But I Am an Alcoholic.
After the amazingly timed shooting star and my realization that I would never find happiness in alcohol, I quit drinking and never looked back. I suddenly had the foresight to see where my life had been heading, and knew that I didn’t want to go there. I awoke with a completely new attitude. I knew what I wanted, so I instantly created an entirely new life for myself. I became truly enlightened, turned myself around, and never forgot from whence I’d come.
Oh, how I want that to be my story.
I want it so badly, I can taste it still, three decades after the fact.
I knew that 1987 was the worst year of my life. To this day, I maintain that there was never a worse year.
I’d spent night after night after night wailing along to my boom box in a filthy kitchen as I drank beer and chain-smoked, lonely beyond any concept of loneliness I could have ever imagined. I’d been brutally attacked and raped and my “boyfriend” – an old man (39) I didn’t even like – had doubted the truth of my story. My favorite bar was ruined by a night I’d stayed too long. I’d gone to two Bike Weeks and what I remembered best was being humiliated into begging half-naked for a t-shirt and sleeping in mud puddles next to the world’s worst port-o-johns.
To get out of the mess I’d made of my life, I’d even tried to kill myself – but I was still alive.
My very best night I had in 1987 was one I don’t even remember. But for one brief, glorious moment the next morning, I’d believed I’d finally gotten away from the hellhole I’d created.
So in 1988, after a Sure Sign from God had blazed across the sky just for my benefit, I had no idea what to do next, except to not-drink for as long as possible. I thought, “I will never drink again!” And I meant it.
I had no idea it might be hard. I had God on my side, after all. I literally had God listening to me, watching me, and sending shooting stars across the sky for me. How can anyone argue with that?
Oh, how I wish I’d turned my life around in January of 1988.
But I am an alcoholic. And there is nothing about my brain that isn’t affected by the insanity of my addiction. So no matter what my resolve, no matter what I’d wanted with every ounce of my sober soul, my 23-year-old self had no idea how to make it happen.
This is how Alcoholics Anonymous saves lives. People who have lived through alcoholism and addiction who want to stop but don’t know how – they can learn how to stop inside AA. There’s a whole Big Book about it. There are not a few but hundreds of thousands of people who have gotten sober by following a path that two guys laid out for hopeless drunks starting with a meeting of two drunks back in 1935.
But I didn’t know about AA. I just knew I no longer wanted to drink.
(It wasn’t enough.)
But while I was in England, I fell into a space where I was the same person I’d been before I ever picked up a drink: the child of two loving parents, the sister of two loving sisters, a member of a family who happened to be traveling in the extraordinarily beautiful United Kingdom.
With the shooting star fresh in my mind, I decided I’d just go ahead and enjoy that.