- Alcohol
- Faith
I was born in South Boston, MA. My mom was born in Ireland, and her family moved to Falmouth, MA from Northern Ireland when she was a baby. The cultural values traveled across the ocean with them and were implicit in my upbringing though never really talked about. Alcoholism and subsequent or pre-existing depression (we’ll never really know) runs rampant through that side of my hard-working, intellectually-gifted immigrant family. On the surface my mother was the American dream. She worked hard but was a tormented woman. I remember her telling me that drinking is like having someone else go into your body and walk around. When I was child, I couldn’t wait. My mom moved to South Boston when she was a 19-year-old labor and delivery nurse. She had always been extremely gifted and goal oriented. This, in my family’s belief system, discounted any other behavior that might be dysfunctional or pathological.
My mother met my father at a party in South Boston. I remember marveling at the story of my conception and dreaming of the romance of drinking and debauchery. He was from this small neighborhood in the city and was also a child of the same Irish Catholic values, but he was far more American. My childhood consisted of witnessing alcoholism all the time. Although I had a lot of privileges and was expected to do well, I grew up in a family system and neighborhood culture where alcoholism and addiction were both accepted and expected although nobody ever talked about it.
I drank for the first time when I was nine years old. I remember saying, “I want to do it until I can’t feel my face.” From then on it was a love affair. I endured a lot of physical and emotional abuse while my father got sober and took a medication that made him full of rage. My parents divorced when I was five, and I didn’t feel seen or heard even though I was given plenty. I felt alone and suicidal, even as a child. I was always seeking relief. I remember a kid telling me about sucking his thumb, “It feels good, you should try it,” when I was in kindergarten, and I got instantly addicted though I had never developed the habit as a toddler.
Drinking alcoholically was a rite of passage in my family, and as long as I kept doing well academically, which I always did, nobody cared if I drank. My alcoholism mimicked mental health problems cunningly, and I never spoke of the severe physical abuse I was enduring. It was a mystery to the people around me who asked, “What is wrong with this kid?” Soon any substance that I could ingest, I did. I ended up surviving my self-hate, despair and total inability to cope with the ups and downs of life by drinking to oblivion and ingesting any other substances along the way. One night, in a blackout from a cocktail of alcohol, opiate pills and benzodiazepines, I was carried home and raped on my kitchen table, an event that my mother walked into and witnessed. I was at my summer job the next day and got a phone call from my mother. I threw up in the bathroom from the disgust that I felt after she shared what had happened. She was furious with me, blamed me, and so I drank and drugged more in hopes that the feelings of disgust would go away. I was so enraged at the world; drinking and drugs were my only solution. I believed that if anyone knew how I felt, they would be so proud of me for coping the way I had.
I got in drunken fistfights with my mother while drinking, hit pedestrians while drunk driving with my mother, who had become a doctor, and fought over narcotics in the morning to ease hangovers. I was still a recipient of the message that being successful in vocation and education gave me the right to drink. I also heard the message that I would never be good enough. I went to my first-choice college early after using my neighborhood connections and inherent charm to avoid charges of forgery, DUI, assault and harboring a fugitive. I never thought I was lucky to have evaded severe consequences or thought I should stop drinking and using drugs. Every time I felt clever to have gotten away with something, and I felt more empowered to drink as I pleased.
I attended a small, prestigious, women’s college in 2008. I felt far from home and out of my element. Rather than immerse myself in college life, I would drive all the way home to meet my drug dealer and my friends who hadn’t left our high-school hangouts. I lied and manipulated my way out of consequences for some time, but eventually my violence when intoxicated became too much for the school to handle. I did not drink like the people around me. I could never stop once I started, and the intervals in between starting got shorter and shorter. I was ingesting some psychotropic substance daily and was being hospitalized for overdose, alcohol poisoning or psychiatric instability almost weekly by the time I finally got help. When I drank I became a totally different person. I would do drugs I thought I would never do and make decisions I thought I would never make. I felt my past and my emotional pain warranted the violence that I exhibited when intoxicated.
My school intervened after a particularly alarming and violent assault and mandated psychiatric treatment. I swore off alcohol for good. I was never going to drink again, but the following week, Cinco de Mayo of 2009, my heroin-addict friend from Boston was living in my dorm with me as I tried to complete my neuroscience finals without drinking. This required a lot of other substances, and we got invited to a party. I had absolutely no defense against the first drink. This was the moment I realized I had lost the ability to choose. I started to wonder what my future held because I knew I was getting kicked out of school and that I had no other vocational skills. I would be shunned by my family and homeless. However the ability to not drink at the party was entirely beyond me. A nonalcoholic person would think, “I won’t go,” or, “I’ll go and not drink.” I, the real alcoholic, started to wonder what my new life would be like once I inevitably drank again.
I drank again, and it was very bad. I hurt a lot of people and got in a lot of trouble but by God’s grace ended up in a hospital rather than a prison. I was introduced to support group meetings shortly after this time. I was 20 years old, and I felt 100. I was so drained, tired and ashamed. I thought that if people knew the things I had done or the places I had been, they wouldn’t want to help me. Asking for help went against every fiber of my being and contradicted everything I had been explicitly and implicitly taught in my upbringing. However I was defeated.
I admitted to another alcoholic, not a doctor or a therapist, just a woman who lived about two minutes from where I had grown up in South Boston, that alcohol had an abnormal effect on my mind and body, that I broke out into a craving for more and that I became totally different and dangerous when I drank. I drank to the point of blackout every single time since age nine and doing so made it hard to feel remorse for my actions. She told me her story and the solution that she had found through a 12-step program. I was given hope, and through that same 12-step process and a lot of love, I have recovered from that hopeless state. I finished college, I turned 21 sober and that feeling of loneliness and uselessness, constant isolation and the desire to die has left me. I have a happy and useful life. I’m 25 years old, I have a master’s degree and I’m five years sober. I love my beautiful life. I work as an expressive arts therapist doing healing work with others who suffer from hopelessness and bringing light to them. I no longer get my feelings of worth through my accomplishments but rather through how compassionately I can live. I have so much faith in the human recuperative process and in what love can do.