AfflictionAteHer

I just finished drinking a full pint of beer, which filled up what I thought was a pint beer glass exactly two times (go figure). The feeling I have right now is a fun feeling. A bit of a rush of blood between my temples and my ears. A slight bit of fullness behind my brow. I feel relaxed and sightly uninhibited (though in what way I would be hard-pressed to describe). It’s a good feeling, all in all, and one that I feel a bit of a compulsion to exaggerate or, at least, prolong by drinking another beer. I won’t, of course. I asked David to buy me only one, as opposed to a six-pack of the smaller bottles, because the compulsion to continue is a thing I don’t want to feed.

And here’s why: a year and a couple of months ago this beer would have been preceded by a long afternoon of home-made margaritas, and somewhere in between there, and the beer, and bedtime, I would likely have consumed an entire bottle of wine. And I felt just awful. Tired. Depressed. Listless. False. Headachy. Terribly, terribly bloated (at 5’2″, my waist actually measured 52″ one day, and I only weighed about 175 pounds). And I was so deeply unhappy and stuck. I wasn’t having blackouts, and I wasn’t much acting on any of my inhibitions, unless you count the inhibition most of us carry around about not really wanting to carry our own weight. No, for the most part, I was sick and unhappy. Except for how I felt after the first drink or two; all downhill from there.

This went on full-steam-ahead for a few months. It had been building for a few years. When I was about 34 years old I went an entire year of drinking every day. I tried to be quite careful about my drinking after that, but eventually I started drinking with friends on weekends, and then after awhile I found myself drinking more than the friends I was with when we went out. For a year or two before last summer it was not uncommon for me to be the last one drinking, holding up the entire dinner party because I’d ordered “one last one” just as everybody else was finishing off their own one last one.

I drink a lot when I am unmedicated, or not taking my medications responsibly. It hasn’t always been that way – it started when I was 30 or 31 years old – but once I’d developed a taste for alcohol it became the thing I turned to again and again instead of doctors or psychologists or medication (or all three).

I have to be honest here and tell you that it frankly didn’t make my life any worse than my life had been before I discovered drinking. Before I discovered drinking I didn’t know I was mentally ill and didn’t have doctors or psychologists or medications at my disposal. Or drinking, either. At least with the drinking I had a few hours of happiness.

But then came the discovery that I was mentally ill all along, and the prescriptions, and the expectation that I would take responsibility for my behavior.

Does anybody else out there have a memory of the time when they discovered what was wrong, and that there was something they could do about it — and being filled with a kind of fury about their past? “This was it?” I asked myself. “You mean there was an answer all along – all that time I spent convinced that I was just a terrible person, a defective character; all those years I spent in shame — you mean to tell me that if I’d simply found the right group of people they could not only have explained what the problem was but could have provided a solution?”

My past simply didn’t give up on me that easily. Even after I acknowledged that I had a mental illness I maintained the belief that it had been brought about because I was just a terrible person, a defective character. I still harbored a deep-seated belief that if I simply did all the things right that I had done so incorrectly my whole life I would no longer qualify as “mentally ill” and would, instead, have lived up to my own potential. Taking medication was terribly comforting; so much so that I felt guilty about taking it. I thought that taking medication, medication that slowed my racing thoughts, erased my anxiety, tuned me to the same frequency as the rest of the word, was a cheat. I knew that didn’t make a lot of sense, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and so I lived in a twilight zone, a purgatory where I was neither a good person nor an afflicted person. A place where I lost the battle to be good, and lost the battle to be sane, mainly because I was afraid to let go of my past.

By last summer I was quite aware that none of this was working for me. I had become rather immobile, and very unsocial. I was in bad shape, and in a bad way. And I knew I had to stop drinking. So I went to a place called La Hacienda – a treatment center for drug addicts and alcoholics. I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I also knew I needed to get away from home to quit drinking, so that’s what I did. I did it, in part, so that I could get back on medication. Neither are decisions I’ve ever regretted. One day I’ll try to find the diary I was keeping at La Hacienda. Or my memories of it, at least. Quite an interesting place and experience that was. Terribly, terribly helpful.

I still have the odd drink though. But for now, at any rate, I don’t quite fit the description of an alcoholic. Just a mentally ill person. Whatever that makes me, I mean.

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