I started drinking when I was 14 years old. The very first time I drank I got blackout drunk- on Sun Country wine coolers.
Looking back, it was just another thing I did that I didn't know why I did it, I just knew other people were doing it and so it must be what I should do too. Doing things is different for me. The nuances that other people seem to naturally understand I only get in hindsight. There are so many unspoken instructions in everything.
I got blackout drunk because the instruction was: drink. I assumed my experience was what everyone else was experiencing too, that we were all doing it the same way, we were all in the same state of being. I didn't understand there were other options like not drinking at all, or going slow, only having two, switching to water- no one expressly told me those were also options- and by the time I figured that out it was already too late.
Too late because getting blackout drunk meant I disappeared. Everything got quiet. I didn't even remember I was a person. All the noise, the hundreds of daily micro-corrections, the confusion, the insecurity- when I drank it all stopped. It was such a relief. So of course I did it again, and again, for 27 years again. I blackout drank from 14 to 41.
I don't think I was addicted to alcohol itself. I think I was addicted to the silence it brought me. It stopped the incessant chatter of never feeling like I knew what I was doing. It shut out the stumbly bumbly two steps behind rushing to catch up feeling, the last one to get the joke feeling. That silence bought me quiet, it let me set myself free- when I was in a blackout I could do or say whatever came up and not be strung out on self doubt. But that silence also brought me a lot of shame. I did and said things I never would have done if I hadn't been beyond wasted; I paid a high price for that silence. I paid with my dignity, with my integrity. My self respect.
I was also addicted to the hope that arrived in my hangovers. I would wake up after a night of blackout drinking and feel like shit mentally and physically. I'd search my mind and senses to see if I had the bad feeling- somehow, sometimes, my system knew if something had gone poorly even if my memory did not. If I had the bad feeling I would spiral on that for a while. But no matter what, bad feeling or no, I would feel the pit of dread... but then, hope would flutter in and perch on my shoulder. Never again, hope would whisper in my ear. You never have to drink again. You can quit today.
Hundreds of times, for almost three decades, that bird whispered those sweet words of hope to me. And I would believe, because that feeling of hope was such a relief... until the next time I needed the silence. The silence and the hope- in a way, they kept me alive, they both gave me respite. When the hope faded and I got beyond exhausted by the relentless need to understand how to be a normal person I drank- because the silence let me rest. It let me be a mess. It's like I was curly hair that was trying to straighten itself out every single day, to be smooth. But my nature was to curl, and I would get so tired of laying flat. Blackout drinking gave me the silence that let me curl. Hope let me not give up.
It's so fucked up, the ways we are corralled into believing something is wrong with us because we don't fit the rigid shape of acceptability. The thousands upon tens of thousands of times I went looking for myself out in the world and came up empty- not because I'm not out there, but because we are all hiding in plain sight. Meticulously masking my differences for social self preservation, drinking myself into sweet oblivion.
Traditional knowledge said I was addicted to alcohol. It said I was powerless over alcohol when I was actually powerless over how hard it was for me to get along in the world, in a system that was not made with me in mind. I think about how many people have turned to substance use to cope with being in a world that doesn't reflect you back at you. I feel so angry when I think about how the system casually shirks its responsibility, instead laying blame neatly at the feet of each individual, as if environments and ignorance have no bearing on our outcomes.
I worked with a therapist for 9 years who wanted me to go to AA- even though I told her for 9 years that I didn't want to. For 9 years she still suggested it regularly. I'm guessing she thought I was resisting- for some, addiction has an idea of the truth it doesn't want to stray from. The lack of imagination it takes to put something as complex as addiction- something as complex as life- in such tiny boxes! What got missed in that 9 years of trying to persuade me to join AA? There are more ways to be sober and in recovery than just the ones that are most well-known and accepted. I have believed that every day of my 4,425 days of sobriety.
Writing about my ND experience has become an important part of my life. Just like writing about my sobriety and recovery became such an important part my life when I quit drinking. How are they connected, these major parts of my identity? One big way is that knowing them changed my life.
I know now that being AuDHD was an integral part of my alcohol use, of my addiction to the silence and the hope blackout drinking gave me. But when I drank, I didn't know I was ND. I just thought I was missing something, that there was something wrong with me. Addiction and Neurodiversity...there's not a lot of research out there about it.
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