Growth

No point in burying the lead: 2020 was a catastrophically bad year for me.  Absolutely horrible.  I did not get sick, nor did any of my family members.  No one died or lost their jobs.  There was no immediate financial wreckage.   So why was something that by all accounts did not affect me on the surface fuck me up so deeply?

What I came to realize recently is that the pandemic was just the trigger that re-opened a fleet of unhealed wounds.  A major, life and world-changing beast of a trigger, but a trigger nonetheless.  Last year felt like a floodgate opening, with every emotion I had battled to repress or thought I had dealt with coming to the surface.  As the world fell apart around me, I fell apart within me. To worsen things, my healthiest outlets of group exercise, in-person volunteerism, and travel were eliminated overnight.  I was literally stuck at home with my thoughts, my absolute version of hell.  And like many others, I turned squarely to the most obvious, cheapest, easiest coping strategy of all: my old buddy alcohol. 

Somewhere along last summer, with no end to the pandemic in sight, I fell into a debilitating depression.  A depression so deep it felt astronomically foreign to me.  I had come to terms with the anxiety that had plagued portions of my 20s, but depression felt different, weakening in a way I couldn’t fathom.  In one of my first sessions with my current therapist, I told her that oddly enough anxiety always felt like a productive byproduct of struggling; anxiety actually made me over plan, find things to fixate on and goals to achieve.  In a weird way, the brainwashing that our sick patriarchal capitalist society had put me through told me that if I just tried hard enough with my anxiety, I could use it as a tool for productivity and structured planning.

But I couldn’t sell myself on this new depression.  In fact, I couldn’t do much of anything because my willpower, energy, and motivation were entirely depleted.  Despite getting plenty of sleep the night before, I was taking an almost daily midday nap during my lunch break.  Dishes piled up, food went uncooked, texts remained unanswered, nothing interested me.  A particular moment that terrified me was when I had the stark realization that I literally had nothing to look forward to. 

Yet I kept putting alcohol into my body, thus heightening my anxiety and deepening my depression, all the while wondering why nothing was seeming to improve…

In a recent session, my therapist highlighted a point that stuck with me.  I told her the other time in my life where I felt I did not have much of any control on myself and certainly not my drinking was my early 20s… and 2020.  After I described how my early 20s were spent in a place where I had minimal real responsibilities, money to blow, and was living in a location that always felt like you were on vacation, she observed that I probably had a lot of time.  And the past year, living in California during the pandemic where virtually nothing was open, I also had a lot of time on my hands.  Sure I had work, but no commute, no activities, no weekend plans, and minimal familial obligations.  Again, TIME.  So, what was it about this excess time that led me to fill it with drinking?   Was it, perhaps, because filling this time with drinking as a coping mechanism was the easiest way to blatantly choose to ignore dealing with the open personal wounds that had been triggered when the pandemic began?  I told my therapist she might be on to something.

Truthfully, I am still charting out what this all looks like for me.  But one thing I unequivocally know after the horror of last year is that if alcohol were a healthy coping strategy for me, my life would have at least incrementally improved over the course of its usage.  Right?  But that is not what happened.  It only made things worse.  FAR worse.  SO much worse that while I knew I was hurting for 9 months, I didn’t even seek therapy until December, when my anger and helplessness came to an obvious breaking point.  So much worse that I read 44 books, watched 20 television series, and did 3 sad puzzles to distract me from doing anything remotely close to confronting my own shit and dealing with my healing.

Therapy, exercise, meditation, reading, and writing are all fundamental to my healing.  But I’m adding a new one: sobriety.