You can be anyone you want to be, my mother is adamant in my brain, so long as it’s within reason. For some reason, this memory keeps coming back to me. Then again, I’m sick right now, smack in the middle of the holiday season that I used to love when I was a full-blown alcoholic. (Dear Reader: I warn you. I’m writing this is as NyQuil courses through my veins.) I keep forgetting what time it is and I dread opening my iCalendar to see what’s next. I feel guilty for taking a second day of work off sick with my fourth grader, who’s sick too. Regardless, whenever I’m sick, I can feel every single insecurity, doubt, fear and lie that informed my alcoholism bleed out as I’m surrounded by Kleenex and DayQuil.
The holidays used to sprinkle magic dust onto my drinking habits. No one batted an eyelash at my order for a double-scotch on the rocks. I got away with alcoholic imbibing. It was encouraged. No one thought it was anything but festive that I was pounding two Great Lakes Christmas Ales at once. After all, whomever invented the hip flask was a greater holiday god to me than anyone else found in the Old Testament. (Answer: scientist James Dewar.)
Now? Not so much. In sobriety, my life is a barrage of easy smiles, hugs, holiday parties, work obligations, crock-pot nightmares and school sing-a-long parties with other parents. And right beneath it is this undercurrent of exhaustion and full-blown anxiety and stress that has somehow flipped to me being stuck in bed for hours at a time. I have a morbid curiosity about what’s going on at work right now, but that’s tantamount to the feeling I get when I have a horrible sunburn and I peel the skin in long, unbroken stretches—I’m repulsed and detached from it at the same time. In the end, I don’t care.
So, here I am, basically ignoring emails and wondering when my next nap is going to kick in. Mainly, I’m thinking about how I’ve made it four years sober, but my greatest threats to that sobriety have always come in the form of illness maintenance. Whenever I was sick, like really sick, that’s when all the nonsense disappeared and I was left alone with how I truly felt about myself. It was just me, self-loathing and Starlog magazines. When Mom saw that I was starting to put “Script Supervisor” and “Screenwriter” down as possible career pursuits, she shut that down and I felt whatever small light I had about my future die a little. Those were Real World Crimes, she felt. I wasn’t supposed to tell other people about this stuff that I playacted in my bedroom for weeks on end. You’re talented, she’d nod, but you don’t want to be one of the hundred anonymous people at the end of a movie. (I just remembered this a few hours ago as my fever started to break.) But instead of feeling sorry for myself—instead of feeling as though I’d been cheated out on some grand role in life, I’ve started realizing how alcoholic this all sounds.
I breeze past beer and wine aisles (Were they always this big?) and read the labels of some of the medications in the pharmacy section. I fork over my prescriptions and with that comes lots of raised-eyebrows that make me feel guiltier than I already do. One is a pill I can’t pronounce to help me sleep more; another is a pill to help anxiety; another is a pill for severe depression. (Today, I’m getting one that will regulate my overall moods. Something about serotonin.) I’ll take anything and everything they have to offer because, well, that’s what I was doing as an alcoholic. I put things inside me to make my insides go away. Now, as a recovering alcoholic with a common cold, I want to drink and drug myself into not feeling the cold, too.
You see, my drinking days were never social visits. If you examine my drinking on any real microcellular level, it was about a very sick man, visiting the places he felt might be best suited to treat his illness. Small talk was out the way. There were vast apothecaries and rotundas and hipster-ironic-speakeasies that held potential cures for me: some familiar; some they’d have to dust off the labels. Hell if I knew. I was just hoping for codeine cough syrup, Xanax, Ambien, uppers in any form, downers in anything I could get—just to find my balance. And that’s all going to a neighborhood bar really was for me: finding balance. Are you balanced enough, or are you down and need to go back up? Do you need some extra confidence? Well, we’ve got that too: all your barmates haven’t moved since last night and here’s what you most recently ordered, for good time’s sake.
Whenever I saddled up at a neighborhood bar, I never once considered myself a patient, but now I do. As I wander all the drugs I could undoubtedly abuse (DayQuil, amphetamines, Xanax, etc.), I’m too tired. I just want the prescription I have so I can take it the way I’m supposed to. It makes life so much easier. I don’t have an angle. There’s a large part of me that is sad, that is still drinking down my mom’s dismissive, early-life editings of what I should and should not pursue as a career. But it’s definitely not worth giving any serious thought to. While I’m sick and feeling incredibly open and honest in ways I normally never am, I’m just incredibly grateful, clutching a CVS bag. to the people who are truly trying to help me be the best version of me out into the world. It’s taken me to get sick to realize just how sick I’ve been — even in recovery.
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