The obsession has (almost) lifted
A My Name is Amy
Obsession
by
Amy Byrnes
I went out to dinner three times this week, which pretty much made up for my social hibernation throughout all of Q1 and most of Q2 of this year.
While sitting with two girlfriends and waiting for another to arrive, I told them to not abstain from alcohol during the meal because of me. “I’m perfectly happy not drink,” I said.
I ordered a club soda and they each got a cocktail and when our friend arrived she joined me in the seltzer and later had a glass of wine with dinner. I reported all this to another sober friend later and she said, “You mean they drank like normal people?”
It would have been much harder for me to sit at a restaurant not that long ago and watch everyone else at the table drink alcohol while sipping on tap water. Even though I did some of my best drinking alone on a couch watching television, in my mind, every meal is better paired with a glass of wine. Somehow, even microwaved leftovers from my frig were elevated by a big glass of Italian red.
How that looked when I was actively drinking and out to dinner was that I’d have to quickly down that first cocktail in time to order a glass of wine to go with the meal (and probably another glass after that). #1: That meant I was ordering at least three drinks during dinner and #2: That made me an expensive dining companion.
I also spent a lot of time while out drinking with friends monitoring how much they drank. When glasses of wine were poured, I’d assess the amount in each and whether I’d been somehow slighted and whether there would be enough left for me to have another drink. I’d watch to see if my companions were drinking as quickly as me (I was a total guzzler), and would often wait to see if someone else was ready for the next drink. Alcohol took up so much of my brain space.
But during dinner with my girlfriends this week, I don’t even think I looked at their drinks and I certainly didn’t pay attention to when and how much they drank. I had scanned the restaurant’s extensive cocktail list – which took up the entire backside of a very big menu – to see if there were any “mocktails” to choose from and seeing none, happily ordered some club with lemon.
***
The night before, I’d gone out to a different restaurant with my daughter and sister that is super retro and hipster and had a small selection of nonalcoholic drinks they called “Placebo Effect.” In retrospect, I think I had a bee in my bonnet about trying a fancy mocktail since reading an article not one but two people sent me last week about how it’s now trendy not to drink booze, which mentioned a bunch of swanky booze-free cocktails. Three of the four cocktails included non-alcoholic spirits from Seedlip, which intrigued me since a friend had given me a bottle for Christmas that I’d yet to open.
The drink arrived in a tall glass with a straw, filled with ice and tons of fresh lime and mint. A proper cocktail, minus the alcohol. I took a sip and told my dining companions it was nice and refreshing and urged them to try it. Then I took another sip and went into a complete tailspin, worrying that the bartender had made a mistake and put alcohol in the drink. “What if I can no longer tell the difference?” I worried.
Then, I started to feel lightheaded. “I’m drunk,” I thought. But then I rationalized that I would be feeling a lot more than a little lightheaded after eight months of sobriety. If there had been any alcohol in that drink, it would have set off fireworks as it hit my bloodstream. I ended up pushing the drink away and insisting when the meal was over on splitting the bill after wasting $10 on such an indulgence.
***
Putting eight months between me and booze has helped pry it out from under my skin, where it had probably been embedded since I was a teenager. I knew in my heart that I could do it because I’d been down that road with other obsessions that had been buried deep within me. Addictions that kept me up at night, wishing I could shake them, only to wake up the next day and fall into the same old patterns.
I started smoking with purpose at 12 and by college, was rolling over in bed in the morning to light my first cigarette. But the morning I discovered I was pregnant with my son – in a hotel room in DC on a business trip – I crumpled my pack of Merits and threw them in the trash and didn’t light up again for another year.
Each time I found out I was pregnant throughout my 20s, I’d throw packs of cigarettes away and then slowly go back to having one or two on the back deck at night after the kids were tucked in bed and my husband was out. My smoking started ramping up after my third child and then after a miscarriage, I stopped for good.
I gave smoking one last try after dinner while visiting my sister in California. We’d driven down to stay in Carmel for the night and had eaten outside by a big heater, before that was even a thing. We must have had a lot of wine and walked back to our hotel and sat outside and she lit a cigarette and handed one to me. I took a few drags and the nicotine hit my system and made my head spin and feel like I wanted to throw up. Worst of all, the taste was all wrong. Whereas the smoke used to feel so good, filling up my lungs, that night it tasted like what it really was – garbage. I never smoked again.
***
For many years, I was obsessed with a guy I briefly dated in my teens and then in college and my early 20s and by the time I was 24, we were married. And whether it was him, or the story I attached to him or what his love meant – how it validated me – remains to be unraveled. But whatever he represented, it was buried deep within me for a really long time.
I remember visiting a college girlfriend one Mother’s Day weekend when my husband I were separated and sitting at her kitchen island drinking red wine and discussing my situation. At that point, my husband and I had spent a few months trying to reconcile and things were starting to head south again.
“Maybe you just need to go ahead and end things,” she gently suggested. “Just rip off the Band-Aid.”
I remember nodding my head, knowing in my head that was the right thing to do, but still, I clung to all the things I wanted us to be, the family I had so desperately wanted. And I knew, too, that the minute I indicated to him that I was done, he’d move on to someone else and I couldn’t fathom the pain of that loss. How would I ever be able to survive?
But time apart gave me the perspective that I needed and now when I see my kids' dad, it's cordial and like seeing someone I used to hang out with in high school. I no longer feel bound by the tentacles of codependency that had held me so close to him for so long.
***
I knew when I stopped drinking in October that, like smoking and my ex-husband, I’d be able to get over alcohol over time. That if I could just put some time and distance between me and booze, I’d be able to break that addiction.
When I first started reading AA’s Big Book, I noticed a lot of references to the “obsession” with alcohol, and it all seemed pretty dramatic to me, like a lot of their literature did. When I first got sober, I just thought that drinking had been a really bad habit I needed to curtail. But now I see how deeply alcohol's taproot had burrowed into the core of who I was.
I listened to a podcast yesterday making dinner and the topic was sobriety and the two sisters who are the hosts talked about their paths to giving up drinking. One of them observed how our culture enables, nay encourages, us all to drink alcohol and has created the mindset that there are falling down drunks who can’t keep jobs and drink all day, and then the rest of us. Or at least, that’s what we like to tell ourselves.
But the reality is that there is a lot of gray in between those two points, and I fell somewhere in between. As my therapist likes to point out, I was definitely functioning while I was drinking, but I wasn’t necessarily flourishing. I think the bigger issue to examine is just what is the hole within me that needed to be filled with alcohol, cigarettes and an unhealthy relationship.
***
Yesterday, I went out to brunch with girlfriends and we sat at a table on a sidewalk on Manhattan’s Lower East Side waiting for our meal and I turned and saw champagne glasses at the table next to us filled with what I guessed to be remnants of mimosas.
While in the past, I would have yearned for a glass or five for myself, yesterday I really saw those cocktails for what they were. I could see the film of orange juice coating the glass and imagined the sickly sweet liquid in my mouth, the bubbly booze making me feel tired and hazy for our walk back to the ferry. I turned back to my friends, smiled, and picked up the big bottle of water from the table to refill our glasses.
xo Amy
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