what was your rock bottom?
My rock bottom was different than most. It wasn’t the last time I drank but it was the last time I clung to a person who was no longer.
It was a night made of two (three? I can’t remember anymore) empty bottles of wine, Catholic shame beating me over the head for loving the woman I did, and a Heart of Dixie episode that seemed to show me the life I should have been fighting for — a life long dead by now.
Alone in a near-empty room, waiting for a text that never came, I wrapped myself in a blanket and drank glass after glass. Each sip, removing myself more and more from the world that was too bright, too much.
The later it got, the more I spun in my head, thinking of a way to keep suffocating the girl inside of me who had just finally broken the surface.
It’s a weird occurrence, to both want to be and not want to be someone so badly. To have gotten a taste at what finally letting her breathe would feel like but then that darkness, that person I’d been for those twenty years prior, came back with full force and beat her over the head.
Dragging her back under water.
Dragging me back under water.
That night, that night was my last chance at clinging on to a life I knew was impossible — a life I didn’t even want.
Each letter I wrote in that mistake of an email, that desperate-last-ditch-Hail-Mary attempt at hanging on to a her that was already gone, drew a paper thin cut on my hands. One after another, by the time I hit send, my keyboard was covered in blood.
I used to feel a lot of regrets about that night, the things I said, the things I didn’t mean, the pain I probably caused.
But I can’t move forward if I can’t forgive that girl from that night. That girl who had finally crashed head first into her rock bottom.
—
Almost seven years later, it has been (and continues to be) a journey but I can safely say I still don’t drink.
Everyone’s recovery looks different but know I’m here for you, we’re all here for you, through it all.
A few of the many resources out there:
