This whole thing started with Jury Duty. I mean, I guess you could go back even further -- way, way back, to a job, and a co-worker. Two co-workers.
This is the flaw with the whole Butterfly Effect theory. At what point are things set in motion?
For the purpose of not having to rehash four years' worth of Life, let's start with jury duty.
It was such an emotionally tumultuous time in my life. I was on the verge of capsizing. Quite literally. I was teetering on the edge of sanity, contemplating suicide, reaching and grabbing and fumbling for some thread of hope, and coming up empty-handed.
I was supposed to get married in September, but did not. My fiance -- no, my ex-fiance -- had moved out at the beginning of February, and it was now nearing the end of March, and I was completely derailed.
A recovering alcoholic-addict, I had mostly maintained my recovery simply by abstaining. I hadn't worked a program, and hadn't attended a meeting in over a year. My EX-fiance was in recovery as well, and we had fallen into this comfortable complacency that involved a lot of time sitting in front of separate computer screens, and very little time spent outside our home, either together or separate.
That had worked just fine for the first two years of my recovery, but now, finding myself relationshipless, and suddenly faced with "life on life's terms," I had plans to relapse. I was ACTUALLY planning my own relapse. Friends -- "normal" people -- didn't understand addiction, or that I was afflicted by it, and supported my plan to start drinking again. I kept saying "one day soon, I will have a drink." I knew it would start with a taste. I would take a sip of someone else's drink. When that didn't cause the world to end, I would order a drink for myself. When I got through that without blacking out, I would be able to order a second drink. And then, after I had done that a few times, I could stop at the store on the way home from work and pick up a bottle. And drink the bottle at home by myself. And THEN I would have an excuse to behave the way I had been behaving. Because drunks are allowed to fall asleep on the bathroom floor. Drunks are allowed to wail and sob and destroy things. It's okay for a drunk to have random bruises appear, because drunks are clumsy, and angry, and depressed, and crazy.
I did all of those things. I was all of those things. But I wasn't drinking. If I were drinking, it would be so much more okay.
That was how I rationalized my relapse. It was necessary, for the sake of my dignity.
And that's exactly how diseased thinking works. Or rather, that's how MY diseased thinking works. Once I came to this realization (and thank God I did), I knew what I needed to do, where I needed to be. I needed a meeting.
It had been so long since I had gone to a meeting. I didn't know who went where anymore. And I knew what people would think. They would assume I had relapsed, or just think I was coming around hoping to run into the Ex. And that was another thing. I DIDN'T want to run into him. I knew that since we had broken up, he had begun regularly attending meetings again. But I didn't know which ones, so I didn't know which to avoid. And there were other people I needed to avoid as well. Women he had been involved with. His sponsor. People who were close with him, who might know just how crazy I was.
And so, my solution was to go to meetings out of town. I went online to a meeting finder website, and searched meetings at least twenty-five minutes away. I had a solid list, and I began on a Monday. I drove half an hour. I pulled up to the meeting site, pulled into the parking lot, took one look at the small group of addicts smoking outside before the meeting, and drove away.
It's a social anxiety thing. It's a "less than" thing. It's a "not good enough" thing. It's not something I can really explain. If you get it, you get it. I just...couldn't. I couldn't walk into a room full of people I didn't know, and share what I needed to share. They would judge me. They would look at me. I was an outsider. They didn't know me. They wouldn't get me. So I left, without giving them a chance to prove me wrong.
I did the same thing on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, I went to a seven o'clock meeting. I left that meeting without getting out of my car, and drove to a seven-thirty meeting. I didn't attend that one, either.
I did this all week, sometimes driving over an hour to a meeting place, only to leave without ever getting out of my car.
By the weekend, I was exhausted. I knew what I needed to do, but I just hadn't been able to bring myself to DO it. I had tried to get a friend to come with me, a fellow addict, but he was busy with work, and moving, and life, and it just didn't happen.
I was weak, and I was broken, and I was running out of hope.
At least I didn't have to face work on Monday. I'd been cursed with jury duty, which meant getting a paid day off to sit in a court room for an hour or so. After that, I could drive to and promptly leave probably at least four or five meetings. I could cry on the way there, and on the way back. Maybe I would even walk in to one of them.
At least I wouldn't have to go to work, where I would have to see the Ex, who works about ten feet away from me, in the same department, on the same team. Work was the worst part about this breakup. We still had to see each other forty hours a week. I still had to hear him laugh, feel him looking at me, endure his looks of sad pity as he saw me come undone day after day. He was not a bad person, but no break up is neat. Not when we had had plans to get old together. And no one should have to come face to face with that failure every. Single. Day.
Yes, jury duty was definitely preferable to a typical Monday.
I had no idea that this was going to be the wing flap that led to the wind shift that caused the tsunami that changed my world forever.
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