Me? An alcoholic? I don’t think so.
The ongoing and pervasive thought that kept me drinking was this: how could I be an alcoholic?
I owned my house. I paid my bills on time. I loved my children. I had no DUI’s, even if I did, on occasion, drive under the influence. I got my brows tinted at Ulta, for fuck’s sake.
I went to work every day, in a blind hangover, sure, but I always got there on time.
When I began to work intently on addressing my drinking, my first husband and I had just separated after 10 years. I was learning to be a single mom of 3 under 3. I had been so focused on my husband and on my babies, I hadn’t even had time to think about myself.
For many years, long before children, I woke with regret about my drinking, but there hadn't been much time to think about it. I had clothes to fold and work to go to, a house to clean, a husband to tend to. Martinis to drink at dinner, flights at restaurants. I was young. I was just out of grad school, we were having fun. And to be frank, I had accomplished a lot during those active drinking years.
I had completed a BA in English and Creative Writing, an MFA in Creative Writing, taken progressively advancing jobs - both pay and position - at nonprofits, bought a house, gotten married, started a business, and I had stopped drinking while I was pregnant with the babies.
Breastfeeding was another story, but we’ll get to that later.
After my husband and I separated, I remember feeling like I was spinning plates -- and despite my best efforts to twirl the plates in the air and keep everything afloat, things were slipping, plates were falling to the ground and cracking, leaving shards in their wake.
Every time a plate fell, I thought, I might have to admit I have a problem.
So I kept spinning. And I was pretty good at it.
Sure, every now and then when someone asked me a question about something at work, when I recalled the work, I had a brief flash of remembering the atrocious hangover I had been facing while I did that work, trying not to throw up, sweating, swearing up and down that I would not, no matter what, go to the goddamn store tonight, and somehow finding myself at the store before getting my kids at daycare that night.
But still, I fed my children fruit. I read them bedtime stories, each one of them, in their rooms. Again, yes, the details of reading them the story can get fuzzy, and also yes, sometimes when I’m reading, I am desperately thinking of how to get out of their room and get back downstairs and also, yes, I drink wine while I have them in the bathtub.
But me? An alcoholic? I don’t think so.
For fifteen years I had written a list of goals that read like this:
Drink less
Smoke less
Write more
Read more
Eat better
When we moved, I found notebooks filled with my journaling, and always these notes. Often a log of how much I drank, how much I exercised, how much I smoked.
I couldn’t quite seem to get it together on any of these things. But I began trying to cobble together a few days sober. My initial intention was not to stop drinking altogether.
A break, I thought, was all I needed.
Just a little reset. Surely I wouldn’t have to give this up forever.
Because I loved everything there is to love about drinking culture. The bottles, the glasses, the cheers, the sound of a cork being pulled out of a bottle. The sweating on the glass, the sound of the ice clinking. In my house, I could always hear the crack of a beer being opened. The little fizz on the top of the can.
The thing about alcohol was, it was my best friend.
My. Best. Friend.
And it was reliable. It always got me there. No matter where I went. From Arizona to Idaho to Oregon to Washington to North Carolina. Alcohol was there.
Not only was it there, but it always got me where I wanted to go.
Every. Single. Time.
When I think back on bars and restaurants and house parties -- I remember my friends’ faces, but I also remember sitting at the table watching my pint glass go down and wondering, will I have time for one more. Who will help me stop at the store on the way home.
But a problem? I don’t know, I’d shrug.
I had always thought I was the most Kristen Kristen when I was drinking. My true essence. There was the fun Kristen, the wild Kristen -- haha! Kristen is sooo drunk again. She fell down and is all bruised up! And hardly remembers it at all! How funny!
But that wasn’t me. That was the dulled down version of Kristen, the sad Kristen, the Kristen beneath all those layers of film.
During those first few days, what I was learning was that I had lived my entire life with a film over it. Sometimes a very thick film.
Beyond those first few days without a hangover, I couldn’t believe what I saw.
There were birds! Cardinals, blue-jays, crows, everywhere. They were coming to talk to me! They sang songs. And this was January in North Carolina.
Where had the birds been all these years? Had they really just been here, this whole time?
That was the first layer that peeled off, which really was like emerging into the technicolor world.
The layers continued to peel off and some were more painful than others.
The drinking Kristen, I came to realize, was a version of me that even I didn’t dare look at. When I would start to think about it, when I was alone with my thoughts, I’d become very scared. I vacillated between a hangover and drinking for the better part of all those years, so I didn’t spend much time there.
When I began dating again, I thought, I have confidence! I’m funny! Yes, I have three kids and a mentally ill husband and tiger stripes and titties that fed three babies that aren’t what they once were, but I was ultimately good.
But there was this itch. It’s going to be a real bummer when these guys find out I like to drink myself into a blackout every night, I would think.
And still, a whisper in my ear, a constant feeling of being chased, a looming and overwhelming sense of impending doom -- the heavy sense that it was going to catch up with me, sooner or later: if they only knew the real me.
A problem, I thought. Ugh. That sounds so negative.
But there were signs.
There was waking up on the couch with a spilled beer and my baby on my chest. There was going to the office chewing gum and praying that I didn’t smell like booze. There was feeling my face, so puffy, feeling like I could see my cheeks in my peripheral vision. There was feeling my central nervous system crumble in, sitting in the car taking a deep breath, saying not again today, Kristen, not again -- and finding myself at the Food Lion buying 3 tall-boys of 9% Voodoo Ranger and 2 bottles of wine, if I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t go out again.
There was buying a bottle of wine and saying, just this, then, later, saying to my boys, “Let’s go to the store and get some goldfish! Who wants goldfish?!” and loading the 3 kids up, a bottle of wine in, to drive them to the store and load them into the cart and pretend we were getting goldfish or marshmallows or even strawberries, sometime, because I was a damn good mom, and also plopping a box of wine or a few of those Voodoo Rangers into the cart, too.
Something else was happening, too, towards the end of my drinking. When I started drinking, I felt the hit in my brain. I always said drinking felt like coming home. That warm feeling down my throat and in my belly. But I was blacking out faster, earlier, with less booze. It felt like as the bottle drained, the shades were coming down, slowly blocking out the light. It took almost nothing, and then I woke to empty bottles.
In sobriety, I learned to listen to my body. I learned to trust what I felt and that maybe my body had known this all along, and the drinking had just been muddying the water.
I did a lot of work with energy healers as I tried to get and stay sober.
In a session with a reiki master, one of my many attempts to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me, she said:
Despite all that has happened, it appears your inner soul has been untouched. Outside my soul there is broken glass, and something - like an outer shell - that I built to be destroyed. A protective layer.
Break in case of emergency.
But inside -- it is beautiful. There are deep blue glistening caverns and walls and it is so beautiful. It is something that is untouched -- maybe even untouched by me.
She said even my ex-husband hadn’t seen the inside of the cave. No one had.
In sobriety, I would explore what was in there.