What's Your Story? Submitted Stories
Starting Early
While I have few memories of my childhood, I clearly remember being given brandy around the age of five for a cough, to help me sleep. I can still remember vividly the warmth of that brandy entering my system, the taste of it, the smell, and the “wooziness” I felt.
It is difficult to write a story that spans over twenty years. I am a thirty-eight year old recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I have four years and four months sober. The emotional pain, the turmoil, the suicide attempts, and the destruction I caused to my family and my son. The worry that I caused to family and myself. The danger I put myself in and others – driving drunk, going off with strangers to dangerous places, etc. Waking up each day feeling worthless and hopeless. Having people tell you to suck it up, to just quit, that if you loved them, you would stop…you hear, but you know they don’t get it. If you quit, you die. If you continue, you die and you just don’t care.
Alcoholism runs rampant in my family history, but I did not find that out until much later in my life. I was extremely shy as a child. I was small, wore glasses, had scraggly hair, and horrible teeth. So ugly, I was cute, I like to say. I was daddy’s little girl and the fourth of five children in a Catholic family. My parents separated over and over and finally divorced when I was about the age of eleven. I spent quite a bit of time alone, locked in my room, writing poetry, and listening to music. Music was my escape and writing was the only way I knew how to express myself.
I entered high school and that is when I became friends with someone that I knew went to high school parties and had many friends. I finally asked this friend, through a note passed in class, if I could go to a party with her and her friends. At that party I had my first taste of beer and that was the moment of my transformation and the beginning of the isolation.
When I was about fifteen, I went to a party with my father and my sister – it was a social function for my father’s firm. Obviously, I was underage, but any glass of alcohol that was left on the table, I drank. This was my first drunk, first blackout, first throwing up, and first passing out of many more to come. Alcohol became my new escape and was the best thing to happen to me. I was no longer that shy awkward little girl – I lost the shyness and inhibition and my life spun out of control. My allergic reaction to alcohol was apparent from the get go. I broke out in rashes with hard liquor. I blacked out with each drunk, which at the time I thought was normal. I thought everyone blacked out. I thought everyone put themselves into dangerous situations. Soon, after drinking, I began smoking pot and fell in love with it.
At 17, I entered the world of cocaine. At first, I got my cocaine from someone I knew and before long I was dealing for him. Unfortunately, I did not do well selling as I was doing all the cocaine myself and soon I was into this dealer for thousands of dollars. I had to leave the area since there was no way I could pay him. I moved to Los Angeles with my sister. I continued to drink, continued to get in dangerous situations, continued to become uglier and uglier in my different states of drunkenness. Everyone knew I was an alcoholic – especially my Mom. I did not care. I did not care about anything, but getting to that next drunk. I could work, but basically I could not function without alcohol. Three suicide attempts, one night in jail, multiple hospital and/or detox stays, several quitting attempts, and one 30-day treatment program are all a part of my story.
It is difficult to write words that explain the fear you put into your family’s hearts, those close enough to see you slowly killing yourself and not being able to do anything to help, but watch and pray. Or how do you describe hiding bottle after bottle in closets and cabinets, switching from white wine to red wine and vodka because it’s easier to hide, and does not have to be refrigerated; or how you turn over your credit cards and most of the cash you have to make your loved ones think you won’t get anymore alcohol, making sure to always keep your I.D. and at least $5.00 in cash to get a cheap bottle of vodka to stop the shakes and the sweating; how you allow your loved ones to find a half empty bottle of your stash so they feel better throwing it out only to find out later you had more and more hidden; how your family and loved ones plan to take your child away or to throw you out on the street, and how you just do not care about any of that because you can’t; finally, how can you describe the complete hopelessness when you find yourself waking up from a blackout drunk at 5 am and heading outside to your front porch with a box cutter in your hands planning on slitting your wrists to stop the pain because the alcohol and drugs just are not doing the trick any longer.
You have to live through it or have lost someone to truly know or to understand. We addicts and alcoholics understand one another. We understand how manipulative and how selfish we are. We understand the pain of not wanting to stop, but REALLY wanting to stop…we understand the physical addiction that occurs. How your body betrays you when your mind tells you and wants to quit so badly, but your body needs it, so you can’t. We understand that even through sobriety, facing ourselves and finally telling ourselves the truth, it is so excruciatingly painful that to stay sober is a full-time job. Many of us do not make it. We understand how the desire to drink can stay with us for a lifetime and each day, we have to fight and be vigilant in the fight. We are unable to ever forget that we are alcoholics and addicts. We understand there is hope in helping one another and in this understanding, in sharing our stories, in one day at a time, and in support and compassion. It’s a disease, not a choice.
Jane S., Virginia © 2006 The Brent Shapiro Foundation for Drug Awareness.
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