My Secret Blog

I started a second blog, one I never put my name on. There, I never discussed my disability. Going back and reading it, it was difficult to imagine that that woman was me. I like her better than I like me. She is not sick.

It got a nice bit of traffic, for a site never promoted. I guess there are lots of desperate people searching the internet at night, searching phrases like memories I cannot live with. It was mostly about not succeeding at stopping my excessive drinking to cope with those memories I cannot live with. 

So sick of drinking. In too much pain to skip it.

There were times when I woke up to my own screaming, “Nobody can live like this!” a statement about the past, not now, although the present had certainly become unlivable. You cannot hep but envy people who do not survive.

Facing the nightmares that were coming for me, well, you would be drinking, too.  A doctor once whispered to me had another patient off long-term opiates and now in endless nightmares. 

My drinking problem started slowly. Off opiates I felt so bad, it was the only thing I looked forward to doing. That post-opiate brain crash... ouch. I felt so thoroughly rotten all of the time.

My brain sure missed being snuggled in a opiate blanket of soothing numbness that made everything seem okay. My brain was super pissed that that was gone, and going haywire. Alcohol calmed it down. They do affect the brain in similar ways, marijuana also, not a drug I am interested in. Does a depressed brain really need a brain depressant? Well, yes, if it is used to being shut down by a substance.

I had been mentioning to doctors for a long time that I thought I had a drinking problem, but no one believed me. There are people who start the day with three bottles of wine. So, it sounded like I was not drinking very much, but even one drink is a lot for flimsy me to metabolize. I thought I was never hungover, but really I was drinking too frequently to notice. Whoops.

Alcohol would make me friendly with the enemy, my feelings, but then it would all sort of backfire. Hard to explain, but maybe you have experienced it. That initial relief was great, then a bit of an unpleasant journey though excruciating depression into the oblivion of I cannot remember what happened. Fantastic solution.

During my time on drugs, I had lost skills of enduring simple aggravations or annoyances, from other people boring me to my own boring inner restlessness. What can I say? I was just so used to being high. All the time.

Then there was my new problem of being completely unused to getting through the day without crushing EDS symptoms. I had spent my life trying to drag my body to the other end of the room, monitoring and limiting every action so as not to injure myself. What do I do now?   

When it got so bad, my drinking was wearing me down, yet buffering me. Was it? Seemed like it was helping. Seemed like skipping it was not an option. Solutions can become problems. It happens.

It was a long time before I noticed what I was doing. Then a time came when I was completely, utterly, totally sick of drinking, could not even stand the taste of alcohol, but could not find another way around it. That was when I started writing about it, in secret, on a blog.

I felt like talking about it. But not here or on my Facebook. Seemed unfair to dump it on people I know. Who wants to hear this stuff? It’s too ugly. Facebook is the place I made jokes about my problem drinking, ha ha ha.

I began looking forward to secret blogging while hating the drinking I was still doing. Progress.

Tony Howell (his company created the site oneEDSvoice are you on it?) gave me the greatest pep talk ever, when I cried and confessed I could not stand life sober, that I could not stand my feelings. I suspect he had noticed. “I am adding up all the hours I am spending on drinking, and this is taking up too much of my time,” I told him. His words were along the lines of you had better figure out how to stand to live sober, but said much much better than that. I will always appreciate that, Tony. 😘

I never thought I would be one of those people: those people with a drinking problem. I fully blame the long-term opiates, the mixed drink they made with my walled-off memories. 

Alcohol is small amounts is anti-inflammatory and enhances health. But excessive alcohol is so bad for the complexion. And it makes you fat. Unglamorous. Not my style. Over-drinking regularly to cope is a ritual truly lacking dignity. Haven’t I already lost enough dignity with my life of disability? 

I pulled my secret blog down when I became able to survive the night without drinking myself into oblivion.

Who was that person writing that blog? Whoever she was, she wrote over 300 posts in a very short period of time. Some of them I even wrote drunk. Drunks can make great writers: Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King.

I am wickedly pleased to have this strange, dishonest record of the peak of my tortured drinking, wanting it all to stop and every vow I made to never do it again broken. Dishonest because I never mentioned Ehlers-Danlos.

I guess you could call it a journal. But I hate to journal as much as I hate to mediate. I already feel so alone. 

My Secret Blog.

So gloriously pained and pathetic, it makes me proud. 

At the Los Angeles Beer Crawl.

Wouldn’t you like to read what I wrote.