I’m really good at making a lot of plans and not doing jack shit about them.

It’s a special talent.  I know you’re jealous.

No seriously, my whole week was this strange undecided space.  I would make a plan about what I was going to get done during the day and then it just wouldn’t happen.  It wasn’t really that I would do something else instead.  It was just that I would putz around on the internet or take a nap or whatever.  I went to work, to adoration, to a party for out-of-town friends, and saw two movies.  Really, I have been busy.  

But I’ve also had hours where I haven’t done anything and I’ve looked at various to-do lists, or tasks that a painfully apparent (read: CLEAN THE FRAKKING BATHROOM) and I’ve just not.  I want to be a person who can stay calmly and consistently on top of the things in her life, but it’s like I have no incentive to do anything until it is a total crisis.

I would be really much calmer professionally if I did my grading every day, but no, I save the whole week’s grading for the weekend, then I see the huge pile and start crying.  If I did laundry when there was one load I wouldn’t have to spend a whole day shlepping 7 loads up and down to the laundry room in the basement of my apartment building.  If I responded to emails at the end of the day that they actually came in then I wouldn’t be constantly consumed with low-level guilt that so-and-so thinks I’m ignoring them.  There are so many daily things that I could do that would make my life easier, would stave off the panic before it begins and I feel like my life is spinning out of control.

But I don’t do these things.

Or if I do, it’s not really on a regular basis enough to count.  I wonder if it is simply that I cannot convince myself that these daily things are really worth doing.  That I manage to trick myself into not remembering when everything is falling apart how happy I am when things are under control.  On the other hand I might just be so habituated to being a hot mess of a human being that I don’t take care of small things as they come up because that is too much like what a functional person would do.  It could be that I am just lazy as all fuck.  That would be the Occam’s Razor answer.

Whatever the reason behind why I wasted so many perfectly useful hours of this week, I need to get my ass in gear, because I am not a fan of what I’m (not) doing right now.  Uncool me, time to fix this shit.

I try not to see alcoholism everywhere I look, but sometimes it’s a struggle.

Let me explain.

You’ve all met the obnoxious evangelizer.  The person who stopped doing something that was harmful for them, and then suddenly that particular thing or behavior (say it’s drinking, or smoking, or eating sugar, or interneting) becomes the greatest evil there ever was and it is destroying everything around it and anyone still doing it needs to stop right this damn minute!!!

We all want to punch that person in the face.

Some things are fundamentally harmful and no one should do them in the first place.  But most things are pretty morally neutral, and in moderation are simple pleasures.  I try to be very clear when I talk to friends about my sobriety: as much as I’m an alcoholic, alcohol wasn’t/isn’t the problem, I was/am the problem.  I don’t want my friends to abstain from alcohol when we’re together out of some deference to my particular struggle, because to me that makes alcohol the flawed substance, instead of me the flawed human being.  (Now, if they don’t feel like drinking that night I am certainly not going to force them!)  If for some reason I can’t handle being around alcohol on a given night, I don’t go out.  That’s my choice, and I don’t think that my choices should dictate anyone else’s choices, when it comes to the boozey booze.

But every so often, when I’m scrolling Pinterest instead of grading (or instead of showering, or instead of making dinner, or instead of sleeping) I come across a picture that makes me depressed.  A fairly generic early-20-year-old girl in a Jack Daniels or beer logo T-shirt, leggings for pants, a shed load of make-up and Texan sized hair is smiling coyly at the mirror of her bedroom, phone in hand to take the picture.  Everyone has seen a version of this picture.  Every time I see this picture I can’t help pain and pity welling up inside me and all I can think to myself is “you poor stupid girl, this ends so badly.”

I shouldn’t do this.  My story isn’t every story.  And my story is much more misery-chick than party-girl, so I was never the underdressed girl looking for a good time.  There is no reason to think that just because I am in a program that every girl who posts an unfortunate picture glamorizing her drinking escapades on the internet is going to need a program someday too.  But it’s hard, when you’ve come out on the other side, not to want to protect anyone else from ever having to go through what you went through.  It takes a while to remove the “worst possible outcome” filter from your vision.

And so sometimes I am that person, who in the privacy of her own brain, screams at everyone to stop drinking right this damn minute!

I’m waiting for God to give me an answer and I super suck at that.

I don’t really operate on God’s time.  I have this idea that prayers should be answered instantaneously, like a genie.

I have a parent who is deeply upset with me.  She misunderstood my bumbling attempt to help her daughter and is now demanding some sort of reckoning.  This happens with people.  We think what we are saying is totally clear and not contentious but those same words are received as vague and threatening.  It is so easy to take things in the wrong way.  And here, when I tried to say “how can I give your daughter the best education possible” the parent heard “your daughter is a bad child and doesn’t belong in my class.”  I’m so overwhelmed by this mess that I feel utterly directionless.  I’m so afraid of making it worse that I can’t see how any option is even remotely good.

So I’m trying to pray about it.  I’m asking God to show me what to do, to give me the right words to make my intention clear and have the best outcome for my student.  I have been praying on and off about it all day.  And I don’t have an answer yet.  I just have the overwhelmed and the rising panic that maybe there is no answer.  Maybe I’ve ruined things beyond repair.

(Yes, in case you’re wondering, I do tend to overreact to things.  How did you know?)

I have to relax.  I have to let God work with me on his schedule.  And I do have to not jump to “well I just have to say SOMETHING, even if it’s not the right thing” because that won’t help anyone.  If I am patient and trusting the correct outcome is possible.  (And now I will repeat this to myself about a million times.)

This leaves me sitting in the overwhelmed, having to face the waiting.  For years I didn’t do this.  I drank.  At the slightest instance of personal discomfort, or answerless-ness I ran to the bottle.  At the end of a bottle of wine I could convince myself it was all someone else’s fault and they were just being an asshole.  At the end of two bottles of wine I could pitch myself over the self-pity cliff, bemoaning how the world had treated me so unfairly and I shouldn’t be so persecuted.  By the end of the third bottle of wine I would pass out and well, can’t think much at that point, can ya?

But tonight, as much as I remember how much comfort I thought I was getting from drinking away the day, I don’t want to drink.  I don’t WANT to feel like I do right now, frightened and powerless, but I don’t want to be angry, maudlin and self destructive.  I don’t want to pretend that I bear no responsibility in my own life.  When I look at the alternatives to the overwhelmed, I think I can hack the overwhelmed.

At least I can with the aid of the emergency chocolate bar I have stashed in my kitchen.  And an episode or two of Revenge.  God will answer me, when He’s ready.  I just have to be sober to hear him.

(1 Year and 24 Days Sober)

Telling people that I am a recovering alcoholic is still difficult for me.

I know that it seems like what I’m about to say is total shit, but I’ve always been an extremely private person.  Always having been introverted and shy, I really don’t like telling people personal information.  Yup, I know how stupid that sounds considering that I am sharing my business on the internet.  But that’s the truth of it.

And as I said above, it is still difficult for me to tell people “no, I don’t drink anymore.”  I don’t have a problem saying “no” when they offer me a glass of wine, that comes pretty naturally now.  It is the follow-up.  The somewhat quizzical look and the “since when?” head nod that makes me all awkward.  I can’t even say that I’m afraid because someone has reacted poorly.  That isn’t the case at all.  Everyone has been kind and supportive, and some people have been genuinely interested, asking lots of follow up questions and such.  But it is a huge thing about myself to reveal to another person.  On the one hand it gives them an insight into me, we become closer through that shared knowledge.  On the other hand, in the way that I am used to seeing things, it gives them power over me.  By telling that other person I am trusting them to a) not tell anyone else, and b) to not use it against me at some future point.  (You would think from the way I talk that everyone I know is a grifter or a spy.  They aren’t.  I am just not super trusting.)  It is easy for me to get caught between letting things be awkward for a few minutes and not answering unasked questions, or explaining why I would rather have water and opening myself up to condemnation, pity or gossip.

More than in my personal life, I feel torn in my professional life.  I’m a 3rd grade teacher.  Only one other person who works at my school knows that I am in recovery.  She and I have been friends for over 10 years and she knew before I started working at the school, so it is more that she is a friend who knows rather than a co-worker who knows.  But I’m starting to feel like I am keeping this big secret from my co-workers.  I don’t feel particularly close to many of them, and I know that it is my doing.  They have reached out and tried to form friendships with me, and I have been very reticent.  And I know that a huge part of it is that I don’t really want to tell them that I am a recovering alcoholic, but I know that truth is a huge aspect of who I am.  

So how close is it possible for me to be to someone if they don’t know?  What kind of friendships can I have with my coworkers if I continue to keep my personal life guarded like the gate to Azkaban?  In a way it is like I am still hiding the way I was a year ago.  To a very select few people I am completely open and honest, and everyone else better stay the fuck away.

(1 Year and 23 Days Sober)

Hi, my name is Andrea and I’m an alcoholic.

In September 2011 I was sitting in a church.  My roommate from freshman year of college was getting married.  In the midst of the Mass everything went completely silent around me.  From the center of my being I heard a voice.  

“This is wrong.”

I was terrified.  What just happened to me?  What the HELL was that supposed to mean?  It took my a couple days to admit to myself (and a few weeks after that to admit to anyone else) that in the first quiet sober moment I had had in quite a while God bitchslapped me so hard with the unavoidable truth that there was a deep wrongness to my life and how I was dying it.

At the reception I told a good friend that I thought I might be an alcoholic.  I had been having uncontrollable panic attacks for days, as I had been struck with the idea that I had been engaged in suicidal behavior since I was 12 and now at 28 I was drinking as if I wanted to die.  This reception was a total hoot for my friend.  Even though I had yet to really process what had happened to me in the church, my heart worked with material at hand and reached out to someone I trusted with a terrible admission of my brokenness.

Flying back to DC from California I cried on and off for hours, much to the joy of the poor saps sitting next to me.  By the time I landed I knew I couldn’t go on as I had been.  The next day I made the call to find a meeting.

To get myself to actually go to said meeting I wrote an email to 5 friends, giving them a semi-hysterical account of the situation.  I just needed to tell someone.  I need to know that there were people out there who knew I was suffering and who could spare a prayer for me.  And because I have the most amazing friends they responded with love, support, humor, kindness, but most of all, with words.  Those words were like hands holding mine in the darkness.  Those words were the contact that keep all my atoms from flying apart.

Alcoholism robbed me of my words.  I became silent.  For me, sobriety is an act of speaking (in person or in writing).  As my first year of sobriety passed I added more people to the email list, and kept writing. This blog is an extension of those emails. 

(1 Year and 22 Days Sober)

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