The Minefield of Mental Relapse

Dear Day 107, 

Man, “healing is not linear” is my least favourite quote. I still want everything to go my way all the time. Even though I’m supposed to be relinquishing control and learning to adapt and let go, there are still so many parts of me stuck in the past who believe that if I just tried harder, maybe I could turn this life into my own personal playground. A playground made just for me, with brand new equipment to propel me into euphoria at every turn. A shiny new swingset that elicits pure joy, a slide that can wash away the pain, monkey bars that lead me towards everything I crave if I can find the strength to hold on. 

When I first heard somebody say that all addicts are inherently selfish, I recoiled. I didn’t want to be called selfish, let alone egotistical. What the hell did these people know about me, and where did they get off trying to tell me I’m selfish? After all I’ve suffered through? After all I’ve done? Selfish? Egotistical? What’s next, an alcoholic? An addict? 

I would sit around, allowing my thoughts to run amok, thinking of all I’d done. I’d hold up a mirror to my guilt and my shame and allow them to station themselves in my wandering mind.

I’m a piece of shit. I deserve all of this suffering. I am “othered” from the rest of the world; they have something I don’t. I’m not cut out for this life. 

How could that journey of thinking lead someone to call me selfish? It’s just that nobody understood, you know. Nobody understands the complexities of the trauma I’ve lived through, or how difficult it is to exist inside the minefield that is my mind. If they could live a day like me, they’d know. I am not selfish, I have no ego. I hate myself too much for either of those things to be true. 

I’d feign confidence, sometimes even believing myself that I was confident. I knew, on some level, I had worth. I just didn’t know how to believe it when the sun would set and the drink would follow, finding its way into my hands like an expertly tailored glove. My ultimate purpose most nights was the search for a high unlike anything I’d experienced before. I was always chasing a way to lift off the ground, to reach that elusive personal playground. The next morning, I’d wake up crashing to the ground, realizing I hadn’t found it, and had only added on extra weight to my already mounting guilt. 

Now I exist in a completely new territory that asks me to sit with it.

Sit while the sun sets, observe the thoughts that act as a mirror to my darkest conceptions of this world and challenge them. To be optimistic and positive, to be “normal” and interact with the people I used to deem myself “othered” from. Normal people are the ones who wake up in the morning and live their days in serenity, whether they know it or not. 

I worked in a kitchen. It was hot, sweaty, quick and dark, even under the fluorescent lighting. I thrived on the adrenaline and lived for the moments I’d have to break into a run during a rush to retrieve or prep something we needed. I loved the dynamic and how stress was allowed to be expressed at the height of service through shortened speech and serious pointing of fingers. The structure of a “yo!” and yelling time goals for dishes, of answering a million questions from cooks, of reading bills and directing a team like a symphony. God, I miss it. I miss the power and the heightened energy. I miss how normal and respected it was if I wanted to lean into my anger. The slamming of doors, the punching of boxes in the freezer. I believed my team had the same kind of fucked up pieces as I did. I loved the dance of suicide jokes, the grabbing of a knife to play out slitting a wrist, the humour we found in our shared suffering. Service could be tough, but God, was it fun. I could be loud, weird, fucked up, unashamed. I miss it dearly. I had to leave, and I don’t think I can ever go back. 

I know how that story ends for me and who I’ll become. I spent my days never seeing the sun, except for the few times a day I could step outside for a smoke. I’d drink my weight after clocking out every night at all of the jobs I worked, and nobody batted an eye. It’s how I coped with the adrenaline coursing through my veins, all the unexpressed stress. It lived in my body, buried by alcohol, sometimes by drugs, by sex, by any vice I could throw at it. 

That has been my MO: Burying it. Bury it. Numb it. Avoid it. Get it away from me because I will not be seen as weak. I am tough. I can handle this stressful career and this lifestyle that pushes me to the edge of a cliff. I can wrestle head-on with demons and emerge victorious. I belong to the streets, to the shadows of the night. I am comfortable in dingy places, with my vision blurred, making stupid decisions. 

“I’m going to die young.” I used to say that routinely. I believed it. I was going to die young, the day my lifestyle finally caught up with me. 

And in a sense, I feel like I have died. Like the person I was is slowly dying, and I’m doing all I can to try and keep her alive. She’s lying in a hospital bed somewhere, hooked up to machines, and I am, for the first time, navigating this life without her. Living apart from the one person I was certain knew all of the answers. Sometimes she comes to, and when she sees the way we’re living now, it gives her drive. I get the call, usually late at night, but lately it’s been happening more and more throughout my days. I drive fast, and I make it to her bedside, asking for guidance. 

“We must find the playground,” she tells me. “It’s still out there waiting for us. Don’t give up now. We were so close.”

I’m not sure if the pain medication we have her on is impairing her judgment, or the head trauma has knocked all the memory from her mind, but when I look into her eyes, I can see that she truly believes it. I feel it in the way she reminisces about her days on the line, or doing lines, yelling at people without shame, crying freely in the streets, arguing within the confines of a toxic relationship, or any piece of her fucked up life. The way she describes those moments to me as if they were our saviours. 

I thought I could increase the dose, you know? To shut her up, make her stop calling me, and stop myself from starting the car to rush to her side. I figured if I administered more medication in the form of gratitude, recovery scripts, prayer, meditation, and a strict, unflinching routine, she’d find the light. I tried believing I am recovering. Pretending to be happy even when I wasn’t. I assumed a new persona in the wake of my sobriety and lifestyle change. Fake it till you make it, right? 

Well, all this positivity led me straight to a liquor store on Tuesday evening.  I’m not sure why, because I don’t think I really intended to drink. I just wanted to play. I felt the permission descend over me with a sinister smile as my insides gave way while sitting in my bedroom. Suddenly, all the overwhelming feelings became very quiet. This happened without a drink; it came with a simple decision: I’m going to the liquor store. That was the permission I needed to numb. 

I forgot how proficient I used to be in doing that, in burying and quieting a feeling. I could just turn it off if something came up that I didn’t want to feel or think. It was, and is, like a wall I place inside of me. I know the feeling doesn’t dissipate, but it goes somewhere I can’t touch it anymore, and it can’t touch me. Compartmentalization. I used to be proud of my ability to compartmentalize. It took a lot to learn, and then it became second nature. I would utilize this supernatural ability a lot at my job. When anxiety threatened to knock me off my feet, I could quiet it in order to focus on execution. If I struggled to make it in the door on tough days, I’d quiet the parts that screamed that I was burning out and desperately needed a break. Denying myself the dignity of feeling. Self-inflicted emotional neglect. It’s learned behaviour, but does that mean I’m not to be held responsible? 

I drove to the liquor store with a sweet feeling and a smile on my face. “I’m doing something crazy,” I thought. “I’m taking my power back in honour of the parts of me that are dying. That worked too hard to just disappear.” 

As I walked through the aisles, I felt shame emerge from the deepest parts of me. Shame that I’d placed behind the wall. The wall was crumbling, and I couldn’t rebuild it fast enough to quell those feelings or the thoughts that accompanied them. Surely those liquor store employees could see it in my eyes, in the way I walked straight for the gin section, how quickly I found and selected a fifth of my brand. They were judging me. They knew I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had opened a door to the past when I began my trek through those aisles. They could see it, I could see it. 

With all of my focus stationed on recovery and hope, I began to use it as a new way to numb. As methods of avoidance usually do, it began to feel cheap. It led me straight to nostalgia, pessimism, boredom, and not caring at all. It darkened my thinking, gave me permission to avoid the world again, to isolate. Then it led me to the liquor store. 

It’s hard to describe the feeling of having a grasp on everything one day and no idea where to go in the morning. It was only recently that I began to feel like I had all of this in the bag, like healing was my new purpose, and I truly appreciated that fact. I had learned to let go. In letting go, I think I forgot that there’s still so much inside of me that isn’t ready to just disappear. It still needs to be felt, to be honoured, to be seen and accepted. I cannot use the wind as my new wall. I must stop searching for the playground because it cannot be found. There will still be bad days. 

I likened this experience of wrestling with urges to watching a dog with a sock, something it knows it’s not supposed to have. I can corner my urges up against a wall and watch them calculate which direction is the path of least resistance. Do they turn towards a relapse, or go forward into the pain of continuing on? For an entire week, I’ve been standing there watching the urges try to make a decision, swaying back and forth, tail wagging, trying to decide which way to bolt. I’m tired of standing, tired of watching. I just need a decision to be made. This limbo is too much to bear. 

What I know is that I’ve started down the path of relapse many times before, and it always ends the same. I have a pretty good idea of where it leads. So I think I’m going to step out of the way. I will step in front of that path so the dog has no choice but to run forward into feeling. I am not a prisoner, and I get to decide. 

Burying my feelings with hollow, inauthentic positivity is certain to lead me to relapse. Feeling my feelings is not. Though both come with their own dangers, I must accept the path of least resistance. Fear and all. 

I have poured out the bottle; now it’s time to get out of my own way. 

Sincerely, 

Charlotte