My last night of drinking was the most dangerous kind of night for me. I was just intoxicated enough to have a fabulous time, but not wasted enough to make a fool of myself.
January 2, 2016 5:28 am
The last drink I had was a couple sips of a PBR around 3am on December 31, 2015. My boyfriend, some friends and I went to a music showcase the night of the 30th. You know, the electronic music kind where a bunch of white people high on drugs have their minds blown and their faces melted by really loud sounds. The kind where you see 16-year-olds wearing golden leather thongs and hot pink furry boots. Yeah, that kind of show.
We got back to the house around three in the morning (after spending $85 on a Lyft…effff, that’s like five hours of working to pay for that one ride, efff). I was parched. I’d been dancing and sweating all night. I wasn’t drunk. I was coming down after a night of eating Molly and snorting coke (and smoking pot…does that count? Is that bad? I don’t know). Not all night…just a few times throughout. Enough to make you feel good, but not enough to make you feel like you smoked meth and you’lll never sleep again.
This is the most dangerous kind of night for me. Where I am just intoxicated enough to have a fabulous time, but not wasted enough to make a fool of myself. I wake up feeling like I accomplished something.
“I didn’t do anything embarrassing! I had fun without going over the top! This must mean I don’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol.”
I forget the countless other times I have embarrassed myself and hurt others. I forget that the only reason I didn’t go over the top is because beers were $10 at the show and our drug dealer friend forgot to bring us Molly to buy. I had a limit on what I could do. I didn’t have enough money to keep buying beers. I didn’t have enough drugs to keep taking hits. If I had those options, I surely would have hit the top and gone well over it. I surely would have had a regrettable night. But I didn’t. I danced and I enjoyed the music deeply. And I enjoyed the friends I was with immensely. And they enjoyed me. And I wasn’t annoying or too much. I was just enough.
But that rarely happens. I rarely stay in control. I rarely am an enjoyable person to be around when I’m drinking or drugging. And that is why I want to be done. I want to be a better version of me. And drugs and alcohol never help me do that. Never.
There are a lot of thoughts bouncing around my head as I think about quitting booze and drugs. I’ll start where people say it’s helpful to start when trying to accomplish something: goals. I say accomplish…but is sobriety every really accomplished? You don’t ever reach a point and say “Wow, I accomplished being sober, I am done with this hard work, I get to stop working at this now.” I don’t think it works that way. It sounds like sobriety is a constant work in progress…which drives me crazy because I love getting things done. I love checking things off my checklist.
Stay sober. From this day on this will forever be on my checklist. I can keep checking it off at the end of each night but in the morning, it will be there, glaring at me, unchecked yet again. But that’s okay. Maybe being sober isn’t the goal…but the way to meet some other goals.
I’ll start with the big goals. I want to figure myself out a little more. I am not sure of myself. I don’t know what I care about…I don’t know what guides me. I don’t know what convicts me. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I am defined by nothing. I don’t feel like I know me anymore. I’m on a mission to get to know myself. So big goal #1 is to get to know me a little better. Drugs and alcohol cloud my perception of myself greatly. The more I drink the further I travel from my true identity. I become someone I’m not, someone I actually can’t stand. No thanks, I’m so done. Read more “the fix”…