#because that's how when you get someone experiencing say hallucinations or severe suicidal ideation or constant panic attacks

[eddievee]

Gay and Sober

I’m intimidated by the thought of writing about this. There are multiple reasons as to why I perhaps shouldn’t express these thoughts. However, I have a problem. I have a problem and I feel as though trying to articulate it will help me cope. It is my hope that friends and family members will read this and understand my struggle. Maybe they or someone on the internet could also find solace in my story.

Basically, I have a drinking problem. Call me an alcoholic. Call me an addict. Any term under the umbrella of substance abuse likely applies. I write this at twenty four. Looking back over the past liquored up eight years of my life, the most traumatic experiences and biggest setbacks I’ve endured have had to do with alcohol. I pinned a guy in my dorm to the ground at eighteen and nearly got expelled from university. I went psychotic at twenty-one, experiencing auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. My psychiatrist deduced that it all transpired because I went off of my psychoactives cold turkey and started to self-medicate with wine. That turn of events forced me to withdraw from school for almost a year. In that time, I left random objects on my university president’s doorstep and nearly got arrested for trespassing. I also showed up drunk to the undergraduate library after withdrawal from classes and had to be escorted out by police. My relationship with alcohol is distinctly self-destructive and volatile. In March, I got hit by a motorist after a night out of drinking. I had recently quit a managerial position after over two years working there, lined up a prospective job with greater pay, and a couple of my coworkers bought me Jack Daniel’s as a farewell present. I wrote a goodbye letter that evidently still has a place of honor in the store. It was a bittersweet goodbye, but I was leaving a staff that I knew was going to miss me. From my end, that feeling was mutual. I also had a solid positive reference in my back pocket from my time there. I was ecstatic. To leave a job I really didn’t like was fabulous. To feel as though I was moving on in my career was even better. It was time to celebrate, of course! So, I imbibed. I guzzled hard liquor by myself and went to my usual haunt. I drank more there and tried to ride home on my bicycle. That’s when it all happened. The injury was severe. I sustained contusions on both sides of my frontal lobe and cracked a few bones in my skull. Emergency services were called and I was rushed to the hospital. There, it was determined that I was at a .27 blood alcohol content. Had I consumed a couple more drinks that night, I would have been legally dead. At the hospital, I was put into a medically induced coma and given a room in intensive care. The coma lasted roughly a month and I received inpatient physical, occupational, and speech therapy for another month before discharge. Multiple doctors, nurses, and therapists told me that based on the severity of the injury, I was expected to be discharged by November. I remember visiting the intensive care unit after being moved to the rehab unit. Multiple doctors and nurses who managed my case expressed verbal and physical disbelief that I was standing and walking. Several entered the unit for their shift, saw me, and would throw their hands in the air and turn around before greeting me. I don’t know the totality of their experiences in medicine, but I imagine several of their cases don’t end up walking and talking a month after coming out of a coma. They were unquestionably shocked to see me so relatively well.

Basically, I almost died. Mortality was clarified for me in March. The physical toll alone was nothing short of traumatic. In spite, I’m happy that my recovery has gone so unexpectedly well. I’ve gained 25 pounds of muscle back, I was discharged from outpatient therapies after two weeks, and I’m now looking at the possibility of returning to work. However, I’m not totally well right now. Despite all of the strides I’ve made over the past three months, I know I have an immense amount of work to do to get healthy again. However, I’m ill at this point for reasons unrelated to the somatic impact of my auto accident. The psychological consequences of my injury came later and asymmetrically. With the physiological component consuming most of my time, energy, and focus initially, I simply didn’t know how what happened was going to impact my mental health. With BPD on my diagnostic record, I’ve been depressed, anxious, and occasionally psychotic for much of my adult life. I’ve been in and out of psychiatry and psychotherapy since I was 18 years old. I’ve been hospitalized for psychological reasons twice. Having a degree in psychology and women’s studies, I know the annals and the phenomenology of mental suffering. Through both talk therapy sessions and undergraduate study, I am familiar with coping mechanisms and understand quite a bit about mental illness as a whole. With that said, the knowledge doesn’t necessarily lead to better mental health outcomes for my own struggles. I shouldn’t be drinking at all. In certain traumatic brain injury cases, to consume alcohol is to possibly have a seizure. I also developed blood clots in the hospital and was put on a powerful blood thinner. I’m off that prescription now, but it could have had complications with hard liquor. None of that kept me away from the bottle. I experienced a radical shift. Prior to the injury, I was working overtime hours every week and dating someone I was passionately in love with. He had a key to my apartment after one week of love drunk stupor. Suddenly, I was unemployed and single, my boyfriend breaking up with me in a hospital bed. It was jarring. That particular adjustment was perhaps as traumatic as the injury itself. I had free time and loneliness and ample opportunity for self loathing. Libations were perfect to indulge that stress and sorrow. Got a problem? Pour some plastic jug vodka on it. Let’s Popov off. I mentioned that I had a history of making serious, lasting, and self destructive decisions by drinking prior to March, but I was always able to control myself. I could stop. Now, I can’t. I can consume an entire fifth of eighty to one hundred proof liquor in one evening. If there’s some leftover when I wake up hungover, I drink it that morning. I can’t handle my liquor anymore. I’ve permanently damaged some friendships by sending weird and alarming text messages when I’m blackout drunk. Normally comprised of suicidal ideation, they’re pathetic pleas of “kill me.” Alongside the profound lack of self control, that depth of depression is what’s particularly alarming to me. I don’t want to get sober, but if I keep going like this, I’m going to die. It’ll be at my hand or with a broken bottle. Maybe both. At the least, my liver will fail or I’ll withdraw into delirium tremens or develop Korsakoff’s amnesia. Something. I’ll say again: I don’t want to get sober. However, little of that has to do with alcohol’s effects on my brain and body. Those certainly are factors, but it’s not the bulk of the story. I don’t need a drink to get through the day. It’s fun to be drunk! I like to party. I like relaxing inhibitions, but I don’t need a drink to function. The social and celebratory elements of drinking make it harder to leave behind. I’ve quit abusing other substances in the past because I was almost always using by myself. I like people more than I like drugs. Alcohol is different because that line between people and drugs is blurrier. There’s a distinctly social component to drinking that bears salience to my life. I’m gay. Bars and clubs, the spaces relegated to LGBT people by dominant culture, are centered around the sales and consumption of alcohol. That’s a fact. I’m also a drag queen, who are hired in part to facilitate that commerce. Alcohol was in the room when I first started to meet other gay guys at sixteen. Its omnipresence throughout my gay young adult experiences make it that much more difficult to go without. Booze is sometimes like an old friend; it has been my chaperone for years.

To leave alcohol behind would make me profoundly anxious, thinking that I would be leaving my friends behind too. My community matters to me. If there’s anything that the experience of surviving traumatic brain injury has solidified in my mind, it’s that I matter to my community as well. I’ve made friends in these spaces for years now. The gay bar has been a critical component to my sense of self and I’m terrified to lose that. A friend of mine might read this portion and roll his eyes. He once told me something like “People you party with are not your friends. They’re people you party with.” That may be true, but it’s connection. There’s a multitude of research literature on how social connections lead to better life expectancies and health outcomes. Unhappily married people tend to live longer than content single people for a reason. I don’t know how to mesh sobriety with my network of relationships in the nightlife scene. These people have welcomed me and held me, laughed with me and wept with me. I’ve devoted so much time and energy to drag performances to express my love and gratitude for my community. I don’t want to be without the people I’ve met in part through drinking. I wouldn’t be here without them. At the same time, many people in my nightlife existence know that I have a problem. I went out the other weekend for a going away party. After leaving the club, I went to my friend’s place and had a 2:00 AM conversation with another friend who didn’t accompany us out to the club. He’s mentally ill, but high functioning, and deeply empathetic. We relate. I asked him about our friends’ perception of my alcoholism. He expressed that even before my accident in March, people would notice how drunk I’d get on a regular basis. He said that some people get that drunk “every six months or so.” With me, it was “like every other week.” He went on to comment on my overall melancholy and bleak outlook on life. He said, “Sometimes, when I see you, it’s like you woke up and happiness wasn’t even a possibility.” Being a depressant, alcohol feeds into my psychological dependency for crisis and sorrow. RuPaul asserted that Katya, Brian McCook, had an addiction to anxiety in season seven of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I feel that. I’m realizing just how intensely accustomed I am to feeling depressed. In drag, I’ve rejoiced in sorrow on stage for years. On multiple occasions, I’ve walked into the bar in full drag makeup and the first thing I hear is “what’s wrong?” It’s not even that the glass is half empty. For me, the glass was never there. To be sad is almost comforting in its combination of introspection and self pity. It’s especially affirming when you feel as though you have a right to that lowness. As Bright Eyes once said, “Sorrow is pleasure when you want it instead.” That pleasure has grown old. I want to do more than just survive in spite of crisis. I’ll say this: I don’t know if I’m going to get sober from alcohol. In my recent brief attempts at sobriety, I’ve recognized just how much temperance culture permeates United States media. You’d be challenged to walk down the main street of any major city and not see at least one advertisement for liquor. The push and pull relationship of Puritanical abstinence from indulgence and the American civic duty of reckless consumption is powerful. That relationship is also undeniably profitable. With that said, my pro and con list of continuing to drink is getting grimmer. What I need to do becomes more obvious after each fifth of bottom shelf whiskey, with each morning I wake up hungover, and within each inebriated, suicidal cry for help. To those of you who have been on the receiving end of my substance abuse, I’m sorry. My brother recently found me in my apartment, eyes rolled in the back of my head from drinking to excess. I’ve fallen down stairs at the local gay bar, making an absolute fool of myself. I’ve said alarming, dreadful things in person and online that I regret terribly. In total, I’ve damaged relationships that I’m never going to repair. The problem is when I’m alone. If I’m at the bar and not drinking around you, don’t think it’s completely because of what I’ve expressed here. More than anything, just know that I have a drinking problem. It exists unarguably within and outside the context of my near death experience. I wrote that I was unsure of how to simultaneously be sober and be present at the spaces where I’ve made loving relationships. This is my attempt. Know that I want to be around, but I simply can’t do it like I used to. I need to get sober from alcohol. At the very least, I should. It’s going to be a tall order, but less lethargy and fewer depressive episodes sound fabulous. Thank you.