Dear Future Lindsey, You Will Fall

Dear Future Lindsey (written as a teenager),

Things are going to get bad. Really bad. You are going to fall. You are going to get back up. Only to fall again. You need to know this now so that you will understand…not how to manage your way through it but to know the ending. In the end, you will find your footing. You will stand tall with your head held high. But its going to take a hell of a lot of time and energy. And faith.

This time in your life should be an exciting one. Leaving for college with a good strong head on your shoulders. Life seems shiny and hopeful. But it won’t last. After losing your mother in a few short months, your life will become something you can’t fully understand. You will quit school to take care of your younger brother as your father will completely come unhinged upon your mother’s passing.

You will shuffle from home to home trying to find your place. You will be lost. You will work multiple jobs while trying to find normalcy of some kind. While your other friends are still enrolled in school, you will work tirelessly to pay your own car payment and insurance. You will be blessed with some families who will take you in and pretend you are not a burden. You aren’t a burden, by the way. You are polite, you bring groceries home to help with the extra mouth they now have to feed. That mouth is yours.

The difficult decision to move away from your hometown to find some kind of solace in your sister’s home will happen just before you turn 20. You’ll find your way into a community college. You still love learning, so school will still come easily to you. Your sister is an alcoholic just like your parents. But you two will live in the honeymoon phase of drinking for a few years. Drinking together, laughing, telling stories from childhood. Her drinking is much further along than yours. Hers has morphed into something that causes problems in her judgment and relationships. Her choices in men will ultimately run you out of her life. They are violent in their drinking much like your father was. She will choose these men over you. It’s her illness, not her. But it will take you years to come to grips with this.

You are now 21 and working full time in a restaurant bar that you love. You will meet the love of your life there. You won’t know it at the time, but he is the one. Late nights, partying with friends, escaping trouble too many times to count…this will make up the vast majority of your early 20s. Then you marry this wonderful man when you are 24. He has an amazing family. You won’t fully trust them because you haven’t encountered a lot of functional families in your short life. It will take time and patience. On both sides. You will come to learn a mother who is loving and kind and patient. You will come to know that a father can be calm and understanding and not quick to shout or hit. These people are your in-laws. Your new parents. You will take them for granted. Not forever, but for quite a few years. You become accustomed to their generosity and sometimes forget where you came from. Who you came from.

You will be blessed with two healthy beautiful children. You and your husband will hold down decent jobs, sometimes struggling to pay the bills. But those are the same worries shared by so many others at this time in their life. Your drinking will increase. It will still seem like fun at this point. Like you deserve something to take the edge off when 5 o’clock on Friday arrives. Slowly, your drinking increases. It’s ok now to drink in the mornings on occasion. It’s ok to have drinks at lunch with your co-workers. I mean, they are drinking, too. So, what’s the big deal?

As you enter your early 30s, drinking has become pretty much a round the clock job. Sure, you will still go to work and church and coach your kids’ sports teams. But booze will become a necessity. No longer the “end to a long day’s work.” Now it is the beginning, the middle and the end of every day. You are falling hard and don’t see it coming. And you grow tired. Arguments ensue. Nothing violent. But you will find you and your spouse fighting over things that don’t even exist. Or don’t matter even if they do exist. You will grow apart. You and your person will start to become co-dependent strangers residing under the same roof. Co-dependent on each other with addiction driving the car while your love for each other is a passenger along for the ride. Barely hanging on.

Fast forward to your early 40s. The big fall happens. I told you it was going to continue to happen. This fall is the big one, though. The one where your best friend, your spouse, your person falls down and almost doesn’t get back up. The doctors tell you he will not live much longer if he continues drinking. And by “longer” they said he wouldn’t see Christmas that year at the rate he was going. At the same time, you will reluctantly enter rehab leaving behind your children and your husband who is still hospitalized. You have fallen hard this time.

This is the hard part. Relearning to walk and talk and function without the crutches of alcohol. You hear of people learning to walk again literally with the help of physical rehab. But this is a rehab for your entire mind, body, and soul. It will suck. There’s no gentle way to put it. Strange place, strange people, and you have become a stranger you see when you look in the mirror. Booze has changed you. Your eyes are different. I won’t say you see a monster, but it is definitely something reminiscent of a fun house mirror. Only this is anything but fun. It’s terrifying.

Dear Present Lindsey,

You did it! You survived rehab and all the shenanigans involved. You learned tolerance of others as well as tolerance of yourself. You got to go home with a new set of skills. Ones that don’t involve a substance to numb out all the bad feelings. You learned quickly you had been numbing all the good ones, too. Addiction doesn’t pick and choose what emotions you get to feel. It makes you cold. It makes you a monster you were never meant to be.

You now have seven months of sobriety under your belt, and you are doing amazing! You are writing again. You rediscovered your love of writing in rehab-Congrats! You always loved it. You just got too lost in your drinking to remember. You also drank away the ability to remember how much your husband loves you. He might have forgotten, too. Most likely not, though. He’s always been my person. It’s a rare thing that a husband and wife get sober at the same time, but you did it!  And life gets a little better every day.

Money issues, work conflicts, juggling day to day stuff still exists. They always did. Only now, you look at them with sober eyes. You discuss them with sober words. And you know it’s all going to work out. You wake up everyday thanking God for helping you to NOT desire a drink today. You never take it for granted. Ever. Because at any given time, an alcoholic can fall. We have all seen it. You hear your AA family speak of this too often to not believe it is true.

Now, when you fall, dear Lindsey, you know how to grab onto a much-needed lifeline and haul yourself back upright. Life is beautiful.