“You were kind of a late bloomer as an alcoholic, right?”
“Yeah, I didn’t really start drinking seriously until around 2004 or so.”
“That makes sense, it fits. Because you strike me as the kind of alcoholic who’s drinking to kill something inside of you. Not really that y0u’re trying to kill yourself, in fact, but something inside you.”
“Yeah, but there comes a point where I don’t really give a fuck which one dies.” That’s scary. Scary scary shit.
************
Separate, unrelated (?) entry follows:
Over and over I’ve heard about how alcoholics, when we stop using, often face a sort of flood of back-logged emotions that we’ve been avoiding for years, and that we don’t know how to deal with them, which can make the experience overwhelming, confusing, and very painful; our coping skills are often negligible at best. I do realize that I have difficulty experiencing in full my own emotions, or even just letting them happen without putting up a fight. This is not necessarily because of my alcoholism (although likely exacerbated by that); this was true of me long before I seriously began drinking.
Beginning around 1998 or 99, I began using the example of crying at a television show or a movie or a song (and I actually thought myself quite ingenious for coming with/realizing this and even thought it to be emotionally healthy, or something like that – a useful tool, at any rate). It was, I said, a safe place to have an emotional experience, with definite boundaries. There is a confined safe space to enter into, have a more or less “satisfying” emotional experience, and then leave it behind. Nice, neat, tidy. That theory may, in some way. also be indicative of why I seem to find it easier to experience emotions through other people, empathetically or sympathetically, than to experience or confront my own emotions.
I started to try to explain some of this to my shrink a few days ago, and he said, or kind of questioned, whether I might be trying to “warn” him. Entirely possible. But this whole thing with emotions scares me, both because facing whatever these emotions are is scary as fuck in its own right, but also because I fear that if I do not or cannot, I will never escape the cycle of drinking, that “it” will end up driving me to the Bottle, make me drink; that I will succumb and accept defeat and destruction; that I will fail… again… and again; that my only escape really will, in the end, be death, not the pretty kind, the alcoholic kind; the kind that will scrape those rusty claws over all the people I care about & love, and it will then dig its claws into them, too, and never let go.
So I want this shit to come up from the ooze. It needs to. But I don’t know, you know?
anatheistataa 