I've neglected my blog for a while now, due to some other things going on in my life. This will be another of my serious posts, where I talk about myself and my life. I've experienced some stagnation and I think I'm in the process of turning a corner.
I don't really want to go into details publicly, but I endured some fairly serious traumas when I was a child. The age of seven or eight is when my path first began to skew. Nothing was ever addressed and I tried to figure things out as best as I could. It's clear now that I began to suffer from real and clinical depression. I have been depressed for nearly as long as I can remember. Few who don't suffer from depression themselves, or have a close relationship with someone who does, understand exactly what that means.
It doesn't mean someone is sad all the time, and, while everyone goes through down periods, assuming that someone who is depressed can or should "snap out of it" or that there's something somehow selfish about it, or that they are weak, is basically making the dyslexic kid sit in the corner with a dunce cap.
I used drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism. One of my earlier blog posts discusses my substance abuse in detail, but even then, it never really stopped. I was always transitioning from one numbing agent to another, and even up to just recently, continued to smoke marijuana regularly, as most of you probably know. While pot is benign compared to most drugs, and has given me a lot of pleasure, it too, I'm afraid, is one more way for me to escape reality.
This pattern of substance abuse is sadly all too common among sufferers of depression, particularly men, who are culturally prohibited from admitting to emotional problems in many cases. I know from experience that in many of the circles I've been associated with, if I were to say even as much as I've so far admitted to, I would be laughed at, insulted and told to kill myself. I've managed to get past the point where something like that would bother me, but there were times when it would. So I buried my troubles deeper and deeper within myself, covering them with a steady diet of intoxicants and acting out in other, typical ways. Aggression, destructive sexual behavior, etc. I don't like the way this world is, and I don't like what it does to people, including me. I've tried for, like, decades now, to own this evil. To enter it, and understand it, and make it mine instead of me belonging to it. This, I realize, is inheriting the wind (and ice skating uphill).
I've you've read this blog before, particularly the older posts, which were written when I was experiencing a difficult transition in my life, you'll note some familiarity with what I'm saying. It's something I've been approaching for some time, but stumbling towards. "Okay, time to cut the shit and get real." says I. Great.
(but I'll just keep this corner of myself hidden away)
I've been like the alcoholic who decides to switch from liquor to beer. A step in the right direction, and it might even work, sort of, for a while, but it's not reality. This is an apt metaphor, because I am an alcoholic, and an extremely destructive alcoholic. Alcohol is such a chaotic poison to me that by doing no more than cutting it completely out of my life, I was able to form an echo of a healthy, productive life. Similarly to the way I was able to lose 60 pounds by doing nothing but cutting out soda. I was much thinner and healthier, but I'm no athlete. If I want to be truly healthy, there's a lot more involved. It was the same with alcohol.
And, after three years of abstinence from alcohol, I drank a couple of weeks ago. Not a little bit, and not in a remotely responsible way. Again, I don't really want to go into details, but it was bizarre and insane. In the aftermath, I was flailing to get some sort of meaning out of the experience, and struggling. The fact that I had completely blacked out didn't help. I had to assume that after three years, I must have thought I could handle it. Now, I don't think this is accurate. I know I can't handle any alcohol for any reason. I know that as well as I know anything. I'm just not wired that way.
So what was I doing? I think now it was probably more akin to a cry for help suicide attempt. Things seemed okay, but something in me was crying out that they were not, that I couldn't live this way anymore. While my life certainly did get better after I stopped drinking, my mistake was thinking that was all I had to do. I maintained total sobriety for something like a few months when I was married, but that was pretty much it since I was about fourteen. As anyone can tell you, addicts are liars. I don't know if I've ever been physically addicted to anything, but I can say for sure that I am emotionally addicted to everything. I have to be on something, because I just never learned how to live life any other way. Many people never do. And I guess I'm realizing that this can't go on. Whatever I was doing, even something as benign as marijuana (which, not for nothing, made me lazy and unproductive, probably reason enough to stop it), the root cause is escape. I can't keep running. And when you're an addict to cope, you lie about how much, how often, and when you use. You start to lie so much that everything about you becomes a lie. Even if you're honest about every other aspect of your life, you feel utterly alone, because no one knows the real you. You lie about using and then lies start to creep into other aspects of your life. The person you lie to the most is yourself. You start to lose track of what's real and what isn't. You get isolated because nobody knows you, really knows you. And without others, there's no self.
I am depressed, chronically. Every therapist or counselor I've ever seen has told me that I'm a textbook sufferer of depression. I was actually doing really well with one therapist I was seeing, I think I was making a lot of progress, but I couldn't afford to go anymore. I don't know. I guess one lesson is that while abstinence from alcohol is an essential component of mental and emotional health, it isn't going to solve my problems. It is, in the end, a symptom. A symptom powerful enough to destroy me and my life on its own, but a symptom nonetheless. All the drugs are symptoms. My life is better without them, but if I want to be the person I should be, I have to address why I did them in the first place.
This isn't something I'm going to figure out on my blog, much less in one post, so I guess I'm just writing this as another signpost on my journey. I am an addict, true, but I am also depressed, emotionally troubled, I have experienced trauma, I have done bad, hurtful things to others and had bad, hurtful things done to me. I have hurt and let down those who care about me and mean the most to me. I never wanted to, but I'm never going to get better unless I maintain absolute honesty and absolute sobriety, so I'm committing to those things. Like Lincoln, Honest Abe, who doubted religion and so committed to impeccable honesty in all his dealings as the means of a good, moral life without it. It's a start. This probably all seems pretty vague, so if you're reading this, know I was mostly trying to work something out with myself. I talked a lot about alcohol and drugs, but the point is that they aren't the issue. Emotional health doesn't end with stopping drinking. It starts there. I have to make the world a better place as best as I can, starting with the man in the mirror. Thank you to my friends and family.
