Tomorrow will be my 10 year sober anniversary. The moment I decided to quit drinking, I knew it was forever. But, this still feels so surreal.
My entire life, I was forced to be the villain in other people’s stories, so I eventually became the villain in my own story.
To be fair to them, during my drinking days, I said some really rude and disrespectful things when I was drunk. So, I’d like to set the record straight- I wish I had the balls to say those things when I was sober.
Whatever text message or email is lurking around, or whatever anyone claims I said, I will gladly take full responsibility for it. But only if it’s true. If it’s a lie, they can choke on their own bullsh!t.
I’ve lost compassion and respect for the people who doused me in gasoline while everyone watched, only to mind f*ck everyone into thinking they were the ones who were on fire. It’s the classic, “Don’t believe anything you see, only what I tell you.”
And not only did people believe them, they helped to pour more gasoline on a fire that was already on the precipice of exploding. No matter how I acted, it was weaponized. If I lashed out, I was blamed for not fitting their mold of how a victim should act. If I stayed silent, I was complicit and chose to stay. No, I don’t have respect and compassion for these people either.
The fact that I struggled with mental illnesses and substance abuse only put the nail in the coffin because we live in a society where visible shame wars are branded as evil, while sympathizing with actual evil by choosing the lesser one.
Forget science, their opinions trump facts.
Systemic trauma rewires both the brain and nervous system, which eventually leads to substance abuse and/or mental illnesses. But, somehow the abusers managed to defy logic- it’s almost like they’re prodigies. It’s so strange isn’t it?
History repeats itself, and yet, we fail to connect the dots. Abusers are out there crying about being victims as loudly as they can, while the actual victims self-isolate and rarely speak about the abuse. How many more movies, Dateline episodes, and public releases of files do we need to see before we really see?
That realization helped me to stay sober for 10 years. I decided to stop listening to the people who were trying to destroy me and refused to be in a system where inflating collective years to enhance the superiority of a meeting is somehow a logical metric of success. The person I was before, was too weak and meager to stand up for myself, would get intimidated into submission, and allowed others to dictate my worth and happiness.
And of course, there are days I get angry and frustrated, there are days I wish were better, and there are days when I want to tell people from the past that dog sh!t has more class than them.
What I won’t do is to allow those days to define my life. Sometimes spite can be your greatest motivator.
And I’m not going to sit here and say it’s easy, because it isn’t. Sitting with your shame during the moments you don’t know how to, feels worse than the times you’ve been defiled and dehumanized.
I’m also not going to sit here and say you need to keep pushing through courage, because courage like every other emotion is fleeting. When you inevitably lose it, you have nothing left to hold onto. Let your anchor be finding safety within yourself.
I’m also not going to tell you that you have to hit rock bottom because the pits of hell are deeper than rock bottom. And I’m definitely not going to tell you that you have to be willing to get sober because learning to survive yourself isn’t unwillingness. You just need to learn how to win the war with yourself. And you will.
What I am going to tell you is that you absolutely can do this. And this isn’t a case of, “If I can do it, you can too.”
No. It’s about reprogramming the beliefs that say you can’t so you can become the person you daydream about becoming. It’s about speaking the wishes you don’t know how to say out loud so you can create and strengthen the neural pathways that eventually become truths. It’s about finding safety within your body so you can feel safe enough to come home to yourself. It’s about aligning your heart brain connection so you can hold reverence for the chapters you’re ashamed of.
This isn’t sobriety. This is recovery.
I’ll see you soon…in the meantime, love yourself so much that even a Hallmark Christmas movie would be jealous.
