avoided all the nice kids and went right for the ones who had the drugs.

I’ll skip over my heroin addiction (I’ve been clean for nearly two decades).

My relationship with alcohol was like this: a dive into a frozen river. A shock of cold quickly turning to numbness. The edges of my vision lined with black gauze, first obscuring my periphery, then everything.

Mornings I’d wake up in someone’s bed, their name escaping me, the smell of their sheets and our sweat, my underwear somewhere on the floor.

Shame an unidentifiable flavor coating my tongue.

I’d tell myself how free I was. I’d find my underwear or not. I’d pull my pants on and cup my hands under the bathroom faucet for water. I’d leave, the other still asleep.

Throughout the day my mind would slip open to release slivers of memory from the night before. I’d cringe or laugh or feel a sense of pride. I could sleep with whoever I wanted. I could check out whenever I pleased. Often I’d spend the day eating food and throwing it up in my toilet, or I’d be off to work, the edges of my self still distorted.

Rinse, repeat.

When I was little my grandma took me to her Al-Anon meetings. I sat in the corner coloring, listening to the stories. Grandpa picked us up afterwards, his car smelling like Trident gum. She never learned how to drive.

When I was little my mom told me about how she and her sister came home from school one day to find Grandma passed out on the living room floor in her own vomit. They picked her up and took her to bed. They cleaned the carpet. Grandma, a nurse, got fired and fired again because she couldn’t stop with the opiates.

After our Al-Anon meetings Grandma would be in the bathroom for an hour. If I went in after her I could smell her lingering shit and the vibrant spice of Listerine. I didn’t know she drank it, the window open so she could smoke too. All those smells were normal to me. Regular.

When we are little, we learn to accept everything as it is. But what happens when we begin to understand those things in comparison to the world at large? What if we’ve been taught the wrong things?

When I was little my father would come every once in a while. He always had a Cadillac, always a different color. Lots of time passed between our visits. He liked taking me to bars, where he could introduce me to his friends.

I remember my mom passing out once from too many wine coolers. Grandma called the ambulance and the medics hooked her up to a bag of saltwater, filling her with what she’d lost. I remember watching her disappear, the color draining from her face like an hourglass releasing time. Once, when we lived alone, I poured all her booze down the sink like I’d seen in a movie. She didn’t like that.

I watched my mom disappear again and again until, when she disappeared, something new and darker was revealed. A second hiding self that had been ignored. The turning away of addiction eventually reveals what is turned away from. Her eyes would glass over and fill with an empty expanse. How can someone be filled with emptiness? The emptiness reached out towards me and embraced me with arms like knives. The emptiness cut me open and wound my insides around it. You little bitch, the emptiness said, in my mother’s voice. You expect to be treated like gold.

The emptiness reached for a gun and pulled the trigger.

My mom took the emptiness from her shoulders with both her hands, as if removing a heavy and luxurious fur stole, and placed it upon mine. I took it because I was accustomed to taking things from her.

When I said no to drinking, I ended something.

When I said no to drinking, I sliced a cord connecting me to the emptiness, and simultaneously gathered the emptiness into my heart and held it there with warmth. Hello, emptiness. I am here with you. We are here together. The emptiness lives inside me. I turn towards it.

The emptiness was a thick rope split into several avenues which were built through my lineage. A parent turns away, a child learns from the parent. And so on.

Now I am here, still with no mother and no father and not much family, but here. Alive. The clouds build and disperse. Since I have stopped drinking I’ve wanted to drink. Just for the taste. Just one.

I’ve wanted to go to a dark bar and order something strong and feel it sharp in my mouth and let it numb my body and have another and another until I disappear.

That longing will always be there.

Disappearing is so much easier than feeling.

Feeling is essential to staying alive.

Sometimes I can’t sleep because the world courses through my body like a storm. Sometimes the world feels like it’s made of broken glass. Sometimes my skin doesn’t protect me.

I’ve been sober for six months.

Love,

Stacy