stories

 

Well it’s been almost a year since I’ve blogged. But in that year, nothing has felt more true than the fact that I need and want to write. So, to get ahead of New Year’s Resolutions, I’m making a commitment to post once a week.  And with that, here’s part one of my story:

 

When I first started trying to stop drinking, it was other people’s stories that resonated with me more than anything else. At first, I read these stories in the privacy of my one-bedroom apartment in Nashville. My sister had recommended Carry On, Warrior by Glennon Doyle, and I remember sitting on my floor bawling—I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Someone else understood. Someone else had been where I was. And that someone else was now the author of the book that I held between my hands.

I want to share my story because the stories are what saved me. The raw, unfiltered words that told someone else’s story started to lift me out of my brokenness. They infused me with a sense of hope that I had long ago lost, they gave me a possibility that I hadn’t seen before.

If any part of my story can have that same effect on someone else, then the story is worth being told.

Alcohol was never supposed to be my poison. I grew up with parents who rarely drank, no one in my extended family exhibited signs of addiction: I didn’t have an uncle who showed up plastered to Christmas dinner or an aunt who was notorious for slipping vodka into her morning orange juice. These scenarios weren’t even in my imagination; I didn’t know of any friends growing up who struggled with alcoholic parents. “Alcoholism,” or what is more appropriately called alcohol use disorder, was nonexistent. It was something that was supposed to stay in the movies, in the dark alleyways that I couldn’t see from inside my ‘normal’ home.

I was the straight-A student in high-school who was a little bit shy, a little reserved, a little too “good.” I didn’t untuck my shirt or wear skirts that failed the dollar-bill-length test, I handed in all my assignments on time, and I could count on one hand the number of times I tried drinking. For the better part of my freshman year in college, I abstained from alcohol because I just didn’t “get it” and because I thought that staying away from it would help me hang on to the high school boy who also claimed he didn’t drink. I tossed my nose up at parties, opting instead to lie on the floor outside my dorm and talk to that boy for hours on end until he started snoring, thinking this was a sign he was still in love with me.

Then, when I found out that boy had more than one girl who he was falling asleep on the phone with night after night, I threw all abandon to the wind and started dipping my toes into the water that was Natty Light and watered-down margaritas.

And I realized that when I drank, I didn’t care so much about that boy, or what hurt felt like. Because I didn’t feel the hurt as deep. I realized that the sensitive, lying-on-the-driveway-wishing-on-falling-stars, seventeen-year-old girl had a different side to her, a rebel, if you will. This rebel side was feisty, confident, funny, outgoing and took shots faster than the frat boys who gave them to her. She was surface, never letting anything scratch deep, never letting anything feel too much again.

I wore the mask of a rebel well. It became easy to hide underneath this facade and push down the old parts of me. I learned how to become a reflection of what I thought the world wanted me to be. I danced through the streets of Broadway, forgetting the parts of me that longed to be the one writing songs and poems, instead listening to someone else play music while I stood on tiptoes to flag down the bartender at whatever honky tonk I was in.

I lived life in a way I thought was fearless. A way I hadn’t known before. It seemed so much easier to me, not having to feel so much all the time. I didn’t waste my wishes on falling stars. I traded driveways for rooftops and the moonlight for the neon signs of bars. I finally knew how to live.

Until all of that stopped working. Because when you have an addiction, sooner or later, the glitter fades, the curtain draws, and it starts to get pretty dark.

Having an addiction feels like building your own prison, living in its walls, and then realizing you’ve had the keys all along, but you don’t know how to use them. Or, if you do figure out how to use them, the minute you unlock the doors and get free, you do the very same thing that got you behind bars in the first place. And you forget again how to use the damn keys. It’s an endless repetition of the same story.

But, if you’re lucky, maybe you read someone else’s story. Maybe you realize that someone else has done what you’ve done, they’ve woken up to texts they don’t remember sending, became the niece that shows up to Christmas dinner plastered, woke up in the backseat of a cab on their first night out in grad school. And maybe you hear how they started wanting something different from life, and they started asking for help, and they started learning about how this addiction thing isn’t something that only lives in movies or dark alley-ways or other people’s homes. It can creep up suddenly or over years, it can stay swept under the rug for ages and then come flying back out when it’s least expected. But it doesn’t have to be the thing that defines you, or the thing that breaks you or the thing that shuts you down. Maybe it becomes the thing that breaks you open, that pushes you to dig deeper, scratch harder, go beyond the surface. Maybe it can become a story that ends up in someone else’s hands when they need it most. And maybe that’s enough.