My mouth feels like two pieces of 80-grit sandpaper scraping together. My tongue feels too swollen to swallow. But I fight one down somehow. There’s that familiar alkaline taste a bad hangover always brings … like I sucked on D batteries all night. Acrid is probably the best sounding word for it—it has that same tang—but it doesn’t even begin to describe it. My stomach is sour. But then again, my stomach is always sour these days. And everything hurts. Both inside and out.
I wrote that a few months before checking into detox. Drunk. Obviously. It doesn’t even begin to describe my emotional state, but I’m sure you get the gist. Vodka wasn’t going to be quick enough—I was trying to decide between a 9mm or a .45. And I knew what song I’d leave on repeat—”Almost Was Good Enough” by Magnolia Electric Co. That all may sound callous, but that’s just my truth when drinking and using. I want to die, or preferably that I was just never born.
I know the bottle and drugs aren’t the solution to my underlying discontent with life—I’ve been in and out of recovery long enough to know that their promises are emptier than the ones I make when in active addiction—but damn, they’re persuasive sometimes.
Whenever I’ve relapsed, like I did 7 months ago and a few months before that and a few years before that and a few years before that, I’m always clawing my way back toward recovery. The reason being is because I forget how haunting active addiction is. My disease or The Beast, as I call it, prefers it that way. Needs it to be that way to survive. Paradoxically, I also forget how good recovery is. I’m talking about home-cooked, Southern comfort food good!
Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something amazing about not waking up in a pool of sweat and wondering if you’ve really sweat through your sheets for the fourth time in a week, or if you’ve just pissed yourself again. There’s something amazing about waking up and not reaching for a sinewy fiber of hope, wondering if today will be the day you finally quit, only to know you won’t fifteen minutes later. There’s something amazing about not wanting to cease to exist. And there’s something amazing about not having to blackout just to cope with that desire to be dead, to eschew the guilt and shame that swallow you. I don’t miss that shit and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I know the part of my brain that wants me dead does. I know because it whispers to me sometimes.
I’ve been told that even if you drive 100 or 1,000 miles, you’re always three feet from the ditch. Recovery, like trust, takes time to build, but it can be torn down in a second. All it takes is one bad decision. That’s the funny thing about addiction—one shot, pill, or line and all bets are off. I frame it as funny, because otherwise it’s just too damn sad.
Early recovery has been all about guarding against making that choice, that first “whatever you’ve got” that minimizes the fear and tedium of being alive. Some days I feel like a salmon swimming upstream, fighting the current and yearning to be coddled, for the warmth of Vodka to wash over me; and others, I just splay out and let the jet stream take me.
When I embrace the latter, or at least don’t fight it, I’m able to see the benefits of sobriety. They seem to come naturally even though a great deal of internal work is involved: reducing my life to its simplest form, shedding the baggage of the past and (perceived) expectations of myself and others, confronting childhood and adolescent trauma, exploring the genesis of my substance use and why I sought solutions outside of myself for so long. Essentially reframing and rebuilding my entire life … I’m able to confront that which I couldn’t when hiding behind the bottle. Those are the gifts of early recovery for me—they’re hard won victories at the beginning of a lifelong battle.
If addiction is the liminal space between living and dying, or not quite living and not quite dying, then recovery has been all about learning how to live again. In many ways, I’m getting to know Marcus for the first time in a long, long time. He’s a sensitive, stubborn, sappy son of a bitch, but he’s also witty as hell, introspective, and would give the shirt off his back to whomever needed it. I’m actually starting to kind of like him. But don’t tell him that. I don’t want it to go to his head.
—Marcus M.