Drinking + Thinking

I used to sit here and drink. Wine, rum, gin, Jameson, expensive stuff, cheap stuff. I’d sit here and drink and the mountain across the way would slowly close in on me. Trapping me. Filling me with emptiness and dread. Making me feel small and worthless. Making me whish I could just disappear from this world…admit defeat…wave a white towel at her curved fortitude and let her take me down to some prehistoric doom deep underneath these Catskills mountains.

I let the fear and shame and worthlessness push me from this place. My home, my dogs, my husband, my place in the world.

But when the mountain was gone, the drink was still there. My misery was still there. My fear and shame and loneliness and sickness went along with me no matter where I went.

Finally, I met someone who told me I wasn’t broken. That it wasn’t “what’s wrong with me” but “what happened to me”. For the first time in my life I became aware that I wasn’t predestined to be bad or broken or crazy or fucked up. something made me this way and therefore I can ‘un’ make me this way.

Thus began an intensive journey into trauma healing and ultimately sobriety.

Now I sit here, in the snow, a different drink in hand feeling freedom and peace and calm and hope.

maybe I’ll share how I got here…or maybe I’ll just tell the birds.