“Come on, Anne! Where’s your passion?!” a long-time friend asked me. We hadn’t seen each other since 2006.
I can understand the question. When she last saw me, I was leaving Tampa for Blacksburg, definitely passionate, feeling physically and emotionally strong, determined to make a new life for myself in my old hometown.
A lot happened in 8 years. And in the past 18 months, I’ve struggled to stay abstinent from alcohol.
I remember my 2006 self. I envision her as whole. I drew stick figures to show that I experience addiction to alcohol as being some kind of black intrusion that adhered to my very self. Abstinence neutralized addiction. But it dissolved me away beneath it.
“The ‘whole self’ is the one that got in trouble with addiction in the first place,” Dan Smith comments on this post. He posits the existence of a “recovering self.”
I am open to these ideas about the self and assume that my conception of the-self-having-become-addicted will evolve over time.
But right here, right now, at 18 months sober, when I heard, “Where’s your passion?” I felt bereft. When I compare how I saw myself and how I felt about myself, 2006 vs. 2014, I feel faded, wisp-like, as if I have fewer particles.
I am not what I was. I am less.
And when I feel bereft, I want a drink.
. . . . .
If I read this post by a friend or acquaintance, even by a stranger, I might think, “Uh-oh, uh-oh, she’s in trouble! She’s going to relapse!”
I have written that the trouble with recovery from addictions is handling how one feels and what one thinks when not drinking or using or acting compulsively. It’s hell. This is just another news report from my private recovery hell.
And blog posts are problematic. A blog post is a stand-alone entity, like a poem. But I am writing the story of my recovery as it unfolds. So the last post is the end of the story until I write the next post. For someone reading a book, if the content of a page is distressing, the reader simply turns the page and is relieved immediately. If someone is reading a blog, and the post is distressing, there’s no relief. The reader has to handle what he or she feels and thinks until the next post comes.
Kind of like wanting a drink.
