June 1st - Coming Back Down in 2021 entries

New Years Eve into New Years Day I had an accident in which I was hurt. I broke my left wrist and for about a month I had blurry vision out of my left eye from which we are recently discovering is from the air bag going off in my face and probably knocking me unconscious for a little while. To be fair, I was so drunk I wouldn’t know. My eye has been bothering me quite a bit lately and at one point in the last week I couldn’t see out of it at all. To me, its just another bump in the road that is my fucking body. I’ve had cancer issues, an infection that ravaged my face and head, a broken hip, twice. My left side of my body is a bigger letdown than the end of the sopranos.

I stopped drinking again at the beginning of the year after all this. I was scared that eventually my body wouldn’t tell my brain it wanted to fight anymore. Eventually if you’re drunk enough and are thinking about killing yourself, youre going to get unlucky enough to fuck up and do it accidentally, right? The problem I have is that I feel so bored without alcohol. I don’t need it for day to day functioning, but I just feel like the charm of having another shame filled, embarrassing, funny story to tell the masses of bar patrons and acquaintances alike isn’t there anymore. I have nothing fun to contribute. I can’t get baked and sit around with my friends and laugh over dumb things. The other things I love doing sober are hard. I can’t see straight long enough to read without getting a massive headache. Same goes for video games; staring at the screen makes my face hurt. I lay on the couch on my left side so I can see with just my right eye. I can’t even enjoy reading the subtitles anymore.

On top of all the bodily issues stressing me the fuck out comes the legal battle I’m enduring over the decisions I’ve made in the last few years. I have had multiple drunk drivings thanks to handling my stress inappropriately and being brutally honest, looking for a way out. It clearly isn’t something that I am proud of but they happened and I cannot change the results. Sadly, the actual intent I had multiple times was to get drunk enough that I would be able to crash my car into something that wouldn’t hurt anyone else but myself.

I fell in love with a girl the year before my first one in the late summer of 2018. Part of my continued emotional and alcohol abuse was trying to drown the pain of losing the future I was hoping to have with her and eventually I drank that away to the point where I was content being alive and drunk and literally accomplishing nothing with my life. 2019 as many know that used to read my blog, I was completely sober, seeking counseling and trying to put a semblance of my life back together again. 2020 I had more health issues, then everyone did, and the safest thing for me was going to treatment and then drinking a handle of whiskey a night, playing video games, screaming at random things and passing out because the bars were closed to patrons. I was slowly killing myself at home, but at least I was not at a bar driving around.

Something changed mid 2020, maybe it was the fact that I could go back to work, maybe it was the conditions of who I was working around and the demand of patrons and customers in an unknown, unsafe, unsure time of a pandemic at a place that lived on serving booze. I was back to getting loaded at work, driving home, and cycling. I stopped communication with a lot of my close friends. All I could think of some nights was what really was the reason I would get up the next day. When sober, I couldn’t stop feeling the pain, and when I was loaded, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I wanted to die. I thought I couldn’t get more unhappy. Why the hell had I put my body through all of that if I didn’t want to be here? What’s keeping me here? I really spiraled heading in to my birthday in October and I cannot for the life of me remember most of October through December. I was drunk or stoned for the entire time. Physically, other than having to puke up the booze, it was the best I had felt that I could remember - I didn’t feel physical pain. I talked myself into giving up a reason to live every day. Cutting a friend out, burning a bridge - I needed a way to just give up.

Then New Years happened.

The next day, I wondered - what now.

What is my life worth? Why am I getting up and going to work? Thankfully there were a few close people that pulled me aside, sat me down and in an almost intervention style circle said, “Stop doing this. You’re too smart to throw everything away.” I don’t know why it resinated but I started going to alcoholics anonymous and seeing people that also confided and depended on being sober. Struggling to find value outside of a work shift, I read what I could. I started walking a little again. It took months for my wrist to heal and since the last round of radiation my waist and legs feel like they’re on fire all the time. I couldn’t lace up my skates to skate from the pain - but, in guidance with the law, I was absolutely sober, nothing mood altering. I had to be to keep a life where I could roam free.

Around valentines day the estranged love walked back into the picture looking for something again. I thought I might need more of a boost to continue correcting course and finding worthy reasons for change. The last few months were great, and I thought it was going to be ideal and then the legal issues started becoming a reality again since the pandemic guidelines were slowly ending. Things got too real. The hypotheticals made her run away again. She wasn’t willing to make it work. A lot of the blame was thrown on me and my burden when she just used me to feel better and when that those good feelings where a questionable reality again, took off faster than a hummingbird in an open field.

As I struggle to find my way through this helpless and hopeless feeling and look for guidance into living a life with purpose and meaning I realized that I sacrificed my mental health and recovery to try and not hurt hers and in the process wrecked every good step I had taken. It is and should be about me first and when I take care of myself the happiness will come.

Sad as it sounds, I have a clump of notes under a stump at a clearing by my work where I would sit, drunk or not, and debate living. There would have been a time in my life where I would most likely be out there now, writing a note by the light of my phone and the moon, waiting to see if a certain song or gust of wind would change my opinion on life. Tonight I am comfortably sitting in my home, behind my computer, realizing that I need to write more and that I put too much care into everyone else over myself - sometimes I think that’s been a saving grace of my life but it has also warped me into the bitter, exhausted and miserable person I can be. I don’t want to be that anymore and if I have to do it alone, so be it.