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It started when I was 19 years old. My friend was a bartender and often sneaked me into her job. I requested for her to make me a Bloody Mary because I liked the name.To be honest, till this day I don’t even know what it contains. All I remember was thinking about my Grandfather
who died before I was even born from a drunk driving accident. His car went over the bridge and my father said when he went to see him at the funeral his cheek bones looked like they had been caved in. That isn’t going to be me is what I said to myself.
I started drinking real heavily at the age of 22. I only went to bars alone and bought entire bottles of liquor which I always drank in one sitting. I didn’t think anything of it. I’ll never forget going to a Japanese restaurant and ordering a large bottle of Sake that serves 5-8 people and drinking it all to myself. The waitress put her hand on my shoulder and asked me if I was okay. I wanted to say no but I was already gone and just laughed it off. Most of my friends smoked marijuana so I convinced myself this was my way of winding down. I kept this routine going for years…
Then I would plug my headphones in and walk the cold streets of New York until 2 am. I thought I was Rick Deckard or something, I walked around in a trench coat with my collar popped up and spoke to no one. I strongly attached myself to the identity of the rebel loner but in reality, I was extremely depressed looking for someone to save me. I was miserable but I didn’t really know why.
During my time in community college I met a group of misfits that I meshed perfectly well with. We always had a bottle of Svedka in the lounge room and I would suck that thing down like it was a baby bottle. You see, I could never focus on my school work if I was high. But being drunk and writing a paper was a walk in the park which gave me more of an excuse to drink. At this point my tolerance was high so when the liquor ran out I would send one of the guys to grab me a beer from the 7-Eleven across the street.
It started getting bad when I started to invite the violence and recklessness. Me and my friend would always pre-game with a bottle of whiskey no matter where we were going. After getting extremely hammered we proceeded to take the train into the city. Walking in a straight line was nearly impossible. It’s a miracle I’ve never fallen onto the train track. We’d always piss at the end of the station since we thought no one could see us there. But this is New York, there was always someone there. I remember urinating on the platform, I looked back and a woman grabbed her daughter by the hand and yanked her away from us and was cursing up a storm. But I didn’t care. We laughed since we thought “we were showing them”.
The emotional and physical numbness would set in and that’s when I would ask my friend to punch me in the face. In the beginning he would always laugh it off and call me a weirdo. Now that I look back I think that he was pretending not to enjoy it as he was a little bit of a sadist. He always punched me in the same spot. My right cheek bone would quickly blacken and I’d wear it like a badge of honor. I’d come to work the next day, people would ask me what happened and I would laugh and tell them the truth. They’d laugh and call me crazy which is actually not the reaction that I was hoping for. I wanted them to ask me if I was okay, if I needed to speak to
someone etc. But nobody did. That’s when I felt even worse for thinking that someone else was going to come and solve my problems for me. How selfish and ridiculous does that sound? So what was my solution? I decided to drink some more and not tell anybody about it.
The worst it’s ever gotten during my college days was when I first played with the idea of ending it all. One night I got so drunk I walked to the Manhattan bridge off of Canal st. I played with the idea of jumping off. I remember looking at the water and freaking out that it looked black to me. I wanted to jump off but I wanted to survive. I had a million thoughts going through my head at
that moment. I was angry at everyone and everything. I became obsessed with questioning my purpose in life. Then I texted my friend and wrote “What does this all even mean?”. No response. Of course not, it was 3 am after all. The next morning when I woke up I saw a stream of messages from people I haven’t spoken to in a while. Exes, acquaintances. I was a drowning man grasping for straws. When I sobered up the idea scared me, but not enough. I kept drinking, even more.
Me and my college buddy eventually lost contact. I used to think that he was probably the only person who could keep up with me. But in hindsight, we were actually having a competition and trying to out drink each other. I was sad that he’d gone away because I wanted a partner but I decided that if I’m going to do this, I’m doing it alone. But what exactly did I agree to do?
Author Kurt Vonnegut once mentioned that smoking cigarettes was an elegant way of killing yourself. So that’s exactly what I decided to do. I was too scared to jump off a bridge, swallow pills or pick up a gun. So I decided that I would secretly do this and see where it would take me.
I liked the idea of inflicting pain on myself. I’ll admit that some of it came from a sense of bravado and testing my threshold. But a lot of it was also trying to make myself feel something. So I decided to get extremely drunk one night and look for a fight. I walked the streets of Manhattan looking for someone that looked at me the wrong way. I specifically walked past bars because if I got into a scuffle I wanted the other person to be accused of being drunk also. Am not going to drown myself alone now am I? Anyways, the night progressed and in a sea of people I was more invisible than I ever felt in my life. It was almost like the universe could sense that I was craving for attention, so everyone ignored me. I was trying too hard, and in the end I got nothing. So I went home.
I found a greek neighborhood very far from where I lived and nobody knew me. II could start a new identity and kill myself as much as I wanted there without embarrassing myself and seeing a family member. The owner of this one bar really liked me and started offering me free drinks every time I came. Mistake. Poor guy didn’t know he was only ushering me into my demise. I had a street dog mentality and attached myself to where I knew I would get attention.
I kept coming back over and over to the bar and that’s when I discovered the second Identity. I don’t suffer from multiple personality disorder or anything like that. But that’s when I began to acknowledge that there’s a duality in me. The drunk version of me, is the person who I’ve always wanted to be. Highly social, affable, loving and extremely generous. It’s what was labeled “The real me”. It was a warm, comforting nest that I could hide behind. It was almost a
super power. I ended up meeting people that I would never have the courage to talk to, saying all the things I’ve wanted to say to friends. I thought I was doing the right thing by being transparent…but in reality I was being extremely vicious.
My father got diagnosed with Lymphoma, and although I never had a good relationship with him it destroyed my soul. My father had a pretty good sense that he was going to die. He was always strong as an Ox, and I’ve never seen him get sick. Hearing him say that he was going to die angered me because he sounded like he didn’t have any will to fight. I think my grandfather’s depression got passed on to him and then on to his kids. My father’s vice was never alcohol though, it was cigarettes and my sister opiates.
He died within eight months which caused my sister to use even more and me to chase after the bottle. Even though you know someone is going to die it still hurts when it happens. I didn’t cry at the funeral, I saved that for when I was alone and when I would slip into my second personality. When I was drunk all I could think of was the way they had sown his mouth shut for the funeral and how much it didn’t look like him.
One night I decided to drink as much as I could and see if I could hear his voice. I went to my usual spot and drank more than the norm. I could barely walk straight and my vision was hazy. I sat down to take a break and when I looked up I could have sworn I saw my father crossing the street, looking at me. I burst into tears and just layed there on the sidewalk for a few hours. I don’t know what happened that night, but this is the night I decided that I’ve had enough.
I can talk endlessly about what awoke me and everything that helped me get off alcohol but It’s never just ONE thing. I started to take exercise seriously and took up journaling. I learned various meditation techniques and attended spiritual classes. I stopped consuming porn for an entire year and refrained from self pleasuring. And even though I felt like nobody was listening, I prayed. But then once it looks like things are going well, life decides to punch you in the mouth again.
Eventually my sister passed away from chronic usage and life truly didn’t make sense to me anymore. I was already on a road to recovery when this happened and I could have easily slipped back to my comfort zone. But I stayed focused on the path and remembered to use the tools that I’ve picked up.
This is a process that took years for me by taking incremental steps. There was a lot of meaningless spite I was holding on to and in return I got to live with the regret. I realized the consequences of leaving things unresolved with the people you love. More importantly I realized how finite our life is. What’s left of my family is me and my mother, she’s part of my purpose to keep going. I started taking spirituality even more seriously and learned how to meditate deeper, disassociating myself from my urges and thoughts.
I often think about my sister and imagine how we both could have helped each other out with our vices. I think she felt the same things I did and we could have put an end to this weird cycle
that preceded my father. The continuous mantra that I’m chatting to myself is that it ends with me.
It’s a continuous process, you never stop recovering. You don’t just reach the top of the hill and say “that’s it.” You keep going. Everyday. Remember how terrible you felt, how you let everyone down. It will fuel you.
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