I Just Quit Trying.
I grew up with a whole lot of non-alcoholics. I didn’t know any addicts until after I became one myself. This, I have learned, is unusual, since alcoholism and addiction are considered to be genetic.
I’d like to say I prove that theory wrong – but my grandfather was a falling-down drunk. I just didn’t know him; he died when I was a toddler.
Somehow I grew up in a mostly happy family. My parents were ridiculously nice and our only dysfunction came from the fact that they were barely legal adults when I was born. I was raised right. My two sisters and I were taught right from wrong; nobody lied, and we all did well in school.
So when I started to drink, it actually surprised my family. No one else in my immediate family ever had a problem with addiction.
When I started failing classes in ninth grade, everyone was shocked; I’d gotten straight A’s all the way through middle school. But then … I just quit trying. I got angry, and I decided that I was no longer going to follow my parents’ serene way of life.
To say “I got angry” sounds, now, like the understatement of the century. I raged for well over a decade. I blamed most of my anger on my parents’ decision to move me out of state when I was in 8th grade.
I’d lived in seven houses by 8th grade; I’d been to five schools. We’d been renting, but had finally bought a home. So I thought: we’re finally staying somewhere!
The new house meant I’d finally gotten away from the evil school bully, who’d made my life a living hell. There were kids all over my new neighborhood, and we skateboarded and hung out. I thought I finally had actual friends.
We lived there for six months. We left my beloved Westminster, Maryland just as I was finally starting to feel good.
So when I arrived in Blacksburg, Virginia, I stopped trying. I didn’t want new friends again. I didn’t want to go to yet another school. I went to a sixth school for the second half of 8th grade, and then – as luck would have it – I started high school in Virginia and graduated from high school in Pittsburgh.
I was pissed.
More than that, though, I was lonely. I was soul-crushingly, heart-wrenchingly lonely, and I thought my parents had taken away my friends. So I planned to “show them” – by destroying myself.
My parents’ first clue was probably the parent-teacher conferences where the word “potential” was used frequently. For the first time in my life, though, I decided not to try to live up to that potential. I somehow passed ninth and tenth grades with a slew of horrid grades; I retook math in summer school. Twice.
During the same years, I picked up my first drug and my first drink. Drinking let me wallow in all that anger, while simultaneously making the anger feel less obtrusive. And it made me feel like my potential didn’t matter. My grades didn’t matter. My life didn’t matter.
But drinking, when I started, also made me feel like my life was finally under my own control. I was finally choosing what I wanted to do, instead of following some script written by other people. I was making my own choices and taking my first step toward independence.
Little did I know that I was taking that first step at the top of a very slippery, million-foot-long, gleaming silver sliding board that was going to burn me the whole way down.