How Do I Live Through This?
I will never forget the first day of my recovery. The day was beautiful. The sun was shining and there was only a few puffs of white clouds floating in the sky. It was mid June and no matter how wonderful the world outside was, inside of mine it was darker and more frightening than it had ever been.
Two nights prior to this day I had been out with my girlfriend and some of her friends. I was there to not drink and to make sure that she had someone to drive for her. The month before we had agreed that only one of us should drink when we went out to make sure that nothing happened to the other. It was my turn to be the designated driver first. As with all great plans of alcoholics, they changed and things did not work out as they were intended. I started off with a couple of pints of vodka and splashes of soda at my favorite bar before she even picked me up. I said that “I had only had one, and I won’t drink any more tonight.”
When we arrived at the location that she was meeting her work friends, I joined them quietly at the end not feeling like I had anything in common with them. She worked in a place where people dressed up for sales and customer interaction. I was a bartender and punk rocker through and through. So there I sat at the end quietly wanting to not feel like a loser. Of course I am the only one that thought this about me, my own worst enemy. So I turned to the only thing that I knew would take away that uneasy feeling and let me “be myself” in a crowd where I didn’t fit in (looking back this was pretty much anywhere) and Jim Beam was there to help me. A few shots at the bar on my way to the bathroom and I was all good, or so I thought. I had no idea what the night was to present to me. After the first shot there really was no saying no in my vocabulary. The Genie was out of the bottle and I was now only along for the ride.
After several more shots at the bar and the night winding down with the normal drinkers a couple of us headed over to another bar that had late night happy hour and karaoke, how much better could it get? After a few more drinks at this place we realized that it was getting late and had to get home because there was work the next day. We all decided to have on more for the road and that was the last thing I remember until coming to in a hospital room looking down at my girlfriend in a neck collar and bloodied up face. Neither one of us knows what truly happened that night after we left the second bar. Did I drop her? Did she fall? There was no memory at all about what happened. I have only one brief memory of holding her head in my lap and pulling back her hair to wipe the blood off of her face, tears pouring down my face and on to hers as she lay there unconscious. How could I let this happen to her?
I was so drunk and belligerent at the hospital they kicked me out of her room. All I wanted was to be by her side and I could not understand how they would not let her “husband” be in the room with her. I of course was not then, nor am I her husband today. I called her family to let them know of the accident. That did not go over well, as you can expect. I was shunned and cast aside as a pariah, like I had done this to her on purpose.
The last interaction that I had with my girlfriend was when I was able to sneak in to her room several hours later, after the security guards and police were sure I was no longer at the hospital. The last thing I said to her was that I would never drink again and then I asked her to squeeze my hand if she still loved me. She squeezed my hand but looked at me with eyes that said “I HATE YOU!” I left the hospital believing that I would never see her again.
The pian in my chest and the loss that I felt in my heart was unbearable. I couldn’t imagine myself gone on without her. Mind you, she never spoke a word to me, all of these things in my head were exactly that, in MY head. How could I have let her down like that? How come I could not do what I said I would do? How was it that this time I was not in control of the situation and able to be helpful to her? Never before was this the case. always remember being the one that was in control when shit went wrong. I was the one that got us out of the situation. I was the one that sobered up immediately and knew what to do. After all, my father was a fireman and saved lives and so was my grandfather. It is what I am supposed to be, the on that rescues everyone win things go bad. That I had lost this when the person I needed most needed me was something I could not live with.
How does one get rid of these feelings and pain when you have not seen the light that recovery can bring? Like the alcoholic that I am, I went to the bar, after all I was still drunk from the night before. At this point I was as broken as I thought i ever could be. Why did anything I did matter now? I did not have all of the rent, I had lost my job the week before, I had lost everything. What did I have left to live for?
I have no idea how many shots of Potter’s Whiskey I had at the corner bar. The feeling of that burn as the worst whiskey ever made goes down your throat was somehow soothing to man like me, feeling the way I felt, knowing that no one cared about me, least of all me. Then the butterscotch after taste rolls in. “This really isn’t so bad” I think to myself. I can just keep drinking today as long as I can in the hopes that I never wake up. My roommate is out of town. I am estranged from my family. There is only me in this world now and no one will be there to save me or miss me. If only I can drink enough.
The next morning I came to in my room. Fully clothed on top of my bed with the covers on the floor. “Shit,” I thought, “I’m still alive.” Now I’m gonna actually have to put in the effort to dying. I stepped outside the back door of my room on to the back deck and had a sorrowful pull of my cigarette. “How was I going to do this?” I thought to myself as I felt the smoke enter my lungs, the nicotine rush to my head. With the stagnant taste of cheap whiskey and cigarettes from the night before growing like fur on my tongue only to be amplified by the smoke from every drag, I made plans.
This is where the tricky part comes in. I couldn’t think of a way to kill myself that would not directly affect my roommate. She was kind to me and took me in when My ex-wife kicked me out. I had no where to go and she saved me from the street. This would not have been the first time I was homeless, and looking back I wonder why that did not make me stop. I couldn’t hang myself, she wouldn’t be back for another week or so and it wouldn’t be fair to her to have to come home to that. Nor would it have been fair to her to come home to my brains splattered all over her wall. Funny how things like fairness to others came to my mind as I contemplated the permanent solution to my existence. I did’t have a car so I couldn’t just drive out to the forest and just disappear. I didn’t really have the courage to jump off of anything, although that would not necessarily have done what I wanted it to do. What a horrible way to live, to have tried and failed at killing yourself only to live with the pain still there and new physical problems compounded on top of that. How could you recover from something like that when you didn’t want to be there in the first place, why would you recover? I am left here because I am a coward and could not find a way to finally be relieved of the hurt and loneliness, the emptiness that was in my soul.
I made it through that day and now as I look back, I do not see the coward I once did. I see that there was something greater than me keeping me from not being here for others. I certainly see that something amazing was working in my life for me without me knowing it.
This is where the recovery began for me. Today I am grateful that I am here and able to share it without tears streaming down my face, without a soul so heavy from the guilt I carried around for most of my life. I am sharing here, as I go through the journals of my recovery so that I can remember what it was like, what I did and why I love what my life is now.
~ Gorilla in the Meeting
A grateful alcoholic