Questioning Direction
Sooo....
First time on a forum like this. First time posting here. Feeling pretty vulnerable but am full of questions.
Alcohol has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My Grandparents used to have 'Martini Time' when we were kids and I would get a glass of 7-Up with olives in it. To imply my family were keen drinkers would be an understatement, though most of them, if not all, were functional heavy drinkers.
I stayed pretty straight until I was out of high school. I was a band geek, I had a group of intelligent friends, and I think my immaturity and naivety kept me on the right side of experimentation: that is to say, I avoided it for the most part. When I moved out I remember feeling giddy with independence. I had my own job, my own apartment, my own life! I would come home from work in the afternoon and drink rum and coke just because I COULD!
Drinking made me *feel* happy, confident, creative, sociable, fun.... the list goes on. Reality told a different story. The happiness was short-lived when I ran out of money half-way through the month and my roommate was threatening to leave because of my late nights and drunken mishaps. My confidence was merely lack of inhibition which put me into countless awkward sexual encounters which I somehow escaped without disease or unwanted pregnancy. Creativity was the lover I chased and alcohol wet my lips as I leaned in to kiss it, but it was always swallowed under with the sixth or seventh drink. Everyone knows that alcohol is the life of that party.... at least I thought that it made me the life of the party... but what I didn't know was that it was really sucking the life from me. And fun. Was it fun? I guess parts were fun, there was a lot of fun, yes. Could that fun have been had without me being off my face drunk? Probably. Definitely.
There were years of this. Years of wasted nights dripping off of curbs and pouring out of cabs and wasted days hanging inside out, buried in my bed, eating if I could, but only horrible processed sh*t. Piling sh*t on top of sh*t inside my body.
Here I am, almost 10 years pickled, and I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing. In the past two months I have experienced two of the worst hangovers of my life. Ones where I spent the day decomposing in bed Googling, 'Can you die from a hangover'. Sad. The most recent one sort of lit a lightbulb with the realisation that maybe I was experiencing withdrawal and not a classic hangover. The first day post-night-out was a complete write-off. I woke up still drunk and slid backwards downhill through the day, not eating, sweating, writhing in the sheets, bound up with anxiety, praying for sleep but too afraid to sink under. The next day was much of the same except the sinus congestion blacked everything out, a migraine exploded across my eyes, and that syrupy, sickening self-loathing started to creep in. Tuesday I went to work fuzzy-headed, almost entirely useless, with a couple pain killers to ease that pain of what I had convinced myself was surely a brain tumour. Today I feel alive, at the surface again, but treading water.
If this is withdrawal then surely I've reached full-badge alcoholic status. That's pretty terrifying. My whole life has been ushered by Alcohol and considering life without it is like remapping my entire world by hand. Everything will look entirely different and I'm not even sure I can draw a straight line let alone plot a path for moving forward.
I guess what I'm really afraid of is meeting myself without the veil of alcohol. I'm afraid I'll be less interesting, less fun, less creative. I'm afraid I'll lose that mysterious alter-ego that comes out when I go out 'single'. I'm afraid I won't have the same deep, philosophical conversations with myself when I drink alone. I'm afraid I won't be the life of the party; no one will like me; I won't seem intelligent enough. Really, I'm afraid I won't like myself sober.
So maybe I don't have any questions at all, maybe I just need to get everything out of my head and hope that I'm not completely alone and weird experiencing everything that my mind is caught up with.