I regret nothing.
That’s right. I had a fucking blast.
My drinking days were good while they lasted.
Sure, there were blackouts and some awful choices. I was at times reckless and maudlin and outrageous and hilarious. But I was an addict, a woman addicted to alcohol. I was a girl-woman stuck in her pain, lost to herself for a lot of years. So I drank. And most of the time drinking made me feel a little bit better about my life.
I hated my life. I did.
I wanted to stop feeling the things I felt. I wanted to kill my memories. I wanted to crush my shame. I wanted to have some fun and not feel as miserable as I often felt in my private moments.
I wanted to stop having disgusting nightmares. When I drank it was for numerous reasons that my crazy brain had concocted. I thought drinking could help me feel “normal”, help me feel like I might fit in with other “normal” people. Help me feel like I was never a girl whose childhood was shattered by sexual assaults, like I was never a teenager who frequently felt unsafe in her own home. A teenager who ground her teeth as she slept, bracing for the eventual sound of the knob turning on her bedroom door. When I drank my hope was that it would help me become someone who might find a way to feel okay in her creepy-crawly skin.
When I was sober, I could barely look at myself in the mirror.
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I write these posts every year on my sober anniversary as a reminder about my alcoholism. I am an alcoholic. Sober for thirteen years now, yes. But I will always be an alcoholic.
I write these yearly posts to remind myself how helpless I once was, completely at the mercy of my alcoholism, wholly unable to resist the magnetic pull of vodka or rum or gin. Hey alcohol, sock it to me, baby! Numb me the hell ouuutttt! I don’t want to feel anything at all!! In the end—the last three years of my drinking—it was all vodka mixed with either cranberry juice, or mixed with Kahlua and milk.
And then, one day . . . it was over. My drinking days came to a screeching halt.
No notice whatsoever. Just a death scare.
Twenty-five-plus years of hard drinking had finally caught up, ripping into my health. Fuck me!
A weakening pulse. Shallow breaths. Poisoned blood. My body shutting itself down.
I almost died.
Ended up in the hospital for a blood transfusion that saved my life.
Whew! That was so stinkin’ close. It scared the shit out of me. I had to join Alcoholics Anonymous.
In those beginning months of AA I cried miserably. I was afraid I was going to die. I was terrified that I was too far gone in my addiction to stop.
I thought, no way. I don’t know how to stop. I’m too hooked, I’m too weak. I’m a fucking gonner. Help.
I was humiliated. Felt so ashamed. How low I had fallen, I thought. To end up in AA rooms inside church basements full of strangers, many of them scraggly-looking old white men. Ugh. Usually only a handful of us were women. It was rural Pennsylvania, so each time I went to a meeting of say twelve or more, there’d be only—maybe!—two (if I was lucky) of us who were black. All of us, drunks or addicts. Oh! My shame!
I was sooo mortified.
But I kept going to those meetings. Because I no longer trusted myself to stay sober on my own. I wanted to live. I needed the help of those scraggly old white men, and all the women who looked as lost and sad as I looked, ashamed to be there, in AA rooms, and the sprinkling of black drinkers just as helpless in their own addiction. I needed to keep listening to all their stories, to open my mouth and choke out my own story, over and over again. I needed to keep going to AA meetings.
Because!
The next drink might actually kill me. Not that specific drink per se, but the countless other drinks which that one drink would certainly lead to. I was an alcoholic. One drink would never be enough. All it would take for me to end up drunk as a skunk all over again was giving in to the ever-present temptation of just one measly drink.
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Meanwhile, temptation was everyfuckingwhere.
Holidays every goddamn season there was. Even summertime felt like one long drinking holiday, all the barbecues and shit. Billboards, always beckoning. And those stupid television commercials—about weekends being made for drinking and vacations with fruity drinks—were nonstop. Mocking me.
My demons screaming at me to drink because getting drunk, floating on that mind-numbing buzz, was the only way those demons would shut the fuck up and leave me alone. Drink drink drink! Come on! Just a taste, bitch. You know you wanna!
I could never stop at having just one—or even two—drinks like non-addicted people—the regular drinkers of the world. I had to keep drinking until I felt high enough— not just mildly buzzed, more like, suPeR hiGh—or until I threw up, or until I blacked out and passed out. Or in my case, until I died.
If I sound angry it’s because sometimes I still am. Sometimes. And this is okay. I am no longer afraid of my dark side, no longer afraid of my shadow. All emotions are welcome at this reflection party. When it comes to the life I’ve lived thus far, when it comes to an addiction that has held me in its relentless clawing grip, I give myself permission to feel it all. I give myself permission to feel everything. I give myself permission to tell the whole truth.
Permission—granted!—to be all of who I am, not just pretty cute. Ugly and nasty can just as readily bring out the genius in us all. Facts. Emotions are our superpower. When we lean all the way in, when we allow ourselves to feel every one of them–whoa!–we find the absolute best of ourselves.
I came face to face with a stronger and more beautiful version of myself. Hello gorgeous!
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Alcohol was a plant. A setup, not unlike colonialism and marginalization. Rape culture. Classism. Racism. Capitalism. Patriarchy—white supremacist patriarchy, to be more specific. All these things colluded to disrupt my one precious little life, and also the lives of countless millions of other humans living in America.
Why shouldn’t I mention these realities? Why shouldn’t I speak these truths? I didn’t invent alcohol in my kitchen. I didn’t rape myself.
Last week I watched a Youtube video by a middle-aged black woman—a former actress turned writer—with a large Youtube following, close to one million subscribers. In the video, Tabitha Brown (writer/actress) told her story of being raped when she was fifteen. It was a secret she had previously–and shamefully–kept for more than twenty-five years.
Nine days after its release that video had been viewed more than 129,000 times and had over six thousand comments. The majority of the commenters were women. And a large number of those women were themselves, rape victims. Every one of them thanking Tabitha for sharing her story and for helping them to feel seen and less ashamed.
Thank you, Tabitha, for sharing your story.
There are way too many of us: women carrying shame about what befell us as females simply trying to exist in the world, trapped in shame prison, feeling painfully alone.
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Yes, I chose to drink. No one put a gun to my head. I get that. I became an alcoholic of my own free will.
But let’s not pretend to unknow the malevolence and evil rooted among mankind. Pandemics don’t fall from the sky. The Holocaust wasn’t an accident. Slavery wasn’t an anomaly. The world is filled with machinations to hurt us. To the powerful titans of industry, this is all just a game.
Nevertheless, here I still am.
I grew up. Not when I turned eighteen or twenty-one. Not even when I turned thirty. Over time–years, then decades, with experiences and lessons–I grew up. Especially when I finally got sober at age forty-three.
I learned to love myself. I learned to love all the broken pieces that make up my life.
I took my life back . . . repeatedly. From one season to the next. Even while I was still drinking. Helpless in my addiction to alcohol. I laughed. I cried. I loved. I fucking weeped, pleading to the sky for some kind of relief. I railed and screamed at life’s unfairness. I crashed. I burned. I got back up. I kept living.
I was wild and I was free.
Fuck fuck fuckity fuck it all! I lived!
I regret nothing.
I’m proud of myself. Thirteen years of sobriety today– Wednesday, April 12, 2023. I’m still here. And I love myself dearly. 🥰
And finally, because I lived long enough for a few paradigm shifts in thinking, I have learned to love this messy life of mine. I’m thankful for every crooked road I navigated to be standing here today. Thank you, Universe. I truly love my life.
I love you too, reader. Keep shining your light into the world. Please, reader– open up and share your own stories. There’s no one in this world who is like you. Your story matters. We need to keep telling each other our stories because they give others of us hope.
Love, Mia đź’•
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Happy Sober Birthday to me!
Thirteen years and still living sober! Woo-hooo!! Go meee!
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Originally published: April 12, 2023