Hard Rock Café, Lisbon by dsevilla
Today, I write this post to keep from drinking.
I never had a problem with drinking before Wendy died. Sure, I could tie one on occasionally, at a party or out with friends, but getting drunk was about as frequent as getting sunburned. It's a lot like getting sunburned, too, in that it's highly preventable, mostly unintentional, and not at all good for your health or comfort--especially the next day, when you promise yourself to never do it again.
In the last year and a half, though, I've had some bad flare-ups. About three months after she died, I started drinking as a respite from the constant grieving I was going through. I could go out with friends, have a few martinis, and take a break from sorrow. The problem was that the next morning, all that damned up sadness would come cascading back and flatten me. Hungover grief is even worse.
So I learned to steer clear of booze for a while. I found it easier to stick to other methods, like sleep or TV, to ratchet things down. I proved to myself that I could spend a few months on the wagon.
Lately, though, I've been having really bad grief attacks that come on strong and sudden (i.e., the last post). They're the fucking heebie jeebies, the type of whole-body discomfort that makes me want to peel my skin off in strips. It's acute existential misery that sends me running for the bottle.
I don't want to hear, "Blah blah blah self-medicating blah blah blah depressant blah blah blah." Those people can shut the hell up. Humans invented liquor thousands of years ago, and have used it since, precisely because life is hard and they like to change the state of their own heads. I reserve the right to do that.
But I don't want to drink away this experience for the same reason I refuse antidepressants. I want to be fully awake to my grief and learn everything about it that I possibly can. If I make it to the other side of all this, I want to know that it was my will -- and not some Pfizer chemist -- that guided me through.
