Dear God,
It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy to post anything. Much to my surprise, everything still feels overwhelming. I do have to admit that some things have gotten better, though.
Shortly after I stopped drinking and started attending AA, I stopped hating myself, which is a victory all by itself. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would no longer be ashamed of the label ‘alcoholic’…in fact, it comes in handy at times. I was with my extended family in another state, and we were at a restaurant for lunch. Everyone ordered their (alcohol-based) drinks, and when they were trying to decide if they wanted another round after lunch was over, I blurted out “Go ahead and have another round. I can drive. You’re with an alcoholic, so you always have a designated driver!” The funny thing was that I didn’t feel weird saying that out loud. It felt no different than saying that I’m only 5’2”, or that I have curly hair. It was just a thing about me…not some terrible, shameful secret. The fact that my daughter was all excited to see my 60 day chip and gave me a huge hug was just icing on the cake.
I have also gained some clarity about why I was trying to erase myself from the room with alcohol. This is about me not wanting to make waves, not wanting to be inconvenient or vulnerable. Basically it’s hard for me to be honest about what I’m feeling: what I’m willing to do and not willing to do, or what hurts me and doesn’t hurt me. I learned the wrong stuff in my family of origin, and while they were doing their best, I have a lot of unhealthy things to unlearn. This is going to take a while, and I’m going to have to be patient with myself. I’m also pretty sure that I’m going to have to cry in front of other people a few times (something I HATE to do) before I learn to say ‘no’ or ‘stop that, it hurts me’ without falling apart. I’m pretty sure I’ll get there…I’m just really, really anxious about it.
I have also gained some clarity around how I’m doing in general, and sadly, it’s not good.
While I was drinking, I kept running through the Beck Depression Inventory** in my head, asking myself if I was becoming depressed. After all, there had to be a reason for my drinking. Whenever I thought about it, I’d decide that I was still okay, that I was just having some negative thoughts about myself for drinking too much.
I was definitely right about drinking too much, and along with negative thoughts about myself, I could have added crushing anxiety and difficulty sleeping. But all those problems went away after I stopped drinking. Like I mentioned a moment ago, I don’t hate myself anymore. I also don’t wake up at 3am with crushing anxiety to lie awake and berate myself for being a worthless drunk.
So why do I start to cry whenever I have a minute alone with my feelings? And why am I overwhelmed whenever anything happens? At first, I thought I was just letting out the grief that I drowned in alcohol (I lost my best friend and my father 3 months apart in early 2018.) And I kept chiding myself to stop thinking that every damn thing was some major pain in my ass; basically I chided myself to stop acting like an active alcoholic and start learning to accept life on life’s terms.
But then I noticed that I wasn’t pissed off when things went wrong. I felt utterly overwhelmed…so much so that all I heard in my head was ‘I can’t…I can’t…I just can’t. I can’t. I can’t do one more thing. I can’t.” That’s not me being unwilling to accept life on life’s terms, that’s me begging for things to stop bulldozing me.
Then I noticed that every time my husband or my best friend (not the dead one…I have more than one ‘best’ friend) talked to me, I would have to try extra hard to listen and to care. The whole time they were talking, I’d be in my head thinking ‘Please shut up. Please stop talking. Please leave me alone.’ Add to all this that I am utterly exhausted all the time, and I finally had to admit something to myself.
This whole mess is NOT. NORMAL.
I finally realized that I might be dealing with clinical depression after all. You may ask what ‘clinical depression’ is. Everybody gets down now and then: the job isn’t going well, troubles with a spouse or a child, issues with health or with chronic pain, the recent death of someone we love…all these things will cause us to feel down, and this is totally normal. We don’t call that depression because a normal reaction to stress or loss isn’t considered pathological (something that is a disease), and depression is an actual disease. You might not think so, but as someone trained in this field, let me tell you: mood disorders are diseases, just like kidney failure and diabetes are diseases. I watched my youngest daughter struggle with terrible depression and anxiety driven by thyroid failure and have worked with a patient whose brittle diabetes caused horrible mood swings and intractable depression (depression that didn’t respond to medication) and nothing helped until the doctor got the diabetes under control. Depression and anxiety aren’t just moods, not when they are daily realities. Depression and anxiety are diseases that require medical treatment.
So guess who made an appointment to go to the doctor?
Me! Me! Me!
Yeah, I’m kind of excited about it, which I realize seems a bit strange.
The thing is that I’ve been trying to work my program and straighten myself out, to basically ‘sober’ myself out of the deep hole my moods have fallen into. Realizing that I might actually be depressed and need treatment made me feel better immediately, because it means that I might feel much better in six short weeks! I realize that six weeks seems like a long time, but as someone who has been sober for ten weeks now (I am sneaking up on that 90 day chip) I now prefer to think that things get just a little better every day when you just keep doing the next right thing. So I’m going to take the antidepressant that my doctor prescribes, and keep taking care of myself (eat right, get rest, exercise regularly) so that I have a good chance of recovering by the time I have moved onto my fourth month sober…and I cannot tell you just how relieved I am.
I have no guarantee that I’ll get on the right medication right away, or that my depression will resolve easily with medication, but I have to admit that just simply being sober for over two months has given me all sorts of gifts, and increasing levels of clarity has been one of those gifts. That increasing clarity is what made it possible to observe myself a bit more closely and realize that I needed to see a doctor.
In meetings, we say that when you work a program of sobriety, that God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. That is absolute truth, and my upcoming appointment with my doctor is evidence of that. If I was still drinking, I would still be struggling to get past self-hatred and anxiety. I would still be putting all my effort into learning to control my drinking so that I could stop after one or two glasses of wine. Controlled drinking is the elusive unicorn that every alcohol longs to find and never does. I’d have been so busy being focused on trying to control my drinking (and failing) that I’d have entirely missed everything else. It’s hard to thoughtfully observe your own struggles when you are too drunk to remember what you did or said just 20 minutes ago.
So here I am, sober and depressed and strangely grateful to know this. Of course, the fact that I just spent a holiday weekend hanging out with friends and family and I remember every damn minute of that weekend adds to my gratitude.
Every day I discover new miracles of sobriety, and it turns out that discovering my depression is another one. Who knows just how things will change, once I’m on the right meds? Hot damn…life is looking up and I haven’t even gotten to my doctor’s appointment yet.
Thanks God. Actually, thanks a LOT. And thanks for listening.
** The Beck Depression Inventory is useful for helping you determine if you need some intervention/help with your mood. It is available online here:
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