It Is What It Is

CW: References to substance abuse, addiction, infidelity, and mental health struggles.

“The hardest part of getting clean are all the damn apologies, paying tolls on bridges that I’ve burned.” 

It’s a line from the Cameron Whitcomb song Quitter. I played it for my sponsor Gina, after a meeting one Sunday night while we sat in a Steak ‘N’ Shake across the street from the church where we met. She told me that I’d come to the part in my recovery that it was time to make amends. She’d let me get away with skipping this step for longer than I’d expected. Still, I laughed, “You saw my mom drop me off, right?”

She stared at me.

“I’m pretty sure she’s forgiven me.” I inhaled through my nose sharply, before throwing myself back against the booth and crossing my arms over my chest. “I’ve already apologized to my sisters and brother. They’re fine.” I stopped speaking, but when she continued to stare, I added, “And I’m certainly not going to call up some other druggies and dealers to be like sorry I ripped you off.”

Gina stirred the straw in her milkshake three times around the glass before raising it to her lips. The silence hung between us, and I watched the cords of her neck strain, as she sucked up her chocolate, lactose nightmare. She released the straw from between her lips, just long enough to say, “You know who I’m talking about,” before using her tongue to guide the plastic cylinder back into her mouth. 

My heart hiccupped, because I did. Frank. The man I’d sworn was the love of my life, my one and only, who I had dedicated seven years of my life to being with, only to watch it dwindle to a threadbare relationship in the end. 

He and I were both flirting on the edge of addiction when we first met, but I had restricted myself to wine, and he had restricted himself to weed, like that somehow made us any less addicts. We were just using more societally acceptable drugs to quell our demons. But I loved him, and I never once doubted his love for me, which was why I accepted his lie when he told me he got syphilis from a toilet seat. I so adamantly convinced myself that I argued with the case worker in her broom-closet office when she told me that someone had to bring the STI to the relationship. “I know he didn’t cheat on me,” I said. “He got it from a toilet seat.”

She’d blinked at me. “I’m just saying to look out for yourself. Most of the time people are only focused on self-preservation.” 

I got the penicillin shot in my ass and bitched about how uppity she was the whole drive home. I didn’t think anything of Frank’s silence at the time, but I rarely thought of anything at the time back then. 

When he confronted me about my later infidelity, I responded with a far-fetched lie, and when he questioned me about it, all I had to say was “I believed you when you got syphilis from a toilet seat,” and he was quiet. 

The drugs were undoubtedly the crux of our issues, but that saga perfectly exemplifies the extents we would go to maintain status quo. Together we experienced whatever meager life our drug induced stupor could provide and buried our demons with cinderblocks of cocaine in an ocean of Bacardi and Yuengling. And in the early morning, we held each other in a jittery, nauseum, swearing that we loved each other. And I suppose we did, maybe more than we should have, because if we hadn’t clung to each other so desperately, it might not have gotten as bad as it did. 

When I got sober, I cried to my mother about my woeful love life, screaming, “When will someone love me enough to make me soft?” 

My mother, who had become my best-friend in sobriety, put on her maternal voice. “Let me ask you this,” she said, “Would you have married Frank?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t a weak and weary answer. It was as definitive in execution as it was in my heart, in my soul. “If I could go back and marry him, I would.”

Her posture prickled. “You would give up your life now—you would give up your two years of sobriety—just to marry him.” 

I gave her the answer she wanted. No. But I wished it’d never gotten that bad. I wished we never started using together. I wish I could have kept it all together. All the things I wished, but didn’t say. I clutched them close to my chest, afraid to speak them out loud, because maybe I wouldn’t have loved him like I did if we’d been clean. Our love had been a trauma bond, balanced on the precipice of common wounds and the need to avoid them. I’d roiled the idea around a few times, but refused to allow it permanence, because it was easier to remember him as a lost love than lost time.

The thing about AA, especially in the early days, is that it’s fraught with quotes that would otherwise leave you gagging but offer a sense of solace as you tread this new life, as raw and scared as a new-born baby. And you might as well be. I spent so much time in active addiction, that I rotted the part of my brain that knew how to navigate emotions and human interactions, all while steeped in a deep-seeded guilt of the past decade.

 So I greedily collected those quotes—

“grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—

and clung to them an in attempt to create some sort of Frankenstein Virgil, guiding me through the hell that was sobriety—

"my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”—

finding comfort in the fact that because the quotes existed, meant someone before me had suffered the same—

“No amount of guilt can change the past.” 

I was happy to leave the past where it was, unfettered and drifting further and further out of my memory.

It took me nearly a month to finally log into Facebook. I’d been intentionally ignoring social media since getting clean, because it felt like there was nothing in my life worth bragging about. Yes, sobriety comes with a sense of pride—you did it, you beat the odds—but more often than not, the feeling of shame outweighs the pride, especially at the beginning.

 It took me a few tries to remember my password, since I’d changed it while in active addiction to prevent Frank from logging on and discovering any mishaps or indiscretions. But when I finally got it, I was bombarded by baby announcements and montages of varying proposals and wedding pictures. I scrolled for hours, lost in self-loathing, truly realizing for the first time just how far behind I was. When I finally slammed my laptop shut, I went to the kitchen and ate an entire bag of dino chicken nuggets and half a cheesecake. 

I took me another week get back on Facebook, but this time I ignored my feed and went straight to friends, typing Frank’s full name into the search, first, middle and last. The two of us draped over each other outside of some bar was still his profile picture, and he hadn’t posted anything since a month before we broke up. Either he’d abandoned Facebook, which I highly doubted, or he’d started a new account. 

By this point, Facebook was sending me reeling into a full-blown panic attack. I felt pathetic. I was a loser. A nothing. Everyone’s lives were the perfect spitting example of everything I’d forgone while chasing a fucking fake high. 

I pulled up Instagram. It was the only social media platform I’d started a new profile on, intentionally only following family, coworkers, new sober friends and funny animal pages. I scrolled through those for a few minutes before finally typing in Frank’s Instagram handle. He had kept the same Instagram; although he had unfollowed me. Luckily, it was not private, and the most recent post was a week previous. I scrolled. It was mostly pictures of him at Hockey games. I felt a tinge of jealousy when I came across several pictures of him in the Dominican Republic—he and I never traveled—and I was actually proud of myself when I came across a picture of him and another girl, definitely romantic, because I honestly thought, good for him, while simultaneously, but separately, feeling bad for myself. I could look at his life as separate from mine, and that in and of itself was cathartic.   

It was a later picture that stopped me. New Ink was the caption beneath a picture of his collarbone, with a freshly scribed tattoo: it is what it is, and it isn’t what it isn’t. It itched like an AA quote, like those simple words held the power to string your life back together, and if he was in AA, then he’d understand my message. I shifted over to messages and typed out a three-paragraph essay with beautiful execution, taking responsibility for the part I played in the destruction of our life together, wishing him the best and telling him that I’d always cherish the memories we made together. But at the end, I hesitated. I shifted back over to his profile and scrolled down to the tattoo picture.

I thought back to when I had cheated. The only person I ever told was my best friend, and when she asked me how I felt, I told her that I felt guilty, that all I wanted to do was spill my heart out, confess everything to Frank.

“You can never do that,” she said, her eyebrows pinched. “All confessing will do is make you feel better, and it’ll ruin him. It’s selfish.”

Whatever guilt I felt was mine alone. And whatever guilt he might feel, was his. But if he ever loved me, and was finally moving past my memory, my popping up out of nowhere would only set him back to square one. And I loved him enough, even still, to want him to move past me.             

Another line from Camerom Whitcomb’s song drifted through my head: “The hardest part of getting clean are all the damn philosophies, telling me how this is supposed to work.” And I understood Whitcomb’s frustration, because sobriety is not a clear-cut path; the only thing clear about it is the destination—otherwise it’s a faded map with winding roads that intersect and change names. And was I supposed to ignore my gut feeling, just because “the steps” demanded it?

I switched back to the message and held my thumb on delete. 

Gina asked me a few days later if I’d made amends. I told her yes, because I had. I had made amends with the past, and that was better than making amends with him, because in the end the past is skewed by your perception of it, by what you want to believe about it. I had finally seen my past with him for what it was. A beautiful, scary, fleeting moment that needed to be tucked into a photo album and only remembered for what it was.