The Girl Who Lived

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be." The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Oh the horror! To use an opening line belonging to someone else. I should be ashamed. I learned that opening one's essay with a quote or definition weakens the writing. I was sixteen and taking a pretest of the Advanced Placement English exam for high schoolers looking to gain college credit by scoring a 3 or above. I don't remember what the quote that I used to open my essay was, but my junior year English teacher handed me back my essay pocked with red marks. "Never," underlined three times the red pen wrote, "open an essay with a quote or definition." I was never told why, maybe it makes you look bad because you didn't come up with the quote yourself. Maybe I was stupid enough not to be the first one to think of what I was quoting, but I was smart enough to use it. When the time came to take the actual placement test, I found the opportunity to open my essay with a quote. And I used it. And I was in the top 5 percentile of students who received a score of 3 on all advanced placement tests I took. Two English credits and one History. My main point is that right now I can totally relate to my opening quote and I don't give a shit about conventional rules.

I read Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower for fun when I was a junior in high school. I drank every weekend and occasionally snuck a few shots in between classes during the week via a plastic water bottle. I vaguely remember passing out mid-lecture in Algebra II class. I clearly remember getting all A's in that class. I was captain of my soccer team. I was in a tight race for third place in my class. I got made fun of for being a teacher's pet. But you wouldn't catch me sober at a football game under the lights. I try to tell myself that I don't know how I managed it all, and as much as I hate to sound like a complete arrogant piece of shit, I know I managed it all because I was smart. I knew that if I pulled off good grades it didn't matter what else I did. Or so I told myself. As I was making horrible decisions with a clear water bottle in the side pocket of my backpack, I was being praised by my history teacher for writing an essay that "read like a Cold War novel!" Academically I was on top of the world, and personally I was itching to watch it burn.

I did manage to possess third place in my graduating class and enrolled as an English major at the University of Maine at Orono. Again, I drank every weekend and Thursday nights, but I almost always ended up hungover the next day. This sometimes resulted in skipping classes or not completing my assignments on time, but I still managed to make Dean's List every semester. I never partied, instead, choosing to drink by myself in my dorm room or with my boyfriend from back home when we stole vodka from my parents. I never counted how many shots I took and always took it straight with a chaser. By the time I graduated with a 3.8 GPA I had many prospects for jobs but had a hint of yellow tinge in my eyes. I remember always wearing glasses instead of contacts to try to distract others from looking directly in my eyes. It was as if the teal framed glasses held a wall and the truth that prevented others from seeing my disease. If I hadn't quit my first job out of college from the complete misery it brought, I was about to get fired for constantly calling out. But I wasn't hungover; I would wake up after 8 hours of sleep and was beginning to withdraw. It would take two hours and multiples shots to finally settle my stomach and put to bed the awful pins and needles feeling that plagued my arms and legs. I'll always remember the first time I heard the saying "hair of the dog." I was fourteen when I hungover for the first time ever. The night before I had drunk with my brother and his girlfriend at the time. It was the second time alcohol touched my lips: raspberry flavored vodka held in my brother’s cheap shot glass that read Bar Harbor ME. When I told them I was hungover his girlfriend laughed harshly and said, "Hair of the dog!" Then she handed me another shot and cheers'ed me. I'll forever be haunted by the way her eyes turned dark and her mouth upturned into a snarl as she said it. 

It wasn't long before "hair of the dog" stopped becoming a quick remedy until I could sleep it off, and instead turned into my always consuming alcohol. I legit would not stop. I could not stop. Near the end, it got so bad that if I slept more than six hours at night I would wake up violently ill with the withdrawals. I didn't know then that alcohol and benzos are the only two drugs that the withdrawals alone can kill you. And they did kill me, twice. I suffered two seizures when I tried to quit cold turkey and lost consciousness both times. One time I was walking my dog in the winter and my fiancé at the time came home from work asking me why I was covered in mud. I had flatlined in a ditch off the side of my road. I don’t remember walking home or why my dog didn’t run away. No one helped me. I like to think it’s because no one saw. 

Alcohol continued to be my constant companion; it consumed my life. I was in and out of hospitals with acute pancreatitis and fatty liver, I almost lost two other jobs because of it, and my marriage was ruined within a year. The only thing I could claim as an accomplishment was the fact I had never been arrested for it. But I didn't stop. I went to a detox center four times. The first time I was able to stay sober for a month, but all the other times I would be discharged, find a hidden bottle somewhere (I hid tons under my bed, in my backpack, the place in my car where the spare tire is stored), tell myself I would just finish the bottle to get rid of it then be done. Before that bottle was even gone, I found myself buying another one. I was in it bad. At first, despite all the destruction the alcohol did, I didn't care. Whether it was denial or true arrogance I'll never know, but I told myself I'd be some kind of badass like Hemingway or Joplin if I died because of the disease. That's right, I might have died young but at least I lived. As if managing to literally drink and drive and lie to my coworkers about smelling like alcohol at work was that noteworthy. The last year of it all, however, I started caring. I was in constant pain even when I wasn't in the hospital. I was always exhausted. I was extremely unhappy. But I couldn't imagine having a life without alcohol.

In the early spring of 2020, right before Covid-19 fully exploded and shocked the United States, I was told I had a huge cyst in my pancreas. The alcohol was literally eating away at it. I still shudder when I recall the terrifying back pain and how I tried to deal with it like a normal everyday occurrence. I managed to last three months until I checked myself into a hospital on June 3rd, 2020. I have told this story thousands of times and it never gets easier. It never will. On June 9th when the surgeon went to take out the cyst, they accidentally cut a major artery. I coded twice on the table and remember waking up from it in the middle of everything. My stay at the hospital extended six weeks and was riddled with frantic movings to the ICU, having a breathing, feeding, and draining tubes, and relearning how to walk. I was told that I would never be able to drink again. It really would be the death of me.

Now, on December 3rd, 2020 I am six months sober. Four and a half months sober on my own. As the cliche goes, some days are better than others, and as time goes on it does slowly get easier. "So, this is my life...both happy and sad...still trying to figure out..." I am so grateful for the second chance I had been given, but the pain of losing my drug of choice, my companion, will forever haunt me. Even though I'm happier than I've ever been, especially with a clear head, I'm always mourning the piece of me that was lost when I left alcohol. I refuse to conform and say that stopping drinking was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because it wasn't. It was almost the complete death of me, and it was the death of a part of me that defended and protected myself. I guess I'll always be that girl who refused to listen to those words written with red ink over 10 years ago on my paper. I'll refuse to listen to Death's red inked warning that I should be grateful for a second chance, period. For me, there will always be a but. I am grateful, but I will always mourn. And now I will end how I started: with a quote. Chbosky beautifully ends his book with a quote that is both positive but realistic, "...please believe that things are good with me, and even when they're not, they will be soon enough. And I will believe the same about you."