I’m feeling sick today, and dizzy and a bit bitey. Friends are leaving, a changeover of guests and I can tell by my mood that it gets to me in subtle ways only identifiable since I’ve been sober. These emotional flashbacks – because that’s what this is – used to form the fabric of my every day, the wallpaper of my world, I didn’t know there was a house behind it, I thought what I felt was the truth about the present, not the past. What I’m getting to is this. Friends are leaving and the disturbance of it twangs those spider web lines to the part of me still alive with the injury of leaving this magic place and returning to a tall, cold house in London. A friend also sober, also in recovery and a survivor says sobriety is like putting out fires, one by one, only then the work begins, the bit when I can see clearly enough what lies beneath the impulses that make me grumpy here or snappy there. Everything, and I mean everything, leads back to those formative years, from the womb until the armour was set, and that includes the intergenerational too because trauma only stays as trauma when the burying continues. It’s hard, sobriety, sometimes, the sometimes when I want to get away from myself, or when I remember the myth of drinking, that first sip, the joining in of it. But on the way here the taxi driver said Oh yes, you’re near St Maur, a vineyard we love, the wine which we’d drink, it too was part of the fabric of my life here. And I said yes, but I don’t drink anymore and in that moment I remembered how I can’t because it isn’t one glass, it is a craving set off that is unstoppable. I was a very reasonable drinker, you’d never have known from the outside that I lived for that moment every afternoon when I would settle down with half a bottle and three spliffs and my lap top, a blank page or a story I was working on, that it was the highlight of my day. But I began to notice how only in those magic hours did I feel whole. And I noticed that the wholeness of me and a bottle and spliffs said a lot more about the rest of my life than I was comfortable with. When I stopped drinking I cried for a month, and then the world went psychedelic and then time slowed down. Those are the things; an upsurge of feeling, a gauze removed, an experience of things becoming quieter.
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Powerful. Honest. Raw. Thank you for sharing.
Quitting drinking is hard. I had to go to hospital for it to stick. I have taken up weed since the pandemic and I was okay with it until this line, "I began to notice how only in those magic hours did I feel whole." That's tough to read.