Dilly's Story

[DePompadour]

I didn't have much of a drinking problem until after I graduated college...though when I look back at my high school days, my best and favorite times were drinking with my friends and coming up with concoctions such as "The **** That'll Kill Ya." Even then, my drunken behavior was the stuff of legend; old friends still talk about the time I almost knocked the refrigerator over.

When I graduated college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I got two crappy jobs. My parents had always been dysfunctional and to escape them, I moved in with a guy I picked up at a bar who could write really good poetry and dance like the world was ending tomorrow. We moved into a ramshackle railroad-style apartment made of cinderblocks. We were surrounded on three sides by bars, each one more seedy than the next!

We were a hard-partying couple and usually had a little "sump'n sump'n"; pills, tabs, shrooms, mescalin, weed, and the perfect cure for all of those come-downs was an ice-cold Amstel Light. It wasn't long before he showed his true colors, he was cheating on me and slapping me around and I was doing the same thing right back to him to get even. We spent most of our time fighting or "making up." Finally, he gave me a black eye over the way I was folding the laundry and I said that's that, good-bye, and thanks for nothing. I had to move back home with my parents.

And that's when I really started to have some fun! It went from a few beers in the morning instead of breakfast to carrying around airplane bottles in my purse, and taking a nip whenever I would be forced to interact with people. I went from sleeping with acquaintances and getting VD, to not being able to stop drinking long enough to let the medication to kill the VD work. Yes, I did some pretty low things, such as slapping my best girl friend in the face when I was blacked out.

The funny thing is, I never felt good when I was drinking anymore. I would drink and cry, and never even get a buzz. I would drink and drunk-dial my friends. I wouldn't stop drinking until I couldn't hold the bottle anymore and it slip right through my fingers and smash on the ground every time. My friends called that phenomenon "Watersnakes" and we would laugh about it the next day.

I decided to stop drinking every day because I thought I might have a little bit of a problem. Instead, I would binge every other week or so. Finally, one night when I was drinking and I glimpsed The Bottomless Pit. I realized that all this alcohol was just going into this hole in my soul. I was shook up about it, but not enough to stop drinking, of course. That Drink with a capital D was my Friend. I would smile and hold that drink like I was slow-dancing with my true love.

This brings us to April 8, 2005. While hanging out with some friends in a band, I was fooling around, acting stupid and I dropped a huge heavy drum on a girl's toe and split her toe open. I can still see that blood all over the floor in my mind's eye. That same night, I screamed at some friends for no particular reason and growled and scratched like a wild animal when they tried to take a bottle of wine away from me. When I woke up the next morning on the floor of a strange apartment, I knew I'd drank my last drop.

I went for a walk in the woods and cried. All the twisted tree roots I saw were like the state of my soul. I went to AA the next door and was completely wild with fear. I didn't know what I was going to do without my Best Friend.

The first couple of months I didn't have any pleasure endorphins left in my brain so I couldn't smile or laugh at all. I also realized that I had no more inner monologue. I had completely stopped talking to myself inside my own mind. I was lost. That first year I would never want to do again. The second year was better but I was doing a lot of work in the mundane world to support myself as I was getting sober and it was really hard to find out where I belonged. I sometimes thought that I wasn't really an alcoholic, and reasoned that I must've been too young to know how to drink properly, or maybe it was because I'm an American and there's more of a mystique with drinking because our drinking age is so much higher than Europe's because our nation was founded by Puritans! (Who says a college education isn't worth anything these days ?!?)

It took me about three years of sobriety before I really and truly beat that first stage of denial. I was on a camping trip with some friends. I hadn't had a drink in all that time and it was the first camping trip I'd decided to go to since I'd gotten sober. I was prepared for the fact that other people would be drinking and braced myself for feelings of temptation or jealousy...

As I watched my friends and acquaintances drink, I saw people relaxing while drinking a beer. The beer was not the purpose, the beer was just a delightful detail, like a garnish of mint on a plate of blueberry pancakes. I watched, riveted, as this other species, enjoyed one or two beers, very slowly, over a long period of time, and then, STOPPED DRINKING.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I realized the difference between me and them was that I could never just "enjoy a beer." I realized that had I been drinking, I probably would've started a forest fire. I would have been a total embarrassment to my friends.

I know today, that if I pick up a drink, even one, I would be flushing all of the hard work I've done over the past four years down the toilet. It's really nice to see who I am without looking at my reflection in the bottom of a bottle.