Catt Scratches

A couple of days ago I passed a lifetime marker and I know I need to write something to mark it,  but it’s big and imposing so I have been dodging putting fingers to keyboard.

April 8, 2010 marks ten years since I have had a drink. I am profoundly grateful for my sobriety and elated that I no longer consider getting high or drunk to be pleasant. When I quit drinking, I realized that I had the capacity to feel emotions. It freed me. I drank mostly because it kept me from feeling badly about my home life and my self deception. What helped me to stay sober was my divorce and my resolve to be true to myself.  Sometimes, I can’t believe my good fortune.

Many people know my story because I’ll tell it at the slightest indication of interest.  In my family,  my parents made a point of not making a big deal about alcohol.  It was treated as just another food to be consumed in moderation. I remember having red wine, some kind of inexpensive gallon jug burgundy or chianti, with Pepsi Cola at Sunday dinner at the age of four or five.  So I can truly say that I drank for more than forty years.

At the tender age of fifteen,  I won a poetry contest at school. That night was the cast party for the winter play. I spent some of my hard earned prize money on a pint of Gordon’s Gin (Is there product placement money to be earned in blogging?) and got trashed. I mean blackout walking around the block vomiting trashed.  It was so  embarrassing. The teacher who held the party had to call my parents and tell them that I was asleep because I had “played a lot of basketball” that day.  Well, my parents knew that I was as likely to be playing basketball all day as to be speaking before the United Nations in support of American Foreign Policy so my dad jumped in the car and drove to Brooklyn to pick me up. I remember nothing after the fifth or sixth gulp straight gin over ice until the following day.

I never appreciated the significance of this event until years later. My first serious drunk and I kept drinking until I blacked out. And I hated the taste. But I just kept drinking. A teacher of mine told me afterward, “Jill, nobody drinks straight gin.” Well, nobody but me.

I didn’t drink much for about a year after that. (I had started smoking pot to fill the gap) I smoked a lot of pot over the next eight years. I washed it down with enough beer, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and Jack Daniels too.  Pot and booze were significant parts of my life. It’s a wonder I made it through high school and four years of college.

I sharply curtailed my drinking during law school; I drank on breaks and weekends only.  After the birth of my daughter, my marriage just started spiraling downwards and I drank heavily for the next thirteen years to keep me from realizing just how miserable I was.   I didn’t drink in the mornings, or at lunch, but I drank every night starting from when I got home from the office at 7 or 7:30 until I fell asleep at 11:30 or midnight. I didn’t just have a few drinks. I had nice stiff ones and chased them with shots just to get started quickly. I could not pass the time at home without being under the influence.

The reason I drank, and every drunk has a reason, is that it kept me from feeling. Therapy helped me realize that my feelings were valid and needed to be acknowledged, and not drowned.

After my ex moved out, I decided to quit smoking. My doctor prescribed a pharmaceutical aid to smoking cessation and when I got the scrip I read that one shouldn’t drink when taking it.  So I said to myself, being a little hungover anyway, maybe today’s the day I stop drinking. Besides, I wasn’t married anymore. I didn’t need to drink.

At first, I was going to go 28 days but my therapist said, no, they tell drunks 90 days and 90 meetings so I balked and but I made 90 days anyway. I had stopped missing it by that time so I didn’t even realize the 90th day had passed.

So I cannot say I experienced anything more than extreme psychological discomfort when I quit drinking. I never had the DTs or the shakes. I never felt the physical symptoms of withdrawal. I quit before I hit bottom; how I had the sense to do that, I’ll never know or need to know. I did it. There are times when I want a drink but these times are usually linked to frustration combined with emotional exhaustion.  Now when I feel like a drink, I work out.

Cigarettes are another matter. I love cigarettes. I haven’t smoked in 30 days; to be exact, I haven’t smoked in 730 hours and about 20 minutes. But I would smoke if I didn’t stop my self. I had my first cigarette when I was 11 and started smoking on a daily basis at about 13. I kept at it for about 20 years, with two quitting periods mixed in: one for about 10 months and one for about 3 months. I quit right after my daughter was born. (okay, yes. guilty. sorry. call family services on me.) and I stayed quit for 12 1/2 years. Then, three years of smoking followed by seven years of not smoking. Then I smoked for eleven months following a bad breakup; I took a month off from smoking and went back to it in the midst of an enormous professional and personal crisis.  I quit 30 days ago after smoking for seven months.

When you read that paragraph above, did you sense the pure addict talking? The rationalization, the bravado, the arrogance. I can’t write anymore about not smoking because it will make me want to smoke. I fight with the addict in me every day and gradually, she is silent for longer and longer intervals.

It’s kind of easy to write when you are depressed and not so easy when the sun is shining in your life. At the moment, knock on wood or particle board (my computer desk) I am giving myself a moment to mark this mile by patting myself on the back and reveling in the righteous life. I don’t drink or smoke. I work out four or five times a week. I am on a healthy, miserable cupcake free diet, I am working with a trainer who brutally works my hamstring, glutes, abs, thighs core and shoulders. I have a new car,  a satisfying relationship with an affectionate,  sane and sober man, and a couple of dollars in the bank. I am putting money in my retirement fund on a regular basis (even though my retirement plan calls for dying at my desk). My daughter and I are getting along well and I am actually (gasp) learning how to balance my professional life with my personal life.

If only I could put myself in  neutral and coast the rest of the way out of here.  I write this as a memorial to good times.  Things will be bleak again but they can always spring back to this. Every human being has the capacity to change.  The mile markers in our lives give us perspective on that change.