A cold wind

" A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things."-- George R.R. Martin

Winter snapshots from my past:

I sat on a log on the shore, my numb fingers feeling oddly separate from me as I watched them lacing up my skates.  My breath rose like smoke in front of my eyes, as I peered over the top of my scratchy scarf. In the moonlight, the lake glistened and stretched ahead into the dark for miles. The frozen ripples of waves near the shore were bumpy under my skates as I headed out towards the smooth center, pulling my thick mittens back onto my cold fingers.  There was no sound except the scraping of my skate blades, the occasional rustle of trees in the circling darkness around the glow of the lake. Now and again I would hear the groaning echoes of the ice as it would shift and sing and moan beneath me, reminding me of ancient whales singing somewhere in another frozen place.  The moon shifting slowly overhead, my leg muscles burning as I skated, racing ever onward to the darkened shore of the other side. I spent countless weekend hours like this. I never thought to complain about the cold. My thoughts focused only on the smooth gleaming ice beneath me, the speed, the way the air moved in and out of my lungs, stinging wind on my face. I was temporarily invisible, in a lonely place of cold and dark but still buoyed up by the magic of the moon, the music of the ice.

And another...

My boots crunched in the frozen deep snow along a half-mile perimeter of barbed wire. I had my M-16 at the ready, my black Army-issued balaclava scratching my face where my breath froze into crystals. The temperature hovered right around 2 degrees. My Tyvek jacket and fleece socks were fighting a losing battle against the bone-chilling cold.   The icy darkness stretched out along the wire, yet strangely lit from beneath by the deep snow. My voice sounded small, speaking into my hand-held radio, "Tower 6 moving right".  I could hear a few other staticky voices checking in as re-assurance we were not all out there alone in the frozen bleak. I reached the outer limits of the wire,  then crunched the other direction for another half a mile.  I repeated this trek every two hours as part of Guard Duty on Comanche Base in the middle of Bosnia-Herzegovina long ago.  I thought of fellow soldiers sleeping warm and safely in their bunks as I trudged along for a 12-hour shift in the inky darkness of night. The long hours of walking, freezing then re-thawing in my tower, lost in thoughts and lulled into some kind of other-world with my isolation and the frozen dark and the hypnotizing white all around.  Until one night there was someone on the other side of the wire. He appeared suddenly, like a phantom out from between snow-laden pine boughs, his dog at his knee, his shotgun held over his arm.  I froze.  Breathless.  And so did he.  Our eyes met and held for a full count of ten. Then he raised his hand and saluted me, turned and walked back into the white pines, the branches swaying slightly in the cold wind. I rubbed my eyes wondering if I'd somehow been dreaming.

I can think of a thousand stories of winter, and I could wax poetic forever about my love of snow, the way it covers and muffles everything, the beauty of it, the incredible wonder of little footprints, yet for as long as I can remember I have always hated this time of year. The space after Christmas when hard winter settles in for real, when spring and the promise of bursting green buds and life and hope seem endlessly far away. It's the winter blahs, when it's bleak and mud or bleak and dirty snow and the magic seems to have drained out of me and it's all cabin fever and dry skin and sniffly noses and no number of candles I light or hot cups of tea I drink seem to be able to penetrate the cold gloom that arises from deep within me. I hate it. Seasonal affective disorder. Such a dumb name for something so hard to describe. Joy Vampire? Fleece and angst-itis?

This last half of my second sober year has been rough.  I told someone the other day that it's basically kicking my ass. Since right before the holidays, I've been dealing with a sudden identity crisis due to a major cut back of my hours at work, (as in zero hours).  A major source of my sense of self, and also the source of a lot of trauma has basically been ripped away.  I feel almost like I'm in a second adolescence where I get to decide who or what I want to be, minus the old labels. Of course, this crisis occurs at the time when my usual high energy almost always seasonally ebbs, leaving me bone tired, in a place where no amount of sleep seems to put a dent in my heavy weariness. It also comes at the worst possible time from a realistic, financial standpoint as I struggle not to panic and visions of ramen noodles and malnourished kids and burly car repo types dance in my head.

These days self-care is summed up by actually changing out of my flannel cat jammie pants and making the effort to shower, going to the closet to get a clean fluffy white towel instead of just grabbing my daughter's hooded duck towel that is hanging on the back of our bathroom door. I put on jeans and a plain sweatshirt, feeling like some kind of colorless bird. I swipe a brush through my hair and put on some tinted moisturizer to cover my dark eye circles, and I try to smile while all the while that voice is there. The constant underlying voice that maybe all people who struggle with depression or addiction fight against. It whispers underneath it all as I pour cereal into bowls, brew coffee, drive kids places and read them stories, struggle through math homework, matching socks, wiping fingerprints off mirrors. It's there at the end of the day when I crumble into bed, and pull the duvet over my head and feel the comforting weight of a cat curl up in the place behind my knees and pray for oblivion and sweet sleep.  Its there when I answer the thousandth question of the day, through the endless litany of Mom, Mama, Mom, Mommy, the clearing up of yet another mess, the cycle of emptying and loading the dishwasher, the trudging up and down the stairs with the endlessly reproducing loads of laundry. It stalks me down the crowded aisle of the supermarket as I pick up bananas and whole grain bread and feel my eyes stinging in the cold as I load the plastic carrier bags into the back of my sensible minivan. It is there as I scroll social media and try not to compare my rumply insides with the perfect shiny outsides of countless "friends." It fades a little when I head out the door with a warm hat on and music in my ears, trying to move my body in search of those endorphins I am so sorely lacking.  It's there as I take my meds, drink another glass of water and remind myself that this too shall pass.

It's a terrible voice, the voice of depression.  I used to drink to drown it out, if not temporarily, for it always returned with more fuel every time I couldn't drink "successfully". The endless loop of old tapes. what did you think would happen when you always settle?  you are nothing special. you never have been. foolish girl thinking you deserve anything at all. everyone would be better off without you.  you're a fraud. everyone would walk away if they knew how stupid you really are. you are just taking up space. what is the point of you? it's so easy to think maybe I'm an illness or your "addiction" but what if I'm the only one telling you the truth? people tell you that you have a gift but really, being a storyteller is just a fancy way of saying you are a good liar. keep moving, because the emptiness is so staggering that you will fall apart if you truly looked at it. there is something wrong with you. what have you ever done that is worth anything? nothing would change if you disappeared. who are you without all your stories and lies? you are weak. you don't deserve better. your children really deserve better than you.

It's sickening. I want to run from that voice, scared to believe it might be right. It feels like it may be right. But it isn't.

I heard the phrase "emotional sherpa" the other day and found it to be the perfect description for what I'm feeling lately about the past, my role as recorder and storyteller and the repository of all the memories for my family, for myself.   The roles and labels I have clung to that need to be re-thought in light of this new me, the sober me. The baggage that I drag, the memories and the old worn-out narratives about me, my life, my mistakes. It falls in on me when I slow down and things are dark and quiet.  It's time to drop the baggage.  I only want to move forward carrying what serves me.  But I'm a slow learner. For me, it tends to be relinquishing inch by inch.  I'm internalizing how to talk back to that voice, how to replace those old tapes with new ones. To remember that feelings are just that. They aren't facts. I will get through this winter. And the next and the next.  Because underneath all of my stories, there is a core of steel that has never bent.  It's the part of me that has survived things I never should have. In recovery, I'm making a new me, forged around that central core, that spark of truth.  But I'm not doing it alone.

Camus said it so well: "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.  And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger--something better, pushing right back."

So, if you are struggling with your own winter of discontent, with deep sadness or shifting of roles, or wanting to isolate, or even somehow deeply mourning that old carefree you with pint in hand, the you of BEFORE, I want to remind you that you aren't alone.  The community of friends in recovery who drag us out of ourselves, challenge our assumptions, call us on our dramatic, overwrought bullshit.. they are part of the invincible summer. One of the gifts of surrender. A roadmap for when we get lost in our own heads and thoughts. So I challenge you: even if you are in an enforced hibernation due to mother nature being off her meds... if like me, some days it all feels dull and muffled and endlessly blah. Reach out. Talk about it. Tell the truth about where you are. You may be overwhelmed by the number of "me toos".  Because you are NOT the only one. Addiction wants you to believe that you are terminally unique, the only one suffering as you are. But you aren't. We recover.  We move on. We learn new things, and even if we slip down the slope a little and even fall off entirely, that's not the end of the story.  Not by a longshot. 

Spring is coming. 

Early June. Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

A thick fog was hovering in almost perfect stillness over the water. I could see nothing through the grey, yet I could hear waves crashing onto the unseen rocks. The air was cold and I shivered in my sweatshirt clutching my "regular" Dunkin Donuts coffee in one hand while carrying a net and a bucket in the other. In between odd jobs painting houses and picking up shifts at the local ER as a medical assistant, I had scraped together enough tuition money to enroll in a Summer Marine Institute program at my college. I was working on a pre-med degree and had chosen a field course since I had always learned better outside of a traditional classroom.  It was taught by Dr. A, a tiny slip of a woman with wild curly grey hair and the balance of a mountain goat. I'm not exactly sure how old she was since she had the tan, weathered skin of someone who has spent their entire life outdoors and in my 19 year old foolishness, I of course thought that anyone over 30 was ancient.  I think she was in her late 70s, yet none of us could keep up with her as she leapt with ease up huge rocks and around slippery tide pools, never falling or slipping in masses of seaweed and unflagging in her enthusiasm for finding the perfect specimen.  She was an expert on all types of North Atlantic sea life, both animal and vegetable, and she was hell bent on sharing her passion with her students.  It was our second day out collecting specimens and breathing that particular loamy, salty fishy smell that is unique to the North Shore.  Later that morning I sat sketching periwinkles and fucus vesiculosis (aka bladderwrack) in my somewhat damp notebook, looking at rocks covered in layers of barnacles, admiring how the waves had cut smooth channels as it had flowed off in foamy rivers, wave after wave, year after year.  She noticed me looking at them and said quietly, almost to both of us, "water is the strongest force on earth and it's the universal solvent. All it needs is time."

When she said that,  I was thinking in terms of literality, thinking how that couldn't be true- that it could never dissolve oil simply because of the properties of covalent and non-covalent bonds. And it's only now, twenty five years later that I think I understand what she meant about time and solvents. I knew she had been widowed at a young age, and was always out on the water, or in the water.  In that phase of life in my own self-centered way I didn't really understand anything yet.  She would often wax poetic about the therapeutic properties of sea water and tears; words I remember now.  She was talking about coping with pain and the unexpected. She was living her passion and healing herself at the same time, but I was blind to that.


She spoke about how water moves through the air, the ground, even inside our own cells and bodies and takes along chemicals, minerals and nutrients. It is part of us, around us, in us, flows through us.  It's a wondrous and mysterious force. Like time.


The summer I spent lugging buckets of fish and urchins and learning the scientific names of snails, fish, plants and birds was one where I was deeply lost.  I was incredibly lonely, yet the desolate beaches of Cape Ann and Plum Island appealed to my desire to be invisible, to be lost in a landscape that was bigger than the girl I had become. The hefty athlete's appetite that had been no problem in high school was suddenly a bad fit for my new sedentary life as I started college and worked and focused on studying.   I ballooned.  By that summer, I felt like I took up too much space. I had an anorexic roommate who was shrinking and dying while I exercised and ate compulsively. I was alarmed at her decline, but unable to stop my own descent into an eating disorder.  The voices that told me I wasn't good enough, too soft, too weak, ugly, unworthy were too loud. I would tell myself I was a failure because I lacked the discipline to starve myself like she could.  I wasn't the tiny fragile ethereal blonds that were the style of the times. I was a chubby girl with a round face and unflattering hair cut hiding in baggy clothes, hating myself so much. I longed for attention from the boys around me, but none of them noticed me.  I thought it was crazy that I could be so big and unseen at the same time.

I would starve myself, then crack and binge eat and then throw up and exercise compulsively for hours and hours, always in the dark, where no one could see me restlessly circling my campus for mile after mile driven by a desire to transform and to return to my old athletic self but unable to curb the insatiable hunger that had grown unmanageable .  Food numbed me and the rush and the exhaustion of the binge and the purge left me outside of myself for just a few moments. It was an act of violence against myself and when it was over, when I felt empty and light and spent, I would swear  that it would be the last time. I would be normal. I would get it together and stop.  I was stuck in an endless cycle that seemed to have no exit. I was spinning and going nowhere. But sitting on those beaches, with my feet in ice cold tidal pools, looking for elusive specimens to catch or draw in my notebook, I felt almost ok. The ocean made me feel safe as I gazed out at its vast wild. There was a big change coming.

Never in my fantasies was I ever me. I was always another person. Someone totally different. My outsides never matched how I felt on the inside. So I reinvented.  I became chameleon-like to see if I could be acceptable. I took on whatever form I thought would make me feel less "other". I didn't change for myself. I had no idea who that was. I just knew I was weak and fat and too sensitive. I  knew that my dreams were never going to come true unless I changed into someone else completely.  And with that first burning sip of alcohol, I found the key.  I finally lost the weight because now I had a new self destructive cycle.  I got edgier, harder, stronger, leaner, faster.  And with each drink, I imagined that I was finally the self I wanted to be. I had the courage to behave the way I felt on the inside. Brave, brash, not caring what others thought. Fearless, sexy, like I could have all the things I had watched everyone else getting for years while I stood on the sidelines waiting like a good girl.  I still had some struggles with food and  body image but I had my new thing. The thing that made me feel ok. It was all ok once I had those first sips and felt it rush through my blood like a warmth that made me forget.  And it went that way for years. Until the absolute pain of not having the insides match the outside returned in a different way.  Until my life was consumed by shame and the cognitive dissonance that can only result when you live in a way that is actually daily flirting with death.

When I was first struggling to get sober or stay sober for more than a few patched-together hours or days in a row, I had one central idea:  if I could just get sober, it would solve everything. Just stop drinking. It would be like water... dissolve all the messiness and the problems I drank over like some kind of magic. The ultimate cleanse.

Only it wasn't. It was more like a magnifying lens on my life. Too bright, too loud, too messy, too much was the theme during those initial raw months.  I simply couldn't imagine being at peace in my own head, inside a body that felt like it's skin was on inside out. Nerve endings screaming, brain scattered to the winds. I could not sit still. It was nothing like I had imagined.

I read somewhere that growing up means putting aside consoling fantasies.  For me, that meant setting aside the notion that I could ever drink normally. And for a while, at the start of sobriety the unknown "solution" of getting sober was another sort fantasy. I thought if I could just get that one thing right then everything that was wrong, or broken or unrecognizable about myself after so many years of cumulative damage would be all better. The universal solvent. Like Dr A's water. A force that would sweep away and wear down and smooth out the rough edges. That has been both true and not true.

These last eighteen months of sobriety  I've been doing the work of sifting through all the history and the wreckage. I unearthed about twenty old journals from a musty box in my basement.  I sat down and read my own voice writing about the paths I chose. I read the pain and the aimless reach for meaning.  I read the words of the girl I was, see how my voice changed once alcohol became part of me. How that voice changed even more when I deviated from the path everyone expected and instead became a soldier and then an ER nurse.  It's all there in green ink in my tiny neat hand writing... like a road map to self-destruction. I can read how I pushed harder and went farther and faster, yet underneath there was still that same desperation of the chubby girl just wanting to fit in, except now I "knew" that weakness was unacceptable and hid all of my fear behind mirrored aviators with a BDU cap pulled low or under my calm exterior as I handled another horrific injury at work where only I knew that my hands were shaking.  I wrote about it all: how I learned to carefully separate my own ambitions from the attention of men as I used them the way I had felt used. Underneath my layers of armor I hid how I never felt good enough or like I deserved any kindness. I set out to be tougher than anyone, would work harder, go faster and faster trying to outrun those old voices. With each trauma, I told myself not to be weak and added to my layers of armor. The scars thickened and alcohol came along for the ride, clouding my judgement and telling me the lie that I wasn't terrified and small on the inside.   Its not a great story.  I see so many places where I could have gone a different way.  I could have leaned into kindness or taken a softer, easier path than I did. But I'm making peace with it.

I realize that once again I am reinventing myself, because there is no going back to who I was "before."  Because in looking at my story, I don't think I had any idea who that was to begin with. I'm just now finding out who I am.  Without labels or mood altering substances. Just myself.  Seems a little late to be getting to know her, particularly when I've been so unkind to her all these years. But that's what I'm doing, every day, slowly. It feels like a gift. And I'm no longer afraid.

I'm learning to replace self-destruction with self care. Accepting soft. Allowing vulnerability and being small.  I'm not just giving kindness to others until the well is dry in some desperate bid for worth, or doing senseless things just to feel "ok".   I don't have to prove anything.  I practice letting my emotions and thoughts ebb and flow and swirl like water, cleaning out things and bringing in new ones like tides.

I am deliberately writing a new life. And I bring all the cumulative lessons and scars and false starts and healing that is happening slowly in layers and circles. I don't know the ending yet.

But I know that I like this story.

Be still

I am a very restless person. I loathe sitting for more than five minutes at time.  I pace when I think.  I'm a toe-tapper, knee jiggler, and had the mama "rock and sway" stance down perfectly when my kids were fussy babies fighting their own stillness.  I tend to be most comfortable when in motion.  Even as a small child, my mother would take one look at me standing on the stoop with my wild energy and say "twenty laps around the house before you come in." And I'd come back all out of breath and sweaty with my grubby little face and she'd look carefully into my eyes, measuring and sometimes she'd pull back the squeaky screen door to let me in and other times she'd say "ten more laps?" and off I'd go with my wild strawberry hair flying behind me and my bare feet pounding the dirt.  I vividly remember thinking that my energy was some foreign thing to her.  My mother is an artist.  Which means she sits for hours, painstakingly creating; drawing and painting.  She escapes and manages her lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression through creative expression.  As children we would watch her in deep concentration, watch the rhythmic motion of her pencils, hear the sounds they made scratching on fine drawing paper, smell the tang of linseed and oil paints, note the tilt of her head as she considered a blank canvas and we knew to let her be. She would spend hours in her studio and then emerge blinking like she was disoriented to the fact that it was daylight and she was a mom when we asked for snacks or help with homework.  She was always a little other-worldly and I felt she never quite knew what to do with my too much, too loud, too high wild child ways.

Even when I am still, my mind is going a thousand miles per hour.  Some would call this a manic defense. Not ever slowing down enough to consider the reason for the constant motion. I have been a blur for most of my adult life.  I walk fast, talk fast, think fast, drive fast.  So the concept of stillness, of sitting IN something is incredibly foreign.  And its' been like lowering yourself into a too-hot bath this past year. First one toe, then one foot, one knee, then the other side, then your bum, then your waist until all of you is submerged and you can't tell if you are burning or freezing, just that you are uncomfortable and then you... aren't. I guess that's the best metaphor I can come up with for early sobriety. At first it's unthinkable but then you get used to it and then it even starts to feel comfy.

I am good with not drinking.  I am lucky enough that the cravings have passed. I am comfortable stating that I am a non-drinker, and for the most part am honest when people ask me why. I kind of laugh and say "well, it tried to kill me" and when pressed am able to articulate why drinking became such a problem with me and why now I don't drink anymore.  And I'm clear about the fact that I'm BETTER not drinking.

But this stillness thing.. the idea of REST.  I still struggle mightily with it.

A few weeks ago I had some unexpected down time when my oldest came down with a whopping case of the flu. All of my productive plans for the week, all my workouts that keep my crazy at bay were cancelled as I cared for my very sick girl. I was physically tired but feeling wired. The enforced rest, and confinement in the house really hit me hard.  I got low.  Low low low like apple bottom jeans boots with the furrrr low.  I started having suicidal thoughts, dark hopeless thoughts like I hadn't had since before I quit drinking.  And I kind of stood on the edge of a deep, dark chasm and thought, "oh."  That's what I've been avoiding all this time.  Deep thoughts of worthlessness, failures, fear, regrets, bad memories. All the things I drank over and under and through and kept at bay by always moving, moving, moving.  I got a sudden sense that THIS is what the next year of sobriety is going to  be about.. moving forward from all of the things that lie behind. Making peace with them. Acceptance.

Running has been like a spiritual practice this past year. I've come to find that I do my best thinking when I'm in motion, and in the process I've worn out three pairs of sneakers.  While running and walking, I've thought through a lot of the past five years; trying to understand how my drinking got to the very dark place it took me.  I've dissected a lot of the whys, the patterns, the things that I need to work on.  At the urging of several sober friends, I've been attempting here and there to meditate. It's probably something I need to do more, since being so still in body or mind is a challenge.  I've been doing a lot napping, aka"horizontal life pauses" and giving myself permission to slow down and even stop. Which is kind of huge. And I need to do it more.

One big question I've been pondering is whether I necessarily need to go back and try to do the post-mortem.  Do I really need to re-live every crushing rejection, re-visit every time I added a layer of armor to my considerable wall, explore every bad choice? Every trauma, every loss? Every pebble that paved the road to my struggles with addiction. Is that necessary? It's an honest question. And I'm open to opinions and thoughts from people further along than me.

Is it ok to close the chapter on it, forgive myself, and stop this endless attempt to "get back to who I was before the alcohol changed me"?  I hear that a lot in the recovery community-- phrases like "the person I was meant to be," "the innocent me", "the un-jaded version of me". I don't think there's any going backwards.  I am who I am because of the things that I have been through, including the considerable damage I inflicted on myself and those around me from my drinking.  But go back? Impossible. I am irrevocably changed, for better or for worse by that self-violence.  I can only move forward. Challenge the lies.  Find new coping. Share the darkness with others when it rolls in like a fog over the mountain. Allow my scars to teach others who may be struggling with a similar battle.

It occurs to me that what I am longing for, and what I possibly fear I won't find in all my restlessness is Peace. When I look at nature and the created world, I have a deep sense that we as humans were also created for rhythms in life-- delight and joy and not just suffering and pain.  Yet so much of our culture, our accepted rhythms mean that we do things just for the sake of doing them.  Because we "should", or just because we "can". And we feel the weight that comes when we don't rest and re-charge because we were created for that as well.

So, my goal for the next few months is to learn to slow down. To embrace the idea of Sabbath or holy rest. The Hebrew word Sabat means " to stop, to cease, or to keep."  And it doesn't have to be the traditional Saturday or Sunday sabbath. It can be a short pause, with intention. Whenever it's needed or even better, before it's needed. With cognitive restructuring we are taught to ask "is this true?" when confronted with a feeling. I still have the relentless drill sergeant in my head, pushing me to do more, be more, tackle more, more more more... it doesn't stop to ask why. The same lack of moderation that led me to drink lakes of booze is still underlying and it needs to go.

I've said no to a lot of things and made some big changes to support my new sober life and so in year two I want to focus on adding things. Adding the PAUSE button to my manic life. Adding more rest.

I want to learn to Be Still.

Dispatch from the laundry room

Summer has been busy, finding me home with my three kids and trying to balance life while working nights in the ER. I've had this blog post bobbing around in my mind the last few weeks, like an iceberg gradually adding mass underneath the calm surface. And so today is the day I'm giving it life. Or trying to.

I remember waking up, not all that long ago, sitting on the side of my bed and wondering if I was actively dying.  Chest tight, hard to catch my breath, waves of nausea. Dry mouth and bloodshot eyes. My soul hurt. All I could think about was when it was going to be time to drink again. My future only went that far. It hurt too much to think farther than that and if I could just get that first sip, the rest would fade away. Or I hoped it would.

Now, I wake up and sit on the side of my bed in the early hours and take an inventory. Weird twinge in my back from sleeping like a rock for eight consecutive hours, slightly sore muscles from yesterday's run.  Notice my hungry belly; anticipate the first sip of dark, rich coffee. I think ahead to the next few weeks of being able to wake up lazy this way instead of to the clamoring alarm that shouts at me to get up and get going, move move move, in school-year mode.

With the end of summer looming, I have a million things I could be doing to be getting ready for back to school. Errands to run, projects around the house, weeds to pull.  Actual school supply shopping. New sneakers for feet that have undoubtedly grown but are still enjoying being barefoot and filthy. But I'm not doing any of those things.  Mostly, I'm just being a mom.  And doing a ton of laundry.

Which brings me to the haiku I composed last night at 1 am while folding another giant load as I stayed up ridiculously late watching the Olympics:

The pile grows higher
Forget, restart endlessly
Wash, fold forever.

I'm not sure if it is the fact that my kids spend a lot of time outdoors or if they are just extra grubby or can't eat a meal without half of it landing in their laps, but I have been doing a ton of laundry this summer.  And while I sit there watching it spinning in the last few minutes before I transfer it to the dryer, I appreciate the fact that I'm actually getting time to myself in the cool basement (with some kind of uncool wolf spiders but lets forget that for now) and I can take a moment to reflect on sobriety. Today marks 161 days of continuous non-drinking. Consecutive days where I have been retraining my brain to realize that just because an emotion surfaces, that's not a cue to drink.  I've done this thousands of times in the last five months.  And you know what? My slobbery brain is learning that an emotion is just that: not a ringing bell telling me to go pour a drink and numb out.  Honestly, when confronted with tough things lately, I actually think how to handle it, which is probably what people have been doing for thousands of years without having to blog about it but oh well, I'm a slow learner.  These days a drink is about 29th on my list of things that will "fix" or get me through the next few minutes, hours, days... And that is the miracle of sobriety in a nutshell. I couldn't have imagined even five seconds at the beginning where I wasn't constantly thinking about drinking.  And now some whole entire days pass where I haven't thought once about drinking. I'm busy living. And folding laundry.

But, all this laundry has me thinking about how early sobriety is a lot like a heavy duty wash cycle. You dive in, not knowing what to expect, and the water starts rising and you think "ok. I can do this. I'm a little damp but I'm floating." Then the agitating part starts; you spin and churn and can't tell what side is up and start getting water up your nose and you are being blinded by soapsuds that sting and burn and it just all feels like too much and all you can think about is just climbing the hell out of the washer and getting back to your regular dirty, smelly and worn state. It doesn't seem worth it when you keep spinning and getting pushed down over and over and you aren't sure when it will end.

Well, I can tell you that eventually it stops. The spinning dies down, the motor cools and you are lying there, wet and wrung out... but clean.  It's quiet. You made it. For me that phase was right at about 80 days without alcohol.  At that point, I thought, hmm... maybe I'm ready to try the dryer now,  (the real work of sobriety) and you begin to feel warm on the inside. You start glowing literally and metaphorically.  Your healing brain starts to smooth out the rumpled and wrinkly parts. And then, almost without realizing it, you start thinking about what it might be like to really go the distance and withstand the heat of the iron and get your soul and body in tip top shape.  And some days this seems like a lot of work and other days it comes easily. Depends on the day.

Still with me on this metaphor? Well, if you drink during the early period where you are sloshing around... It's like you open the lid on the washer mid-cycle and dump a gallon of mud in.  Add a few greasy wrenches, some musty sneakers and a bag of rocks and then close the lid and let the cycle finish.  Not only are you not clean at the end, but you are beat up and filthy and think you never want to go through that again because you feel worse than when you started. There is nothing appealing about even thinking about climbing back in for a do-over.  That was me for years.

Consecutive days.  That's the key to allowing your brain time to reset and heal.  Not three days here, eleven days there, drink and then start over.  That's just some kind of awful torture where you leave your brain more confused than when it started.  It takes full commitment to putting as much distance between the drinking and the new you. And that can be done even when you have kids climbing all over you, a job, a nutty husband and a busy life. It just means taking each decision as it comes. Being all in. Declaring deep down with complete conviction that booze just isn't an option anymore. Eventually your brain gets the message. And when it does, it's pretty great.

I had a moment at work the other week when a patient came in with a dislocated jaw.  We were kind enough to put it back and I was giving her discharge instructions and noticing how uncomfortable she was and she sadly told me she was disappointed because the next day was her birthday.  And I said "well, looks like a smoothie with a candle in it for you."  And she snorted and said through her giant ice pack: " More like a bucket of margaritas with a straw."  And BLAM. That was it, the moment I realized that I would have said the same thing five months ago and it hadn't even crossed my mind that drinking was an option in that scenario.  And I got kind of ridiculously giddy and had to share it with some sober friends.  Perhaps that's how normies feel. I will never know because I'm not one. But still, it goes to show that the brain CAN be re-wired. We can move from our obsession with booze to being at peace. And that was something I could not have even imagined when I first quit.

My early attempts at re-training my brain made me feel about as competent as the Filipino Olympic diving team.  (If you are early to sobriety and suffering from insomnia like I did, I highly recommend you google this. Just because. You're welcome)  The beginning days of sobriety where you are being forced to feel your actual feelings, sit with your unfiltered, raw thoughts is excruciating.  It's like being stuck in permanent fight or flight, jangly nerves and overload when you are forced to plug in for the first time, possibly ever.  I read a research study where subjects chose to be subjected to ten minutes of electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for ten minutes.  That's our numb-out, tune-out, check out world for you.  And for alcoholics, it's probably worse since we were the masters at not feeling anything.  But adding day after day, moment after moment, where drinking isn't an option, my synapses are stretching and re-wiring. I can sit in a feeling and then it passes.  I can examine an unpleasant memory and not fall to pieces.  And that is so encouraging.  I am finally becoming one of those people I used to look up to... the ones further up the mountains who kept shouting down through the clouds: "It gets better! Keep going! The view up here is incredible." Because it really is.

So, we have two weeks left before my minions return to school.  Everywhere I go, I get "the look" (which is half bemusement and half relief it's not them) as people survey my three spirited kids and say "I bet you are really ready for them to go back."  And I kind of smile wistfully and say "not really."  Because part of me is.  It's been a long summer of sobriety and motherhood.  Ups and downs and false starts.  But I've also been fully engaged for the first time in years and so I'm not quite ready to let go of them, and go back to only seeing them in the afternoons when they've given their best to their teacher and friends and have only dregs of crankiness and homework resistance left for me. Which is ok. I am working to accept that I wasted so many years either giving them my dregs, or wildly overcompensating.  I still have a lot of guilt about that. But, I want to squeeze out every last ounce of summer time we have... Which doesn't mean that they don't drive me absolutely nuts some days with the squabbling and messes and filthy sneakers and tween drama and ludicrous battles over Minecraft and groans of "I'm borrred."  I have had plenty of moments where all the noise is just overwhelming and I want to yell " Stop being ungrateful little jerks, I'm trying to cherish you for crying out loud!!"

Last week we got a tough diagnosis for my five year old daughter.  Life as we know it is probably going to change in ways we can't even imagine.  And it's scary and unknown and I kiss my daughter's head and thank God that I'm sober and can be there for her as we navigate this new world of tests and needles and procedures. My first thought when we got the call wasn't that I needed a drink. I cried and felt honest, real sadness. Which I let flow over me, and then I got on with formulating a plan for how we would support and hold her up and walk into this new chapter.  This would have been impossible five months ago.


So, for you newbies who are in the first days of trying sobriety on for size.  You know your time drinking needs to be done. And maybe you are having some false starts. I think we all did. But  let me be yet another voice in the invisible army that is doing this with you: Be encouraged. It does in fact get better.  So much better that I won't even spoil it for you.  Because you will get to that place and you will notice one day that your heart isn't in a crumpled ball of pain, your breath comes easy, you actually feel GOOD.  And quite possibly, nothing "tangible" will have changed.  You will still have an asshole boss, money troubles, a painful marriage, maybe health problems or a lack of support.  But everything will feel different. Because you will be different.

And so, that's all for now. I'm going to keep on plugging.

Yours with love, signing out from the top of Mount Laundry.

Ugly-Beautiful

I read a post the other day about "sobriety bloggers" and how a lot of them seem to run out of gas at the 3-4 month mark, and try to return to the nightmare of moderating or just disappear altogether from the blogosphere because they have fallen back into active drinking.

Well, I haven't done any of those things. Yesterday was four months sober.  But as I suspected it would with all of my kids being home for summer, it's been rough trying to continue my laser-like focus on sobriety. Navel gazing and quiet contemplation of my co-dependent ways have taken a back seat to the urgent needs of three small children. Which is understandable. After our vacation, my two oldest kids plunged right into a week of day camps and I spent the week driving to and from opposite sides of the county and hanging out with my five year old in between picking up and dropping off the other two and dodging severe thunderstorms. I didn't realize how much energy my first sober vacation had taken from me. Or how dependent I had become on the hour or two of quiet when they were all in school when I could write or read or go for a run.  Most nights have found me running after nine pm, when it's just me and the fireflies glinting in the trees, punctuated by me suddenly flailing to wipe a spider web from my face and praying that the spider isn't crawling somewhere on me.  The other night I almost hit a deer. I came around the corner and there he was, standing gazing at the pond. I freaked him out and he ran away, with me envious of his wild speed as I continued to trudge under moonlight. I guess I'm burning off the crazy. I'm not sure it's working. I read my support group emails in the wee hours and use my smart phone as a light to read books about recovery while my husband snores and my kids have gone to bed and I steal time from sleep to do the work. It's not ideal but it's something.

Two weekends ago was our big neighborhood party that in years past has always marked the beginning of summer. Slip and slide and pool for the kids and volleyball and yard games for the adults and booze everywhere.  I woke up the day of the party feeling low energy, and having zero desire to be around a lot of people.  I expressed this to my husband and I told him that I was going to go but that I might need to leave early.  I got the kids dressed, sunblocked and pool ready and then decided to take my time getting showered and dressed and walk to the party, which is about a mile away on roads within our neighborhood. I thought having time to think and unwind might put me in a better frame of mind.  I got there and everyone was drinking. No one was really watching the kids in the pool so my paranoid ER nurse self plunked down with my bottled water and watched about 20 kids as they were swimming. It was blazingly hot, and try as might, I just didn't want to be there. My son hit his head on the slip and slide and needed to lie quietly with his head on my lap in a shady spot with some ice and recover his dignity. He finally rallied and when we rejoined the party, all the other moms were doing shots and drinking margaritas while floating in the pool in their bikinis and I just felt like the sweaty, grumpy odd girl out.  Reaching into the cooler for water and brushing past glowing ice-cold wine bottles every time just got to be tortuous. I ended up leaving early and came home and immediately started thinking that I need to just re-vamp my entire social circle or it's going to be a lifetime of miserable parties where I feel like an awkward stick in the mud who ends up watching everyone's kids. Not helpfully, my husband who had been drinking and playing volleyball and oblivious to the fact that we had three kids at the party had the balls to tell me that I am miserable now I'm sober. Gee, thanks. Because going someplace I felt uncomfortable going in the first place and trying to have a good attitude and be in the moment as much as possible wasn't hard at all.

I sat on my bed and stared at the wall for a while and had my first fleeting thought along the lines of  "might as well drink if everyone thinks I'm boring and miserable now."  And I had an actual, physical response to that thought where I felt nauseous and said out loud. "oh, there you are, just waiting for your way back in, huh?"  And there it was, the moment when SH#T JUST GOT REAL.  The first few months were all about not drinking and triumphs like I was at the high jump and they kept raising the bar and I kept surprising myself when soaring over what seemed like impossible heights.  And then I jumped and smacked right into the bar, landing on my back and knocking the wind out of myself.  Because not drinking is just the start of it. 

I know I'm not the only alcoholic in the world who struggles with excess, boundaries, extremes, always pushing, pushing, pushing.  So it's really not a surprise that I overdid it in taking on boozy scenarios in early sobriety. Like a test. Like I could breezily say "oh, it doesn't bother me if you drink. I'm fine." Except I'm not. I hate that everyone is drinking.  I hate that there was a pool full of kids with no supervision. I hate that I was left out because I wasn't doing poolside shots. I hate that I have not one single sober friend in real life. I hate that all of my good intentions and hard work are boiled down to me just being no fun and miserable now.  I hate that my disease takes all of these feelings and tries to convince me that I should just start drinking again.


Two days after the party, my parents arrived for a week-long visit.  Because they only see us once or twice a year, there is usually immense pressure to be the perfect hostess, make lasting grandparent memories, go fun places, etc.  This year, I cleaned up within reason, planned very simple non-gourmet meals and didn't go overboard and neurotic in trying to appear perfect.  Which is a huge (HUGE) step for me.  My parents have always had standards that I could never meet and in somehow not trying to meet them, and in just being myself it ended up being a relaxed, natural and meaningful visit.  The kids enjoyed just playing games and doing puzzles and swimming in the pool and going for walks.  We didn't do any giant day trips. We ate crabs on the deck. I ended up having an opportunity to tell them that I'm an alcoholic and was met with understanding and compassion. And pride.  Which shocked me.  But if we had done our normal overscheduled, cram as many happy memories into five days routine, there wouldn't have been the quiet moment when my dad asked me "are you training to be on American Ninja or something? You look great and something has changed" which segued into a long talk about the last few years and sobriety and what I'm learning.  My parents both shared times of deep loss and depression and teared up as I told them how low I had gotten. They hugged me and told me they were proud.

So, in choosing different things, in learning to go with my gut instincts, I am navigating the real hard parts of this journey.  Because it really is no joke. The pink cloud has blown away and the voice is like a jackhammer in the background of my thoughts.  For a while it was quiet. It was peaceful. And now I am heading steeply uphill with no idea what lies at the top. But I know deep down that it's still better than the nightmare that drinking had become.  I told a friend it's like the first 100 days or so it was like being at basecamp on Everest.  I'm acclimating to low oxygen, getting my body used to a new reality which in this case isn't altitude but being alcohol free.  But now I've left the safe place behind and I'm climbing uphill, uphill, uphill and my lungs are burning and my muscles are protesting and every step I hear a voice just saying "give up.  This isn't worth it. Even your kids say you aren't fun now. You don't need to go so deep into this. You can drink again now that you know why you did. You can just change those things and manage your stress better."  And with the next trudging step forward  I say "No. I want this. I'm not going back."

Step. "Just quit". Step. "No."

So that's where I am right now. I am trying to make huge changes. In the midst of the demands of motherhood and life and having all my kids home and feeling like I'm on permanent overload. My ADHD has my brain feeling like a Labrador and someone just threw two thousand tennis balls.

But I know what I want.  I want the vista at the top of this mountain. And I'm not stopping until I get there.

What is making this possible is the new friends that I've found in this journey.  They may live hundreds of miles away, but they are in pocket, just an email or a text away.  They get it.  We can talk about all the FEEELINGS. And how we struggle with how to handle the feelings that are hard to face. The anger, the pissiness, the lack of "me" time as a mom of small kids, the straight up blah parts of this.  Giving ourselves permission to not just be shiny happy sober people all the time.  Some days totally suck.  We see things in ourselves and our children and our partners that we feel responsible for. Things we want to run from. Unweaving all of this is exhausting.  And some days we are just mad and it's not pretty and we have to reach out or drown.  But while I float up to my eyeballs in sadness and regret some days, I have other voices that are louder than the one in the background.  They tell me it's ok.  It's ok not to love every part of this.  It's ok to be mad, disappointed, petty, selfish, overwhelmed.  And it's ok to be stupidly happy over a sunset or something cute that my kids did. It's ok to be annoyed when my kids steal my La Croix water and then leave it sitting around unfinished. It's ok in that moment to be a little like Gollum hissing "my pressshusss." 

So many of us are black and white thinkers. Things are either good or bad. Sober life; life unbuffered by the numbing effects of alcohol feels wrong at first.  The rawness of opposing emotions can be overwhelming when we have spent our whole lives labeling them as "acceptable" or "not acceptable". We spend so much time trying to wrap it up in perfection that we miss the beauty in the ugliness. In not running from the ugly parts of ourselves, in just acknowledging them as just a part and not the whole, those things lose power. Yes, I have moments where I am not patient, I am monstrously selfish, I am hot-tempered and short-sighted.  But I also have moments where I am wise, loving, self-sacrificing, long-viewed.  The trick is to stop running from the moments when I'm the former.  Just allow myself to be angry or whatever.

So, that's where I am. My house is a mess. My kids are either adorable or squabbling. I run every night in the company of bats.  My marriage is still teetering on the edge of something.  My 11 year old was invited to a sleepover by her 5 year old sister with all of their American Girl dolls and I have no idea how many more years are left of that sweet connection. My son has made his first real friend and he's seven. I'm terrified that he's going to get crushed or his quirkiness will be too much.  I have a snake living in my garden that I've named Winifred.  My minivan needs new brakes and I think I need a new job. My coffee intake has risen to an alarming level.

There are seismic shifts going on under my surface that no one can see. 

And in all of it, I'm trying to embrace the German idea of " hasslich schon". Ugly beautiful.  Because that sums up life perfectly right now.

Shucking a million oysters ain't gonna do it

Things are a little tangled in my head today.  I'm tired after a long shift in the ER last night, and I'm recognizing that being sleep deprived really is a trigger for bad thinking on my part. So, I see this funk as a sign that it's time to write some of it out.  To be honest, there are some days when I wish I didn't have to fight so hard or make myself do the work.  I want to relax and just take the day off.  But, there are no days off.  Which seems unfair, but actually, with the right perspective it is really awesome.  I don't skip days where I make my health, my life a priority. It sounds better when I reframe it that way. It becomes a privilege and not a burden.

There will always be that voice in my head that wants to think "you're better now. You can stop struggling so hard. You could probably moderate now"  The same voice that wants me to revert to isolating, being headstrong and obstinate. Doing things the old way instead of the new.

So, with that in mind, allow me to introduce the frog that I met the other morning in my pool:

He looks innocent enough.

But, this, ladies and gentleman is the most "I do what I want" amphibian I have ever come across.  He was gleefully swimming all over, diving down and skirting away from attempts to catch him in my net and I swear if he could have given me the finger, he would have (actually, in the picture above I think he may be). He simply had no idea that if he kept on swimming in the chlorinated water that eventually, he would drown.  There was no way to climb out without help.  He couldn't see it.

After about ten minutes, I finally got him out. Exhausted from his attempts to elude me, he sat for a minute on the warm concrete where I had gently deposited him.  And then, he HOPPED RIGHT BACK IN to the pool.  Where we then had another game of chase and he did everything he could to avoid my attempts to catch him and save him from himself.  I finally got him and carried him out to my garden, far from the pool and gave him a stern lecture about not even thinking about hopping his obstinate butt back into danger.

Folks, this is what we do when we are in denial.  We have this idea that somehow we will be the exception. Sure, other people who drink as much as I was end up dying way too early. But I'm special. I'll be that exception. I'll be like that 100 year old person who smokes unfiltered cigarettes and eats bacon and drinks Jack Daniels all day every day and somehow defies the odds. We stay cocky and stubborn, even when we start to suspect that we are totally screwed if we don't stop. 

When the truth is, I'll end up a dead frog floating if I don't stop swimming in a pool of alcohol and disordered thinking.  So many people are stuck in endless day ones, afraid to accept the help of others who are holding out the net, and instead keep diving down deep away from what looks scary but is actually salvation.  Humility. Admitting the need for help. It's tough. But it's necessary.

So I have to remind myself daily: Don't be this frog.

Which in a round about way brings me to oysters.

Stay with me.

So, this past week I watched a movie called "Burnt."  It probably got lambasted by the critics for being a little one-note. But the addict in me really resonated with the main character, played by Bradley Cooper (a real life alkie in recovery). He's a dry drunk, a chef who fell from grace and lost his restaurant due to his addictions to drugs and alcohol.  It is written as a redemption story; how he attempts to rebuild his reputation and his life (without actually truly making reparations for the things he did when drinking or embracing specific principles). At the beginning of the movie, he's in New Orleans "doing penance" by completing his goal of shucking a million oysters.  He's not working a program, is still woefully shortsighted and unaware of how his actions have hurt others. He's a human wrecking ball, and while he announces that he's been sober for two years, 2 weeks and six days at the beginning of his quest to return to greatness as a chef, he's an untreated alcoholic through and through. He's a self absorbed loner, a bully, volatile, and short-sighted. He just doesn't drink or do drugs.

Ultimately, through loss and failure, and from relapsing (which comes as no surprise) he gradually learns to accept community, help and belonging as key to healing and moving on. Which made it satisfying to me as a newbie in recovery (and lots of beautiful food which just makes me happy). But I think the thing that sticks with me is how this movie made me ponder what it means to not just stop drinking but create a meaningful life. Or as my friend in my online sobriety group put it:"Staying meaningfully sober is different than just quitting drinking.. Just shucking a million oysters ain't gonna do it."  Outward actions without inward changes ultimately are meaningless. We can not drink and white knuckle and be miserable.  Or we can not drink, grow, reach out for help and give it in return.

Some days we are the frog, and other days we are the net. But we don't go it alone.

Sorry, Ernest

So I blew past ninety days this week. And sometimes it shocks me that just three months ago my internal landscape was all post-nuclear holocaust in its' bleakness and despair. I was all rubble, sickness, shame, head noise. I had no words anymore.

I've been thinking about language and writing as it relates to this journey. I used to take Hemingway's advice "write drunk, edit sober" and applied it with an extreme amount of enthusiasm. Most of my writing the past twenty years was done that way. Now, I'm exploring how to write sober, edit sober and finding my raw truth without a buffer, without anesthesia. It's more pure and much more scary to write without that armor.

But language, vocabulary... I've spent my life learning "insider" lingo. First in the Army with all of its' acronyms and abbreviations "Copy, NLT, Hoo-ah, FUBAR, BOHICA, OPFOR, etc."  And then, with my career in medicine when phrases like "45 yo M presents with h/o of COPD, sob, dyspnea, CP x3 days, BBS c exp wheezes, prn albuterol q4 hours ineffective, r/o PNA/ COPD exacerbation, recommend CTA chest" make absolute sense. I speak the language.

Sobriety has a language of it's own. There's a whole new lingo to learn. We hear a lot of it in recovery. "Cognitive restructuring, surrender, willingness, NA drinks, gratitude, Normies, one day at a time." Slowly, these terms become part of a new vocabulary.

When I think about the word "SOBER", its' definition seems incomplete and lacking oomph for something so life-changing and explosive.

sober
adjective| so-ber

1. not drunk
2. having or showing a very serious attitude or quality
3. plain in color

Well, I'm definitely not drunk. I am dead serious about this journey. But there is nothing plain or dull or staid about this trip. There is belly laughter. Joy that is burbling up like an underground stream.  I am laughing at how ridiculous I can be,  finding my sense of humor again and rejoicing with friends in recovery as we discover how full of miracles and COLOR life is now that we are no longer letting ourselves be abused by alcohol.  I run every night in my reflective orange vest and I'm sure I look like a deranged crossing guard who is lost but I can laugh at how silly some of what I'm doing to stay sober might seem.  But I'm all in.... Doing whatever it takes. Scratching notes to myself in a lovely journal, eating dark chocolate caramels with sea salt. Going for runs more than twice a day some days. Coloring with my kids. Eating a whole bag of cheesy poofs with a vitamin chaser. Getting choked up over a post rainstorm sky. Performing the heck outta the "corpse" pose in yoga because my middle aged muscles are protesting all the exercise I'm putting them through. Having to laugh when my earbuds unplug while I'm in the checkout at Lowes buying plants and suddenly hearing my sober podcast echoing all over the perennials/getting the hairy eyeball from stoic sensible sandaled/sunhatted gardener-types.  Letting random strangers ahead of me in the checkout line because I'm teaching myself not to rush. Leaving the dishes in the sink and going with my kids to jump off the dock into the river. Playing sober anthems and singing along. Practicing self care like it's my job.  Finding the elusive beach blue glass on the beach and seeing it as a sign.

I know it's not the pink cloud because that sucker sunk a few weeks ago. This is an uphill hike where I just keep pushing, and am still shocked at just how much energy it takes to get sober. Some days are unspeakably hard and I have no words. Many moments sting like a bucket of ice water dumped on my head, regrets still float around and surface from time to time, old traumas creep into my dreams and remind me they are still there. In those times, my recovery community surrounds me, encourages and reminds me to keep my eye fixed on the things that are invisible. They remind me that healing results when we do the hard work. They shout reminders to me, cheer me on, help me find the words to speak to myself. And I'm learning to do the same for them.


I don't know if other diseases have a voice. Maybe diverticulitis sounds like a guy talking with a mouthful of nachos, saying "Anybody want a peanut?" and emphysema sounds like a wheezy old broad with 3 pack a day smoker voice saying "Light up, honey." I'm not sure. But I do know that my alkie voice starts out all smooth and velvety like Tom Hiddleston reciting Shakespeare, all posh precise, rich, round tones. It whispers. "You are doing so well, just look at how much better you feel. Why not celebrate with just one? You don't have to tell anyone. It would just be between us. Go on, darling."

I picture my sober self  as a wise earth-mother type with a flowy skirt, serene face and a halo made of daisies (a girl can dream, right?) ; "No, I'm enjoying this lovely glass of La Croix coconut water. Plus, I could never just drink one, remember?" 

The tone of my alcoholic voice changes the more I talk back to it, reminding it that I don't drink anymore. It gets more whiny, more petulant, more bratty. " But you deserrrve it. Look how hard you are working. No one knows how HARD this is. You never get a break, wouldn't a nice crisp glass just taste so nice."

When I continue to refuse, it gets nasty, in a Loki, "kneel before me, you mewling quim, I must have a drink!" way.

My sober self answers: " Well, sure, if I want to end up dead on my bedroom floor. That's not on today's agenda, thanks." And then I give myself a mental high five and get on with my day.

So that's the new normal. No more waking with a splitting headache, dizzy, looking for a place to throw up. Actually, I haven't thrown up once in the past 90 days. Not once. No more pounding antacids with my shots of whiskey. No more checking my rearview mirror obsessively because I'm driving buzzed for the thousandth time. No more feeling alone, no more secret keeping from even myself. No more energy wasted on denial, procrastination and lies: "I'll quit tomorrow."  There were always a thousand tomorrows.

I'm living in today. Writing sober. Living sober.  I am finding my new voice.

I wish Hemingway could have found his.

Scars and mirrors

Her twisted face is mere inches from mine and my ears are ringing from how loud she is screaming inside this small room. Her shrieks are echoing out into the rest of the Emergency Department which has gone eerily silent.  Black eye makeup streaks down her cheeks to mingle with tears and sweat. She is screaming obscenities and commanding me to let her go. The smell of alcohol, dirt and sweat stings my eyes. In the next breath she is screaming, begging ,"please just kill me. Just kill me". I am speaking quietly, calmly down near her ears where I hope she can hear me. " I hear you. You need to try to calm down. We don't want to hurt you. We are trying to help you."  But she is beyond hearing.  She is spitting, kicking and trying to bite my hand that is holding her hand down onto the bed as our staff struggle to put on the locked wrist and ankle restraints without being kicked.  I look down at her slender wrist, see the thin blue veins which are lumpy and scarred from shooting up and then my eyes travel further up to a network of silvery and red horizontal lines, scars from cutting. There are hundreds of them. A small, homemade broken heart tattoo hides on her inner arm. Her eyes are pleading, enraged, defiant and sad all at the same time.

Later, when the medications I have given her have taken effect and she is lying quietly in the darkened room with a warm blanket she whispers to me, "You just don't know.  I have to get out of here. I got kids."  She is barely out of childhood herself, though she looks much older. I imagine if that was one of my children, with a scarred body and shattered mind, strapped to a gurney in four point restraints, strung out and off their meds and so drug addled and drunk they want to die. And I know that I've seen the look in her eyes in my own mirror after I've been drinking.

**********
The gurney rolls up the back ER ramp, surrounded by EMS workers in blue uniforms. On the stretcher is a man a greyish white color that any nurse recognizes immediately as a bad omen.  He looks frail, his skin translucent and clammy. His eyes meet mine with an animal desperation as he vomits cascades of bright red blood into a cheap plastic bucket. I can read what he is asking me without words: "Am I going to die?" I speak to him calmly, recognize the smell of vodka mixed with blood which is a smell that stays in your nostrils long after you've gone home and showered in scalding water. He vomits again, a seemingly endless gush; a startling crimson sea. I start his IV, type and cross for blood transfusion, start hanging IV boluses as I watch his pressure dropping precipitously. I send a tech on the run down to the blood bank.  As the monitors start alarming with a startling cacophony, he grips my wrist with his grey cold fingers and he says "is this it?" And I say, "I don't know. We are going to do everything we can." He is whisked off to the OR to fix his ruptured varices.. veins in his throat that are torturously dilated after years of chronic alcohol use. I survey the wreckage in the room he has vacated.. the trash on the floor, the suction equipment, the empty bags of transfused blood, the air still heavy with fear and vodka and the unmistakable metallic smell of blood. He is a year older than me.

***********
The car screeches up onto the ramp in front of the ER, the doors fling open and a body is tossed out onto the sidewalk which is more like a river since it is pouring rain. I run down with my radio, immediately notice the blue color of the boy lying on the ground, call for help and start CPR. My team arrives, we load and go with me sitting on top of the gurney still doing compressions as we roll through the waiting room, full of wide -eyed back pain sufferers, toddlers needing stitches and miserable flu patients, back through the pneumatic doors to one of resuscitation bays. Everyone does their jobs, we administer narcan and suddenly the dead boy is back. His eyes open, he takes a gasping breath and immediately starts yelling and cussing at me, calling me the cunt who ruined his high. I remind him that he was dead five minutes ago and that we just saved his life. The doc and I calmly explain the need to monitor him for a while in the ER since the heroin he took could cause respiratory depression and death when the meds we gave him wear off.  He tells us to go fuck ourselves, rips the heart monitor off, flings it at me, cusses a few more people out and storms out of the ER, out onto the street as thunder rumbles.

Forty five minutes later we get a call on the EMS radio that they have a priority one overdose en route to us with a 5 minute ETA. They roll through with an intubated patient,  CPR in progress. I see curly wet hair, then peer at his face and recognize the boy who had just left an hour ago. EMS said unknown down time. We work the code for a long time, check with ultrasound for cardiac activity, and finally he's pronounced dead, exactly 2 hours and 24 minutes after I first took his pulse out on a sidewalk in bucketing rain.


***********
I hear a familiar voice from behind the curtain of room 3. I know who it is, even before I go in the room to go assess my latest patient.  He smiles at me as I enter and I check him out. Double amputee, Vietnam vet in the bed, wild grey hair he has covered with an old bandana. He has a raspy cigarette voice and a deep laugh that makes the fluid wave in his distended belly ripple. He is dayglow yellow and smiles with perfect white teeth in his wasted face. His spindly arms are cradling his massively distended belly and he jokes "We've gotta stop meeting like this, Wen."  He goes on to brag to me that last week, when I was off work he came in and they tapped him for 4 liters of fluid. His personal record. His stories are great, his attitude is amazing. Yet his body is failing, his liver is shot and most likely I won't be seeing him much longer. But there is something about him. He talks about the joy he found in sobriety. A joy that sustains him, even when he is obviously dying. I look at him and I think how can he be joking and laughing when he's in so much pain. How can he be telling others about his peace and serenity now that's he's finally sober?



In my gut, deep down, under my neat blue scrubs and name badge that says "RN" on it, under my professionalism there was a voice that I tried to ignore. A voice that was warning me. A quiet voice drowned out by the raging need I felt after shifts like those when I would pull into my driveway in the wee hours. I'd come up the steps with throbbing feet and reach for that glass, hear the glug glug glug of wine that I was gulping before I even had my coat off.  When I was still a young, unjaded nurse, I used to come home and pray and go to bed.... then years later I would tiptoe into my sleeping babies' rooms and kiss their sweet innocent cheeks and breathe a prayer of thanks over them, then lie awake until the call of the alcohol drew me downstairs for a glass or two. But in that last year, I couldn't face their innocence knowing that I was bringing a monster inside me into their rooms. I didn't want to breathe my poison on them.  I felt tainted by what I had seen.. and utterly convinced of what I knew was coming for me. I would sit in my dark kitchen and drink until the faces faded. But they still haunted me the next day when I would wake with a splitting head, queasy stomach and a soul that felt shredded and hollowed out.


***********
My last shift before my last drink.

EMS rolls in with another intubated patient. Eyes fixed and dilated, she's posturing on the gurney, a sure sign of neurological damage. I'm the primary nurse. Rest of the team shows up to help. EMS tells me that she was found unresponsive by her family. Suspected alcohol overdose. Respiratory arrives and we put her on the ventilator and we start multiple IVs. She starts seizing and I yell for meds. Someone brings them and I am hanging them as her family enters the room. 16 year old son acts as spokesman and her two younger daughters, age 10 and 5 hang back with fear in their huge eyes. One of the nurses goes over and speaks to them quietly, assuring them. I speak to her son who tells me that she had been in recovery for alcohol for a year, started dating a new guy who he said was bad news. She decided last night to have "just one more" which turned into him finding her slumped on the floor of the kitchen when he woke up in the morning at 10 am. He wasn't sure when she stopped drinking or how long she had been lying there.
I start focusing on titrating drips as her blood pressure is dropping and she's continuing to have intermittent seizures. I listening to the rhythmic hiss and whoosh of the ventilator breathing for her. Her jaw is slack, her eyes rolling. Her two little girls are crying quietly at her bedside and kiss her arm and hand.  The son takes them out to the waiting room to meet their aunt who has come to take them. I stop focusing on numbers and the medicine for a minute and really look at her. Notice that her necklace is digging into her neck around the ties that are holding her breathing tube in place. I can't loosen it so cut it off and place it in a bag with the clothes we cut off. I wonder what the story is behind it... an angel with a single wing.

Boyfriend arrives, staggering and slurring, yelling at her to wake up and pulling on her tubes and lines. I call security and we all try to calm him down. His eyes are blood red, his hair is wild and nothing we are saying is registering. He keeps grabbing her and crying he's sorry. He turns his eyes to me and towers over me saying " the paramedics told me she was fine. Why did you do to her? Why aren't you helping her." His voice gets louder and he comes closer, grabbing both my arms. I grab his hands and twist away as security steps in and end up dragging him out of the ER.  Her son appears a few minutes later and tells me he called the cops to have the boyfriend arrested because he tried to assault him in the waiting room. I ask him if he's ok and he says in a shaky, shuddery voice, "yeah. We've been through this a lot. I thought she was finally better. I can't believe this is happening. She just kept saying she just wanted one more and then she'd be done for good."

A few hours later, I've taken her to CT and xray and we've discovered that she had aspirated (vomited while unconscious and breathed it into her lungs), had a massive hemorrhagic stroke and most likely an anoxic brain injury. She will probably never wake up. I'm reading the CT results on the computer I've rolled up next to her bed and I look at her. Freckles across her nose, red hair, slender. A few years older than me. She looks like me.  I have a premonition and the hair is standing up on the back of my neck. I shake it off.  I give report to the nurse taking my assignment. I turn in my radio, grab my bag, walk out of the ER and drive home feeling that need. The need.

At home, it's 0300 when I get in the door. I'm shaking. I can't stop thinking. I drink. And I drink some more. As if I can just wipe that memory out of my mind, deny the premonition I felt.  The irony that I was making it come true was lost on me as I just slammed shot after shot.

I stumbled to bed, woke with my alarm, had a rough morning getting the kids to the bus. Fight with my son who was melting down about the seams in his sock, sending him off to school in tears instead of with a hug and less annoying socks.. still seeing her face when I shut my eyes. More drinking. A whole bottle of whiskey. Then darkness. Blearily waking to realize I forgot to get my preschooler off the bus. Squinting with one eye to see to drive when the road looked like four roads. Entering the school office, realizing I was slurring terribly. Bursting into tears and telling some unintelligible story about having the flu and oversleeping my alarm. Alarmed faces of the office ladies. Maybe the real truth was too hard to believe. I was almost falling down drunk at noon and about to drive my five year old home. I have no idea why they let me take her. Another squinty eyed drive up the road. Home. Making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, pretending to be the competent mom who gives her kid lunch after a busy day learning her ABCS. Except I dumped a jar of olives instead of jelly onto her bread. Started over. Opened a second bottle of whiskey. A few more shots since the shame was trying to creep in past my "don't care, nothing can touch me" alcohol fueled bravado.  I remember giving my girl a sandwich and some fruit and then stumbling upstairs to my room and that was it for the next 12 hours.

I remember horrible blips and snapshots of that night. I somehow called my husband in my blackout and told him to come home. I remember him trying to pull me out of the shower and my voice that sounded like someone else's' just crying over and over that I wanted to die. Telling him I'm an alcoholic. I want to die. All those fearsome truths that I'd been skirting around for years. The truth was out. The curtain was whipped back like in Oz and this was the new reality. Around midnight, I sat up in bed, finally able to steady my spinning mind to ask about my kids who I was assured were safe. Looked down at my legs and saw that my kneecap was completely dislocated. I felt nothing. Not a thing. Absolute numbness. Stood up and it popped back in, hobbled to the bathroom, squinting in the light to see the entire right side of my face covered in bruises, my lip split and swollen, my tooth missing, my entire body covered in bruises and aching from falling. I have no idea how I busted my face. Limped back to bed, pulled my covers over my shaking shoulders, feeling ice in the pit of my stomach. And I sat there in the dark and realized that I had two choices: I could ignore it. Chalk it up to a bad shift, a rough week, just a one time mistake. Yes, I'd had blackouts and hurt myself before but never that bad. I could cut back or try moderating again. Or, I could absolutely face the fact that I was going to die if I continued this way. I could choose to surrender to the idea that I simply can never, ever drink again. I could have killed my daughter or myself or someone else. The school could (and should) have called the cops. I could have fractured my skull falling with that much force, could have aspirated and been just like my patient, leaving my three kids crying and never understanding why I left them.

I chose the second. And every day I wake up and choose the second.

And I see these patients with different eyes now. I don't fear them anymore, being terrified to see myself in them, wanting to deny the similarities.  Now I see the commonalities. I feel compassion.  I am able to quietly share, ask questions now that I never would have before. Because I KNOW them. I am them. And they can make that second choice too.

So, I'm like my dayglow yellow man now. I have hope and joy. I am utterly grateful that I was given the chance to walk away, though limping and looking like a hillbilly with one front tooth for a few days. I still have a lot of challenges, a lot of scars. But I have gratitude too. Oceans of gratitude instead of oceans of shame and despair.

Now when I look in the mirror, I can see the lines on my face, the remnants of pain. But I also see a twinkle in my eye.

And there but for the grace of God go I.

Center your power

Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri is a god-forsaken place in the middle of March. It's probably that way in July too, actually.  It's cold in a damp, bone-deep way.  It's barren. There is a lot of horizontal sleet and winds that can knock you backwards.  The whole place is ugly: all barracks and training buildings and dirt and cratered firing ranges where there is no shelter from the constant wind. The only part that might have been beautiful was the woods, but it was winter when I was there, so it was all naked trees and frozen mud and shallow foxholes.

It's where I spent my nine weeks of Army Basic Training.

I vividly remember one morning.  Like every day that wasn't Sunday, we were up and out and in formation at 0500. It was inky dark and freezing. My stomach felt queasy. I was struggling with a cold that I'd had for three weeks. (They call it the crud and everyone gets it. Too much sleep deprivation and living in close quarters, I suppose).  I felt lousy. The temperature was right around 20 degrees and there was a stiff wind that was blowing occasional bands of sleet right into my face.  One of our burly, seemingly non-human drill sergeants announced that in honor of the beginning of week 9, we were going to run to the airfield and back. There was a collective groan from the whole platoon. The airfield and back was a 10 mile run.  Since it was week 9, those of us that had survived that long were in great shape.  But I wasn't feeling it at all.

A little back story: we had started our training with sixty two women in our company. We graduated with six.  Of the 200 men that started, only 110 made it all the way through.  Those numbers launched an investigation that took two years and which ended in multiple dishonorable discharges and a conviction of soldier abuse against the Commander of the company I was in. We were clueless that anything we were experiencing wasn't what everyone experiences when they go through the hellish, "mind and body breaking down and building back up" process that was Basic Training before it became the kinder, gentler version they have now.  We were so exhausted and numb and cut off from the outside world that we just accepted it as reality, put our heads down and pushed through to the end so we could get out of there.  In the end, we endured a lot of things that other soldiers on the same base weren't experiencing and which we later discovered weren't in the Army's training doctrine, but a product of the mind of our ex-special forces commander who had a few screws loose.  It was unorthodox, but I have to admit that it made us tough in every way.  Looking back, surviving that really set me up for success in the Army  So much of my flexibility and ability to endure tough things; problem solving instead of breaking down;  a large part of my personality developed there. I still have my old battered Basic Training Soldier's manual and I had written on the side of it NEVER QUIT. And I never quit anything, until 81 days ago when I quit drinking. 

Ok, back to that dark morning.

I was shivering uncontrollably as we warmed up with some stretches. My drill sergeant stalked past me, stopped and said "Are you cold, Private?" Through chattering teeth, I managed to say, "y-y-y-es, D-d-rill Sergeant."  He looked me directly in the eyes. Though he was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, he looked perfectly warm and unbothered by the sleet that was dripping into his eyes. He bellowed "Center your power."  And then he walked away.

I had a long ten mile run to think about what that meant, exactly.

And I don't think I really gave it any more thought in the many years that have passed since then. I'm not sure why it came to mind today, but it did. I used to think that it meant being strong no matter what; cultivating a core of strength that you draw from. I thought it meant never ever admitting weakness, ignoring the sleet, pushing through and never admitting defeat.

So, when it came time to finally surrender to my powerlessness over alcohol, to admit defeat and to finally say "I QUIT!!" it meant undoing a way of thinking I have believed was true for my entire adult life.

Mental toughness can't overcome hypothermia or addiction.  I used to believe I could think my way out of any circumstance, use my wits, my smarts to just overcome whatever was in my way. Unfortunately, alcohol didn't get that memo. And so I'm dragging myself up out of the abyss that my life had become and am stepping out into the light.  But I am not doing it alone.

When I think of that phrase, I think of it in terms of community. How community is helping to keep me sober.  The invisible army of other alcoholics that I am meeting on this journey are helping me to center my power, to grow, to challenge my thinking, to reframe external circumstances, to heal the gap between the person I feel I am and the person I became when I drank. To allow my soul to heal from the soul sickness and shame that have made the last few years so very dark.

Instead of drinking to numb my feelings, I am learning to feel them. I am willing to admit when I am weak, when I need help and when I'm freaking out, I can reach out to others who "get" it. They can talk me down, remind me of the good, the privilege of this journey. In giving up one thing: drinking, I get to change the ending to my story. A story that was only going to end in my premature death and an utter waste of life. For "just one more" drink. I am choosing a different ending.

I have the awesome task of rebuilding a life from the wreckage. Some days I am weary, tired of thinking endlessly about my sobriety. It's WORK. It feels like I am unbeaching a whale. But I have the privilege of taking on this challenge in the company of others who are wiser than me, who have had the way paved for them by others who went before them: a gentleman in my online sobriety support group calls it " an endless chain of souls all supporting each other no matter what."

My loneliness when I was drinking was immense and breathtaking and I just drank more when I would start to feel it. In sobriety, I am finding connection, community, and hope. I could never have imagined the life that I'm discovering, when I was in that hole. The changes are immense and the feelings are too.


But I'm finally learning to truly center my power.