The best thing about recovery is getting your feelings back. The worst thing about recovery is getting your feelings back.
Recovering from an addiction has been a path traversing both into reality and the landscape of mind and emotion. There is the side of it steeped in human biology, chemical reactions, and scientific facts. I really wish I had knowledge of all of these things when I made the choice to get sober. It would have made me use a hint of caution, especially around my loved ones and my job, and given me hope and a peace of mind when things spiraled out of control on some days. The other side of the path of sobriety is how you approach it mentally and the strength of what you are made of as you try and weather the storm. There is a reason recovery groups list milestones to strive for while attempting to regain control of your life. Any victory, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is a foothold to grab onto in what is a very, very chaotic and difficult journey.
Today is 92 days sober for me. Damage that years of alcohol abuse caused to the frontal lobe of my brain should be close to healed by now.
“it takes about 90 days for the brain to break free of the immediate effects of the drug and reset itself. Researchers at Yale University call this 90-to-100 day period the “sleeper effect,” a time during which the brain’s proper analytical and decision-making functions gradually recover.”
My memory of incidents that have happened both recently and years ago definitely seem clearer in my mind. Which is a painful reminder of just how stupid and self destructive I have been acting over the last decade of my life. There are also frustrating moments when I cannot even fathom how I could have possibly been so SELFISH. I mishandled so many confrontations when as a sober person, I could have walked away or soothed the burning emotions. Being an alcoholic caused me to care very little about not only my loved ones, but about any consequences at all. I definitely cared about myself and what I wanted, hence why I called myself “selfish”. But as far as the health, financial, and emotional consequences, I really didn’t care.
A really fitting encounter happened yesterday. As I was driving through a parking lot in Fort Walton Beach, I saw a man walking with his young daughter. He was easily recognizable. I had gotten into a big bar fight with him several years ago at a dive bar called Coasters. That period of my life was one of the most reckless, and when my drinking picked up considerably. I was all alone in Seattle, reeling from the fallout with my daughters mother. Not being an everyday parent drove me crazy, and knowing another man was raising my child every day while she was still an infant and me being able bodied and willing, caused me to not give a damn about very much. It is a miracle I stayed in graduate school or wasn’t thrown in jail this time of my life. The week prior to coming home to Florida and getting in the brawl, I had driven to Alaska from Seattle, a sort of psycho holiday… in the middle of December. In my Jetta. It was such an idiotic, foolish, and reckless “plan”, that I casually left a farewell letter sitting on my desk in the event that I died during the voyage. I still have the letter somewhere. When I somehow made it halfway to Anchorage without being crushed by a rampaging buffalo (a near miss) or flung off a cliff during white out snow fall conditions, I tempted fate by drinking a few beers at some backwater outpost in a ghost town. After driving all the way to Anchorage and back to Seattle in about 5 days, I arrived in Florida and was “allowed” to see my daughter for a few hours in Tallahassee. When I got to Fort Walton Beach, I went straight to the bar and proceeded to get hammered. Lack of sleep and lack of care resulted in me staggering around the corner and proclaiming to the first person that I saw that they had a beat down coming. There is really no point in recounting the details. They disgust me. I still have the scar above my eye from the punches I took to my face. My knuckles were sliced to ribbons, and I was told that I was laughing like an idiot as I got pummeled by this guy and one other person. A friend saved me from further injury by threatening to call the police, and I remember sitting in his car afterwards. I burst into tears, not from any physical pain, but out of the frustrating feeling that I was on some runaway train that I had no idea how to stop. I got out of the car, found the person who I had fought sitting under a staircase behind the bar covered in my blood, and apologized to him. I distinctly remember telling him thank you and that I had deserved this. I wasn’t just referring to my actions that night, either.
Last week my dad and I were having lunch on the bayou, and he told me a side of my late grandfather that I had never heard before. I was shocked. Never in a million years would I have ever pictured my grandfather being an alcoholic. Not from my memories of him. He was a sweet, hilarious old man that never had a frown on his face right up until the day he left this earth. Yet here I was, listening to an eerily similar story of alcohol abuse, violent and reckless tendencies, and a brush with throwing a family away. I couldn’t believe it. It was how he finally changed that made me realize that this journey I am on is guided by fate of family and circumstances. He quit cold turkey, same as I had done almost 3 months prior, because he couldn’t live with how he was hurting his family. Maybe this addiction skipped a generation. Would I have approached alcohol in a different mind set had I known my families complete history? I have no idea. Sometimes I think we just have to experience these kinds of things for ourselves. That being said, I wish I had at least known that this had happened before in my lineage. This entire time I had been walking around thinking that my family tree held no history of addiction.
I know that this isn’t over yet. Meetings with a drug and alcohol counselor has helped my awareness of the chemical side of things and how the cycle of post-acute withdrawal symptoms will be a part of my life for the next several years of my life. These happen every 30 days or so, another piece of information I would have been better off knowing before this all started…my last fight with Angelica happened around day 60. The details of these symptoms and what happened that weekend are uncanny.
Like I wrote last week, both with the fact that I am sober and the other changes that I have made in my life have resulted in a fact that I am oh so aware of : I am better off now than I have ever been in my entire life. I will never forget the pain I caused the people that I love the most, or underestimate the damaging power of substance abuse.
My inspiration
