On Breaking Up With Alcohol and Getting One's Groove Back
/I don’t know quite how to start, so I’m just going to leap right in. That’s OK with you folks? The ocean isn’t half as bad once you get your head thoroughly under the salt water and process the fact that you need to scrub sand out of crevice-y bits and then find out that you’re only wearing a barnacle bra with some nipple windows and an elegant seaweed thong. But I digress.
Everyone who really knows me knows that I’m an alcoholic.
They also know that I’m a sometimes-depressed anxiety-riddled weirdo with a seizure disorder, but that’s beside the point. Really, I just added those because I wanted to play up what a catch I am. Thrill as Lyndsay barely leaves bed for three days! Witness a 41-year-old woman sip pickle juice from the jar! Weep with the depth of your admiration as she has a panic attack over falling down the bottom two steps of her staircase and starts crying uncontrollably and her beautiful partner has to coax her down as if offering a cat treats to get it into the carrier bag!
But this weekend is the Baker Street Irregulars Weekend, when all of Sherlockiana who are able to do so gather together to celebrate the Great Detective and the Good Doctor. And I owe everyone an explanation, because I’ve tried my best to be open, honest, and forthright—even if it’s about me NOT being open, nor honest, nor forthright.
People are going to see me drinking in moderation this Weekend. For some, that will be highly disappointing, and for others (the ones still reading, and again TL;DR), it will make at least a modicum of sense.
A beloved friend of mine (and fellow severe addict—I met him when I moved to NYC in 2005) has been encouraging me for a long time to join an organization called HAMS. I’ll use their own words to describe them: “HAMS is a peer-led and free-of-charge support and informational group for anyone who wants to change their drinking habits for the better.” The acronym stands for Harm Reduction, Abstinence, and Moderation Support. Essentially it’s a group wherein there is no pressure to quit if you’re not ready, you can tell people you just filled a bathtub with gin as a skin treatment but are accidentally drinking it instead of releasing the drain, and nobody counts days unless they want to, in which case of course there are appropriate balloons and parades.
After my friend had been sober for 6+ months when we’d previously been in the same boat, I was very very proud of him, and I started paying attention.
This is NOT something that will help everyone. If AA works for you, I applaud that. But for some personalities, being told you can have NONE of something makes you instantly crave it. I don’t have a sweet tooth, for instance, and I once foolishly told myself I was quitting refined sugar. It was constantly on my mind. (Why? Because I was entirely avoiding it that’s why.) I was in rehab for a year, outpatient, which many of you saw via my posts. Often, I was well behavior-ed, and always when I was posting about it. Sometimes, during the Much Worse Periods, I took the daily urine test (rehab is just a teeeeeeny bit demoralizing), capped it, then immediately pulled the two mini-bottles out of my purse, shot them, and discarded the empties in the little trash can and draped elegant toilet paper over it before classily publicly setting a container of my squeaky clean piss in the medical window on one wall of the waiting room/lobby.
Because that’s what addicts deserve, right? Parading their excretions around a waiting area.
Never say addicts aren’t a refined bunch. And we are treated as such by many rehab facilities! We wear rich velvets and silks and our napes smell of 2000-count bedsheets. TRUST ME. Also trust me when I say If you need rehab, be in rehab. Stay in rehab. They are doing as well as they can. And so are you, CLEARLY.
But it was hell for me personally. I learned a very great deal, a metric asston of relevant and valuable information both in group and in therapy. But I’m a bit of an empathy monster, and sometimes the stories about my-grandma-used-to-punish-me-by-making-me-kneel-on-a-cheese-grater-for-hours literally drove me to drink alcohol, or at least gave me a terrified and heartbroken excuse. Not that I didn’t have my own troubles, but cheese graters had only ever brought me joy before that particular group session.
[And no, don’t try to school me about I shouldn’t have shared that story, you have literally not the slightest clue who I’m talking about, and bits of real life filter their way into every one of my books, which is how books are made.]
Last week or thereabouts, my beautiful partner went into the kitchen for a beer after a long day. He called out, NOT in any enabling way, but in a gentlemanly way, “Do you want anything, my love?”
I thought about it. Hadn’t had a drink all day.
Didn’t really feel like one.
I could always get one in ten minutes myself if I changed my mind. No one would judge me and no one would question it.
I was entirely sober for the next three entire days and I wasn’t even trying.
I don’t know whether everyone understands how big this is for me, but it is Amazon’s chokehold on retail sales level of big. Because, you see, since I was allowed to have it, I wasn’t fretting about not having it. Again, this won’t work for everyone. I just wanted to share that I had three days sober, then a single glass of wine with a fancy pasta on Day Four, and I didn’t even want a second glass of wine. The open bottle sat in the fridge for like two more days.
This is not the black-and-white chiarascuro outcome that some people want me to post about. Some want me to post that I got a sobriety chip for going a year clean, and I respect that. Very much so. Some think that my lack of willpower is a moral failing, doubtless. Some may find it disappointing, especially since I’m doing my usual open-forum Olympic-level oversharing nonsense.
I don’t care. Letting go is powerful.
For a very very long time and from multiple sources, I was made to feel as if I wasn’t doing anything technically the “right” way. This veers from wildly emotional nonsense conversations to how to load a dishwasher properly. There was always the right way to do something, and it wasn’t generally the way I was doing it. It’s amazing how different you feel after you had to prove you can survive all alone, and I do mean ALL ALONE FROM DAY 1 OF QUARANTINE for a year and a half, and you are still here, and sure there was self-medicating, but self-medicating is the urge to LIVE, not the urge to give up.
And I did it. I lived. I lived through:
—immediate invasion of ants
—total quarantine isolation (other than my dear interwebs and phone call friends) for much longer than it takes to crack an operative in solitary
—thus rampant touch starvation (humans need to be touched at minimum 7 times per day)
—the deaths of multiple close friends
—a divorce from my husband of 20 years and my girlfriend of 3 at the same time (raises hand, is pansexual)
—developing a seizure disorder and waking up in the hospital knowing no one was coming for me
—being kept in said hospital for a week the second time, mostly on an IV
—ongoing IRS kerfuffles (two of them)
—half my houseplants dying because I couldn’t muster the energy to be conscious
—cancelling multiple fun virtual events because I was too sick to handle them
—flood damage and total book carnage in my basement
—professional career setbacks
—truly nasty depressive streaks (you definitely noticed that already, Reader)
—withdrawal, a few times (I’d done that roller coaster well before these jolly couple of years, and believe you me it is not cute and no sage advice on the subject is solicited, please and thank you very much)
Enough about this. Enough about me.
Nope, I’m also relentlessly vain, and pathologically helpful, so here’s a few more things…
STUFF TO DO THAT CAN POSSIBLY HELP YOU FEEL BETTER:
—eat something, I don’t mind what it is, your body needs salt as well as calories, could be a pickle for all I care, I lived off of them
—answer one person’s text message sitting in your inbox
—read some Sherlock Holmes
—cook something for a neighbor
—watch some Star Trek
—are your sheets too upsetting to handle? (because mine were for a minute) then sleep the daylights outta that couch baby
—eat a cheese slice if you care to/can do, they contain a mood-boosting dairy protein called kasein
—put on that form-fitting outfit that shows off your quarantine habits and stride around like you own the world (as soon as it’s safe to do so)
—do full on makeup, boys and girls, even if no one is going to see it
—pet your pet, and if you don’t have one, pet your stuffed animal, and if you don’t have that, pet the friendly imaginary cartoon rat who chats with you while you make classic French veggie casseroles
—make your computer (via Spotify or pandora are easiest) play only songs from your favorite decade
—good, now eat something else and fall asleep
Peoples of the interwebs, sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get better. But I’ll share with you something I very often share as a mentor when I undertake workshops or manuscript critiques. It applies to literally anything to which you care to apply it, be that making box brownies or getting into Yale. The sentiment kinda amounts to “It gets better.” But my version is:
It was only ever a waste of time if you give up.
For exactly the length of time you keep going, what you were doing was never a waste of time.
Take yet another nap if you need one. Write 2,000 words if that’s better. Stop writing and heat up a soup. Stop snacking on soup and go for a walk. Keep doing what you’re currently doing and pass out with high school Polaroids strewn over your bedsheets. Write a poem. Read a poem. Think that the poem can never express what you’re feeling and literally throw it across the room.
How you have been living your life was never, ever a waste of time.
My Sherlockian friends are some of my favorite people in the whole wide globe, and I cannot wait to see you. I almost typed “to see you all,” but it isn’t all. Is it? Some are attending, yes. Some are staying away due to finances. Some due to safety and health, be that mental or physical. Some aren’t with us any longer, and I missed the chance to say goodbye in person because we were all trapped indoors, and that’s going to hurt for a long time. But the only thing more useless than fretting about the future is dwelling on the past, so I’m going to do my best to process that in a healthy way so that I can move on from it. Because I’m tired of tranquilizing my feelings and I’m sick of being so unhappy that I didn’t even remember what it looked like to be contented anymore. I honestly didn’t.
A friend of mine told me that even Murphy’s Law is subject to Murphy’s Law and eventually gets fucked and runs its course. Truer words were never spoken. It gets better, Because it’s only a waste of time if you quit.