What's Your Story? Submitted Stories
How Dry I Am
It seems like only yesterday that I was passed out on my couch. Night after night, week after week, I’d slip into darkness, like a ship leaving the harbor at twilight. Sometimes I wasn’t even particular about the couch-it didn’t necessarily have to be my couch, any couch would do, or the floor. It was the escape that was important. And my Stoli.
It seems like yesterday, because I can readily recall the garbled phone conversations I had with friends where I tried so hard not to hang onto my S’s, for fear that they would turn in to telltale slurs. The next day the conversation would drift back to me like a fog, hazy and surreal.
But it wasn’t yesterday. I know because I’ve been married to a man that has never seen me consume an ounce of alcohol in nine years; I was a year sober when I met him: I know because I have since borne two healthy sons, now four and six years old. It seems like only yesterday, but it was over ten years ago.
A decade is a longtime by many standards. To a worker ant, for instance, whose average life span is a couple of weeks; ten years would be the equivalent of an ice age. To a tortoise, which can live over a hundred years, a decade may be trivial. Maybe a decade is remembered as the Shark Years, another the Decade of Births.
So I finished my first Dry Decade. It was heavy on the major life stuff: I fell in love, got married, quit my job, moved to another state, bought a house and had two babies. How I did it all without Stolichnaya, I don’t know. But I couldn’t have done it with Stolichnaya, either.
“So how were the first ten years?” a friend asked as we celebrated my ten-year sobriety anniversary.
I sat mute. I could hardly remember. In some ways, the past decade has been a blur. Then again, so were the years preceding it. It was clear that I had a problem, even early on. I look at pictures my father took of me in my playpen, two years old and holding my father’s Hamm’s beer can, and I see an alcoholic waiting to happen.
I remember my first hangover that lasted all day when I was in fourth grade. The first time I smoked pot with my sister in sixth grade. I remember drinking like the guys, and not liking the disparity that I sensed between the sexes. Why was it socially acceptable, almost a rite of passage, for the guys to drink the way they did, but not the girls? I wanted to cross the gender line and have equal drinking rights. I wanted to ease the pain of what was becoming an increasingly violent and dysfunctional family life. I wanted to drink and laugh. It cloaked the hurt and emptiness inside.
At some point in my drinking career, I did cross the line. Not the gender line, but the line distinguishing the social drinking from the alkies. Consciously, I didn’t know I had crossed over, although people who knew me were aware of my slide. Gradually, I dropped out of contact with old friends, and became a barfly. Then I married a fellow drinker.
What would have served as wake-up calls to many-losing a job and getting a DWI-I went through in total denial. I bamboozled my way through a court-mandated responsible drinking class, and continued down the craggy path that I had chosen. Towards the end, drinking has no time limits; morning, noon, and night were all perfect opportunities to imbibe. In fact, what better way to brace for the day, than with a little vodka and orange juice?
Gripped by a sudden desire for semi-honesty, I told my therapist that I was bothered by my unhealthy lifestyle. I had been hard at the bottle, any bottle, for over ten years. After my inevitable divorce at age twenty-eight, I also started smoking, and I told my therapist that it just didn’t fit my self-image.
“I’m drinking martinis every now and then,” I told her, throwing in, “that was my father’s drink of choice, too.”
“What bothers you more?” she asked, “The drinking or the smoking?”
“Oh the smoking,” I said, throwing up a smoke screen even for myself. Denial runs deep.
But I was unsettled that night. I knew on a visceral level that I was slowly killing myself. I was involved in a new relationship with another alcoholic, a new drinking and smoking buddy. We urged each other on, talking night after night about our respective divorces, drowning our sorrows in self-destructive behavior. In the mornings, I went to the bathroom and retched, thinking nothing of the metaphor inherent there.
Finally, I went to an internist to see what the retching was all about. He told me I had something like Alcoholics Syndrome, and mentioned that he had heard good things about Alcoholics Anonymous. He gave me some pills to “take the edge off” when I decided to stop the booze.
“Hello, I have a boyfriend that has a serious drinking problem,” I told the voice at the other end of the line. “I thought maybe you could tell me when you have meetings around the Fitchburg area, and I’ll let him know.” My palms were sweaty; I was sure that they had heard this outright lie before.
That night I went to my first AA meeting. I cried. I couldn’t speak when it came to be my turn, and I went home and finished off my bottle of vodka. But I went back the next day, because I knew it was a way out of the darkness that was enveloping me. I knew I wanted a better life, and I knew that I had gotten myself in so deep, that I needed help crawling back out.
It didn’t happen overnight; I struggled with my sobriety for months before I finally was strong enough to just quit. First, I had to get out of the insidious relationship I was in. Then, I played some mind games with myself. Not wanting to go “cold turkey” and stop both smoking and drinking at the same time, I first tried to stop smoking while allowing myself two drinks at night. But after half a drink, I decided that it was pointless to not smoke when I was drinking. It was all part of the same package. Maybe if I tried to smoke and not drink. But that, to me, was like a martini without gin.
So I finally just did it. All at once, just like that. On April Fool’s Day 1992, I began a new way of living. Living, without the crutch of alcohol. Real living, where I felt the aches and pains of life, along with the joys and exhilaration.
So how were the first ten years?
It seemed like a loaded question. How could I encapsulate all of the emotions and experiences that I have felt after belting down that last drink? To think back is at once painful and exhilarating. To see where I’ve been, and where I am now is both confusing and clear.
Ten years is a long time, but then not. It’s ten years that I may not have lived to see, had I continued sailing into darkness.
Julia Jergensen Edelman © 2004 Chicken Soup for the Soul Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission
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