In my first post I briefly mentioned my first year in sobriety, but I said we’d leave that story for another post. So here’s how it started… Let me start by saying that getting sober was not my idea. Well it was, but no one else knew that I was even considering it. It was one of those ideas that would pop up, but that I would quickly dismiss because it seemed impossible. I had no idea how to even attempt life sober and the very idea was absolutely terrifying. I didn’t want to do anything that I thought I might fail at because I already felt like I had failed at everything. I hated who I was. I hated the life that I had. I woke up every day and felt like I was living someone else’s life and I didn’t understand how I could have everything that I was supposed to want (according to society’s standards) and be completely miserable, but I was. I would get up every day and go through the motions, but I always felt like I was stuck on the wrong side of the looking glass. So every day I would start drinking as soon as I got home from picking up the kids from school so that I didn’t have to feel the anxiety and depression that completely consumed me every single day. My kids were the only that made me feel like my life was worth living at all. Being a mom was the only area in my life where I felt I had been successful, but I was even starting to feel like I was failing at that because my older daughter (who was 13 at the time) was noticing how much I drank and was aware of the fact that my mental state and my behavior were not healthy. I was a hot fucking mess and I had no idea how to fix it.

The shit finally hit the fan when I had a full on nervous breakdown on Mother’s Day of 2013 and I dealt with it by getting completely wasted. My family of course didn’t know about the breakdown, they just thought I was being a selfish drunk. To be fair, I can see how that’s what it must have looked like on the outside. I could go into all the fucked up shit they did to contribute to the meltdown, but today I’ll keep to my part in all of it. I hadn’t admitted to anyone that I wasn’t sleeping, that I had panic attacks that made me feel like I was going to pass out, that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. I would tough it out and deal with it how I had always dealt with everything; I drank it away. What I would come to find out a couple weeks later was that my family started planning an intervention after that weekend. Was an intervention necessary? I don’t know. I can see how they felt that it was. I will admit that in those days (and for the majority of my life) I was a fucking hurricane when I got mad and no one wanted to deal with that without a trained professional. Like I said, I knew I had a problem. I had thought about stopping and none of this was new. I started drinking and using when I was just a kid. I started going to drug and alcohol counseling when I was 13. I went to a rehab when I was 14 and again when I was 22. Shit, I did part of my sophomore year in high school at a continuation school called The Teen Recovery Center. This was however the first time I had experienced an intervention and I feel that the way that it was handled was not awesome… but it got me to go to rehab, so despite the horrid train wreck that it was, the goal of the intervention was accomplished and my entire fucking life changed because of it. So even though it was one of the worst days of my life, it lead me to some of the best days of my life.

I knew exactly what was happening when I opened the front door that morning and saw some professional looking woman standing on my porch with my mom, sister, daughter, and my two aunts behind her. I actually said, “Oh fuck no,” and shut the door. Earlier that morning my sister had called and asked if she could come pick up the kids so my husband (now ex) could have some time alone. He had been stationed overseas for a year, came home for two weeks in December 2012, and then left for his next duty station. We had decided to wait till the end of the school year before the kids and I moved up to Monterey to join him. He would come home a couple weekends a month while he was in Monterey and we’d party it up like we always did when he had a chance to be home. So it had been about a year and a half of him being away and me raising the three kids alone, so breakfast alone with him sounded like an awesome plan. Well, we didn’t even get to eat. The kids left with my sister. He started making breakfast and told me to go relax. I poured myself a screwdriver and sat on our balcony, and then came the intervention.

I was instantly pissed off and not kinda pissed off, really, really fucking pissed off. I went straight from the front door to the back door and started walking down the street away from everything. Then the intervention woman started yelling at me that she was going to call CPS on me. NOT a good idea. I mean, it got me to stop and come back, but the hurricane started building… I gave her a good, “fuck you bitch” as I walked past her on my way back to the house. I went in and sat down on the couch, amongst the circle of family members in the living room. Everyone looked like they were waiting for me to explode, but my daughter was there, so I didn’t want to make a scene. So then intervention woman (who I called the intervention nazi until only a couple years ago), gave the instructions for everyone to follow. I was to say nothing while they went around the circle and let everyone say why they were there. My aunts started. They were crying and saying how worried they were. It was touching and made me feel like a miserable failure, but it was constructive. My daughter didn’t have much to say and I can’t say I blame her. I guess she had no warning of this whole plan so she wasn’t really prepared. I don’t even remember if my sister said anything. But when my mom started in, I thought I was going to lose my shit. The story of my relationship with my mother is long so I’ll save it for another day, but I’ll summarize and say that it is completely fucked and she was a piece of shit parent. A horrible, awful, emotionally abusive, narcissistic, piece of shit… So when she started in about what a piece of shit I was and what a piece of shit mother I am, I could not stay quiet. I told her to stop talking. I told her I will not listen to any fucking thing that she has to say about me as a parent. Then my poor husband started. This poor guy… Not that he was a saint by any means, but he cannot handle confrontation at all (hence the paid interventionist). So he said what he had to say, but ended with a big fat ultimatum which was, “either you go to rehab today, or we’re packing the kids’ stuff.” That did it. Mom had pulled the pin and he just let go of that grenade. BOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!

A couple years ago, I heard someone say the phrase, “a choice of no choices,” and this story immediately popped into my head. Both choices sucked, which was exactly the reason they concocted that ultimatum. I had a conversation with my ex several months later about the whole thing, as our marriage was coming to an end, and he said that he knew I wouldn’t let anyone take my kids (my two oldest are not his by the way). He said that his first idea was to threaten to leave me if I wouldn’t go to rehab, but he knew I would let him leave. He was right. I wouldn’t have given up drinking to save my marriage. No way. To me, drinking was survival. Drinking was breathing. If you look at the research behind addiction and the way an addict brain functions, you’ll see that that’s exactly what your brain tells you. It becomes something that your brain thinks your body needs in order to survive… of course none of this is conscious, it’s all brain chemistry, but having learned about that wacked out shit in an effort to better understand myself, I was able to understand why I felt the way that I did when I had to consider giving up booze. It kicked me into survival mode, literally fight or flight survival mode and I was ready to take down anyone who got in my way, but they used the one thing that was more important to me than my own survival, my kids. He knew I would pack my shit and go if he threatened to take my kids, and he was right. Today, I get why he did it, but at that time and for a long time afterwards, I hated him for that. I lost all trust in him the second he used my kids to get me to do what he wanted.

I stood up after he gave me that ultimatum and said, “well I guess I’ll go pack my shit cuz no one is taking my kids anywhere.” I remember the intervention nazi telling me that it was my choice to make. I remember wanting to sock her in the mouth. I remember saying, “this is not a fucking choice.” I did everything I could not to throw anything and everything, not to hit everything. I was so mad that I could feel my entire body shaking as I walked to my room and tried to pack my stuff. My sister walked into the room and said she was sent in there to watch me… That was when I lost it. I started screaming at her to get the fuck away from me, to get the fuck out of my room. I probably looked like a fucking crazy person. She wouldn’t leave so I told her I was going to hit her if she didn’t get the fuck out so she finally left. Then my husband came in and I just kept screaming, telling him I was done with him, that I would never ever forgive him for threatening me and using my kids as a tool. I got my shit and went outside and a bunch of other family members were there with my two younger kids so I could say goodbye. The intervention nazi let my oldest daughter and my son come with us in the car to drive to rehab (they were almost 14 and almost 9 at the time). We sat in the back seat and all cried and hugged each other the whole way. I remember trying to tell my daughter that she had to convince my husband to let me come home. I can’t even describe the level of panic, and fear, and anxiety that I felt during that drive. It was the scariest thing I’d ever experienced… and I was homeless as a teenager, so I have experienced some crazy scary shit.

It was a twenty minute drive to the rehab but it felt like an hour. We pulled up to the front and I felt like my entire world was crashing. I was 33 years old pulling up to the same rehab that I had gone to when I was 22. I knew what to expect at least. You start out in detox and then go into a 28 day inpatient facility. It looked exactly the same, but it didn’t feel the same. The first time I was coming down off all kinds of shit and was still high walking up the steps and up the pathway to the entrance. The first time, I agreed to go to get everyone off my back, but I had no intention of actually staying sober when I was 22. I figured it would help me get off the hard stuff, which it did, but I was still having a good ol’ time partying. The first time I was there I liked my life. I liked myself. I was 22 and enjoying life! I was still successfully bottling up my past. But this time was terrifying. This time I knew I needed to do something to change my life and I knew that the changes that I needed to make were going to be incredibly difficult because I knew that it meant dealing with all the shit I had been burying with drugs and booze my whole life. So I started up those mother fucking steps and made my way into the detox facility. Part of me was relieved to be there and part of me was thinking up some award winning argument that would convince everyone that I was really fine and that I should go home.

After getting checked in to the medical detox, I immediately sat down and started writing up a contract of what I promised I would do if I could just get sober at home. I promised I’d stay sober. I promised I’d go to meetings. I promised that I’d go to therapy (again). And at the same time, on a separate piece of paper, I was making a list of stuff I wanted my husband to bring me from home so that I could stay… Talk about internal conflict! The next day was supposed to be family day at the rehab, where you could have your family come and visit. My husband had told me that he would come that day and bring the kids. Well he showed up by himself so I freaked out again. To make matters worse, I had refused all the meds and food at the rehab because, “I don’t need to be here,” so I was NOT doing great. It had been over 24 hours without any booze so I was rapidly approaching a downward spiral anyway. So I’m cussing and screaming at my husband in the hallway of the detox, scaring the piss out of the other patients. Those poor souls. I was begging him to let me go home and also telling the nurse to tell him that I’m okay and that I should go home. Holy fucking shit show… So my husband finally just left because I was a lunatic. Naturally that didn’t help the situation. The nurses insisted on taking my vitals. My blood pressure was through the roof. They tried to give me vallum and told me I needed to take it or I was going to have a seizure, but I refused that and got up and went to my room where I proceeded to kick the living shit out of my hospital room. I was crying and screaming and cussing at the top of my lungs. I threw anything that wasn’t bolted down. I literally kicked my hospital bed till pieces of it were flying off… I finally stopped after I punched the wall and discovered it was cinderblock. Ouch.

That did it. That son of a bitch hurt. Something clicked at that point. I went out and told the nurse that I broke my room and that I should probably take that vallum. She also gave me some sleeping pills. Ha! And that was it. I passed out and slept a whole night for the first time in months. I woke up the next morning and felt like I was where I needed to be. I ate breakfast and then went outside and bummed a cigarette off one of the other patients (who would later become one of my best friends in the whole world), and by the end of that day I decided that I was going to give the 28 day program a shot. My smoke buddy and I both decided we needed to do something and neither of us had any better ideas. That was the moment I became willing to do whatever it took. That was when life started to change, when I admitted that I was fucked and that I could not fix myself by myself. I have that date tattooed on my arm, May 28, 2013. The day that I walked out the doors of the detox facility and walked into the 28 day rehab, the day my do-over began.

Recovery is not an easy process. Anyone who has gotten sober understands how it feels, but it’s a struggle for families and friends too. One thing that has always stood out to me is how difficult it is for people who are not addicts to empathize with those of us who are. This is why I think we need to share our stories, so that we can better understand each other. Addiction is not about lack of will power. It’s about mental health. Yes, people do recover, but the reason so many of us don’t even try isn’t because we don’t want to, it’s because they don’t know how and we don’t believe we can. Before you judge an addict, do some research on the addict brain. There’s a great documentary called “Pleasure Unwoven” by Dr. Kevin McCauley that explains the brain chemistry behind addiction. So before you judge your family member to harshly for the decisions they’ve made and the things they’ve done in their disease, learn more about addiction and how it affects the addict. Help end the stigma around addiction. Addicts aren’t bad people, they’re sick people. Addiction is a disease, recognized by the American Medical Association and insurance companies as such since the 1970s. At least 10% of the World Population suffers from addiction.* It’s time we start educating people about it.

*According to research conducted by the World Health Organization in 2007.

(Photo: My sobriety date tattoo. I got it on my 3rd sober birthday.)