Using Sobriety as a Blank Canvas

Just a quick update regarding my last post on trying to recover from alcoholism. By the way, I’m not really trying to turn this into a future memoir or some shit — on a side note, there is too much I have archived to properly pay any mind to (in terms of writing).

When last I wrote I was weening down to half a shot at night. There were some nights towards the beginning of that that I felt I didn’t even need to even take that half a shot. I did it anyway out of fear of delirium tremens. Because I had been drinking pretty heavy for slightly over a year straight. I’d go to the liquor store daily and get those little bottles to impose a false limit on myself when really it built up my tolerance more. Some days I’d get two little bottles. Some days I’d get three. I’d stay at three for a while, go back to two, and then next time need three or more; until I needed more than three little bottles and didn’t want to be inconvenienced by having four little bottles, so then I would get a little larger personal bottle that was enough to last a day or two. Then I would go back and forth on that; sometimes I’d finish it in a day and realize I was drinking a bit too much at that point. Then I’d regress back to those little mini bottles and be in limbo with two or three again.

So basically, eventually I moved into a better job, so to speak. I was able to afford actual whole bottles, I thought to myself (obviously I was spending a lot with the daily aforementioned bottles, too). So anyway. A habit that became reinforced was drinking moderately throughout the day, either a little bit before work, or after. Then it became both. There is an inherent irony in that sentence which expresses the self-deception I had about drinking. There was no choice, but I wanted to pretend there was. I’d just feel so awful and need more alcohol to feel normal. Normal meaning being in less pain, forgetting about anxiety. Long story long, short story short, I started getting sick with random but unnerving side-effects, which would take too long to get into. Overall, I’m absolutely confident I was dying at an accelerated rate and that put stress on my body which turned into panic attacks as a self-alarm for me to stop — and so I did, cold-turkey.

I always rationalized panic attacks as something of a premonition to warn you how you are on a path which will lead to your actual death and how your body basically forces you to divert from that path whether you like it or not because the panic attacks are so distressful and disruptive that it’s like a built-in reflex to the body’s will to survive. It’s reassuring to know in a weird way how persuasive the fear of dying is. This reflex, I believe, doesn’t kick in for some people until it is too late, and there is this overwhelming dread within the body translating to, “No, this can’t be happening now!”

All it takes is a near-death experience to simulate that deep, all-too-human feeling of realizing one day it will happen and that it can happen when you least expect it. I suppose it was at that stage of my alcohol addiction that I had to admit I didn’t want to die. I think there is this self-deprecating mental factor which manifests into denial, ultimately — I hated myself and had to cover it up. Hating yourself is very stressful, to say the least. I’ve been long enough without alcohol that my body has resumed normal functioning. I still have stress and anxiety, but it isn’t killing me as much as before.

Another reason I quit cold-turkey was the fear of dying turning into a fear of drinking alcohol. I wasn’t worried about DT anymore because I was going through it for a while while drinking; I never got hangovers because I didn’t ever go long enough without drinking to actually feel a hangover, and that kind of perpetuated itself into having DT-related health problems while drinking, if that makes sense. The two weeks after going cold-turkey were actually a relief, and any time I had a DT episode it was minor in comparison to what I was already dealing with.

I did have stomach issues, though. Something along the lines of too much stomach acid and getting delirious mental states from my gut trying to learn how to function without alcohol metabolizing in it. I carried on knowing it was part of the detox, seeing as it would take some time clean to slowly recover and that that was a necessary part of the recovery.

I have to ask myself when will I drink again? It has been over two weeks and I have a longer-term plan of making it to eight weeks so that my cortisol levels can continue calming down. It’s still mind-boggling to me how lighter I feel. My body doesn’t overreact and triggers mental alarms when I feel uncertain in my senses. Instead, I am able to ground myself more naturally and without nearly as much paranoia caused from involuntary depersonalization. I put it like that because part of the alcohol-induced delirium I would find myself seeing myself in this weird, absent third-person perspective, as if I my mind wasn’t there and I was this creature on autopilot, and that is a frightening feeling because it can feel like this impersonal out-of-body experience that renders your experience of yourself rather meaningless — devoid of content.

All of that is quite synonymous to dissociation. In my experience of delirium tremens it put me at a higher propensity towards dissociation, hence the involuntary depersonalization and sensory confusion, namely the delirium part of DT. The tremens was a parallel in that during these dissociative episodes I would feel shaky, but not like literally shaking. More like being so uncertain with myself that my ordinary activities were layered with this uncertain shaky aspect to it; I wouldn’t want to do anything but stand up and walk away from the source of that reference point; it would be this urge to remove myself from where I started feeling that way to re-evaluate myself and try to convince myself I wasn’t losing my mind or on the verge of dying. A mental claustrophobia, if you will.

It used to be the case that I could simply drink more alcohol to ward off those scary introspective feelings of uncertainty and dread. But then I would do that and still have this low-vibrational type shaky anxiety that started to get annoying and disruptive, now that I look back on it. When it did escalate, I’d have no way to reassure myself and would need to wait for it to wear off, sort of like a bad trip. Not being in control of my mind and senses was bad enough, but having seizures was the rotten cherry on top.

This was new to me because I thought seizures made you drop on the ground and convulse. However, I learned that seizures have an aura to them. It only makes sense if you ever had one. I would describe it as a sort of sensory overload where you feel your body slowly lose touch with its sensorimotor functions and you panic because there isn’t much to do about it except hope it doesn’t get worse. Then this inner paranoia occurs where you slowly feel it getting worse and you can’t let yourself relax because your body tenses up and makes everything you do extremely uncomfortable.

Claustrophobia of yourself.

Knock on a wooden table I haven’t had to deal with that much anymore, or so it seems. It’s been something I dealt with for a very long time in my adulthood, but I never really took a break longer than three to five days from drinking, and that was before I became a hardcore alcoholic. That in itself is self-evident enough that, for the same reasons I can’t handle marijuana, I can’t handle alcohol. Marijuana brings out this secret schizophrenia in me that I rather leave dormant. Alcohol is bad for my cardiovascular and nervous system. Nicotine and caffeine are the next candidates, perhaps.

My strategy for staying sober off alcohol in particular is to manage my cortisol and stress levels, given that I might have formed a habit with nicotine out of unrecognized stress and anxiety due to alcohol raising my cortisol levels, even as far back as my early adulthood when I drank only occasionally. Now that I’m discovering this about myself, I need to test this personal hypothesis on myself, but I have to continue monitoring myself as I stay clean and get the timing right to surrender myself from nicotine to really test my relearned coping mechanisms for anxiety and stress. To my surprise a lot of it revolves more around the gut than the mind.