I’ve tried to set a goal to sit down and write out an entry every other day. I have the time, that’s no issue. The issue is I have no ideas of worthy topics. I’m cultured, but understudied. All I have that’s authentic and original are my experiences. And of those, I have plenty.

The experience that comes to the surface more than others, because it weighs the heaviest on my heart, is addiction. I grew up in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, where drug addiction is inescapable. Of my graduating class (I attended two high school’s in the area), there have been over a dozen fatal overdoses. Heroin is still a mystery to me, all I can speak about is alcoholism, but I suspect it garners the same mindset necessary for abuse.

I’ve been sober 23 months. I won’t go into the details of my years of addiction, but I will share some of my understandings of why I think did what I did. Throughout my years of drinking, I was living in a fog over how I truly felt about myself; A pretend world where I was OK with myself and the only reason I drank was ‘just because’. I would’ve vehemently denied disliking myself, but during the almost 2 years of sobriety, I realized it was much worse than that. I’ve spent days and weeks reliving horrible memories, and I think I’ve done enough soul-searching to come up with this reasoning:

Abusing alcohol, or any sort of drug, stems from a variety of issues. For me, it was having such a low sense of self esteem that the hell I single-handedly brought down on myself, I deemed deserving. It is a combination of not believing you’re good enough, reveling in the feeling of pity, and kidding yourself that a life lived intoxicated is better than your sober reality.

Addiction also feeds on excuses. Excuses were the bread & butter of my life. One of my favorites was that it “runs in the family”. My father, and my father’s father (and who knows past that) are alcoholics, so it kind of let me shrug my shoulders and think it was bound to happen at some point. The fact was, perhaps the genetics played a part once I had it in my system, but I believe the real genetics that are passed down (that lead to a sober you deciding to be not sober) is that of a weak mind. The reality of me stopping off at a liquor store on a beautiful spring day when I had money in my checking account and a great job was because I was not enough to keep myself sober. I did not view myself as worthy enough of stopping for. I needed something greater than myself, some ultimate ultimatum, before I was going to have the willpower to stop.

The question I keep coming back to is.. Did I not like myself because of the drinking? Or did I drink because I did not like myself?

Either way, it was a spiral. I drank, liked myself less and less, and drank more because of it. And so the hate continued.

I’ve been living in a safety bubble for going on 2 years now, so I actually have little experience of the real world in relation to my sobriety, but I’d like to think that I’ve made progress on what I deem to be the real issue: my self worth. How I view myself has changed. My health and success are now big enough reasons for me to stay sober. I’m in the best shape of my life (had to trade one addiction for another, am I right), and my mindset is close to matching. I still have so much to work on, but at least I can see clearly. Literally. When I’m stressed or angry, I tend to have dreams where I’m drinking, and I have that feeling of guilt and shame in my dream every time. I have a feeling those will always be my nightmares. But my reality is no longer a nightmare.

 

Ainslee