I don't know how to stop the pain because I don't know where it starts.
An excerpt from my new recovery memoir, Love Me Sober
This is an excerpt from my new recovery memoir, Love Me Sober: How I broke up with booze & came home to myself now available for download at this link.
Ride It Out (Jan 15th, day 15)
The last two weeks of maintaining my sobriety have felt to me like I am fighting a war no one else can see. I cannot explain it and do not want to because I am overwhelmingly tired of trying to explain things to people. All I can do is stay close to myself and put one foot in front of the other as I do not put large goblets of wine into my face.
When Saturday night rolls around, my third one sober (third!), I stand in front of my husband exhausted and undone. He wants to turn up the music and swallow down the whiskey and I want nothing more than to play the role I have played along with my whole life. The role of the cool chick with the tight body and the easy wit, who can hang with the big guys. Drink and smoke and fuck and be all around needless and easy. I could match those guys pace for pace, until I couldn't.
Part of me wants to ditch sobriety right there in front of the fireplace as we listen to Todd Rundgren confess that he’s thought about someone special for a ‘long, long time.’ Part of me wants to say fuck this and go back to being who I was for a long, long time. Sink all the way back into the wine bottle like nothing else matters. Like nothing has to change. Like drinking or not drinking is no longer a choice I have to make. As if both addiction and sobriety are just bad dreams.
But it is not entirely true that I want to give up, it’s just that my brain is a matrix of well coordinated lies I’ve been telling myself for so long that I mistake them for the truth. The lie that I was fine when I wasn’t. The lie that I was in control when I wasn’t. The lie that I could stop whenever I wanted even though I knew I couldn’t. My thoughts are a jangly mess that wants to be music but isn’t because it’s mangled with all manner of exaggerated distortions buzzing around each other, culminating into a maddening burst of shrieking panic.
My beloved looks into my eyes and tells me I am beautiful and strong. His words feel like warm honey for a split second and then they just roll right into the back of my screaming thoughts. I try to hold onto that elusive warmth with all that’s left of my withering might.
If I make it through this night without poisoning myself, it will be the fifteenth in a row, not that I’m counting except that I am absolutely counting the days, the evenings, the hours, the minutes. Not always. But sometimes. And the times when I am keeping count are so loud that I can feel them beating against my organs all the way up through my throat. Thoughts are knives; and try as I believe I must to dissolve the ones that want to sever the string of days that are the only outside proof of my sober progress, part of me is on my knees begging for the piercing stab of gushing release. Just cut me open already. Just cut me loose from having to do this very hard thing. I just want the pain to stop and I don’t know how to pull that off because I don’t know where it starts. I don’t know why.
If only I could understand this shit, maybe I could pull it apart, lay it all out on the table of my manic mind and restructure it. I am a fool in some ways and I admit that but I am not entirely ridiculous, am I? Addiction is a motherfucker because it isn’t some outside menace that is chasing you down the street, it lives inside of you as you. It is sinister because it knows you more intimately than you know yourself.
It’s got pretty claws and glistening fangs which are laced with a euphoric kind of heavenly abandonment. It’ll lure you in seductively right before it tears you limb from wine-soaked limb. My addiction speaks cunningly to me because it knows me so well. Just when I am starting to get the hang of sobriety, suddenly my addiction appears from out of nowhere and whispers:
You want out, sweetness? Come here, baby, I’ll get you out. That’s right, angel, give me those big hopeful eyes of yours and all that aching flesh, inside, inside, take me inside into those dark places and let me spill out all over. Drink me, suck me, fuck me, I promise I’ll give you everything you crave so badly. I will give it to you til you can’t breathe or think or move or speak. You can’t help it, I know, you poor pathetic thing.
My husband has always been the kind of guy who rolls with the punches and I adore that about him. The cold doesn’t phase him nor does the heat just as long as he can be wild. As my mental torment plays out unbeknownst to him, he sips red wine and lights up his fancy cigar. I sit by the fire smoking a cigarette, wondering if any of this matters at all in the end. If I drink or don’t drink. Was I really that bad? But even through all the internal chaos, I notice that the music is so good that somewhere inside of me all of my questions and fears dissipate like a fog gently lifting off of a wide dark sea.
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Allison Marie Conway is a Certified Professional Life Coach with a specialization in Addiction Recovery Coaching, working primarily with women who want to quit drinking. As a creative and resourceful woman living an intentional life of sobriety, Allison brings her deep compassion for those who struggle with alcohol addiction, and her unique life experience in navigating the ups and downs of sobriety, to her beloved work. She is also a published author (Love Me Sober, 2023; Luminae, 2018), wife, mother, mentor, and addiction recovery researcher and advocate. Before opening her private practice in 2023, Allison worked in the professional corporate environment for over twenty years, excelling in supporting C-Suite executives for well over a decade. She earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences from Pennsylvania State University. Allison grew up in and around northeast Philadelphia, and currently lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with her husband, John, of seventeen years.
I relate to a lot of this, but that headline got me. Very powerful, thanks for sharing and wishing you the best with the memoir!
Bringing back some memories 😌 so beautifully written. Thank you so much for sharing ❤️