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)