I’m fairly new to the concepts of AA, but not to alcoholism and its dynamics. My grandfathers were both alcoholics, each of their own kind. One at least, as I know, died from the disease. My parents grew up in alcoholic households and never took the steps to recover themselves, therefore I also grew up in an alcoholic family.

My father’s death was related to alcohol, too. His was a grand, triumphant self-destruction. Once an obese man, he had been addicted to food and self-punishment a result of having been violently abused by an alcoholic father, a life-time soldier, a captain in the Air Force, damaged by the trauma of war and destruction. After a radical surgery, a gastric bypass botched by a doctor who was later disbarred, he lost the ability to self-medicate with food, so he turned to alcohol. His drunkenness was quick and severe, as his stomach was so small and his internal mechanisms so drastically damaged by the surgery. There were other complications too, but when a man is hospitalised and immediately upon release returns again to drinking, it’s hard not to consider alcohol as the culprit. Every case, every person, every demise, is different.

So here I am, two months sober and wondering what happens next. Bits of AA speak come into my head, such as ‘working the program’ and ‘dry drunk’. I spent my first weekend, this past weekend, not drinking with friends who were drinking. Turns out I still felt funny the next morning, just without the physical hangover. I felt a bit insecure, not sure what to say, not sure really how to interact and realised, yet again, that it is not just the alcohol that is the problem, it is me. I’m the problem. My mind, my past experiences, my patterns, my insecurity, my self-loathing, my wounded spirit in every cell of my body is the problem. The alcohol was just there to mask it all. To make it easy to throw myself forward, over it all, past it all, but it all remained. So now, I’m left with it all just there, a dry drunk.

I too, use food, as my father did, for many reasons other than sustainence. I use it to numb, to distract, to feel something good, a fleeting pleasure with that rush of sugar dopamine. Some days I eat as much sugar as I can, until I fell sick, and then later I eat some more. It is addictive, and I have an addictive personality. I use it to punish myself, knowing that it will harm my appearance, add to my hips, my waist, and lately even my chin. I use it to hide, to not have the perfect body that my conscious self so desires. I have been told I use it for protection, which I also believe, as so much of the judgement of a woman originates from the judgement of her body. I know that I also use it in attempt to silence myself, as a full mouth can’t scream or protest. It’s a terrible cycle of control and the relinquishing of it, something I saw my father do as well as he battled with food for many years.

Mind mechanics, some are learned, some inherited, I wasn’t sure of the difference really until watching my children, and learning from them that there are some things, many things, that you are just born with. It’s up to us as parents to help them to figure out how to harness these powers, and to help them to find the good in all of their differences, so that they might find their place in the outside world. My mind mechanics seek stimulation, always, perhaps it’s natural curiosity, having been left to my own devices, happily, as a child, with not too much scheduling and lots of time to wonder. I have also a pervasive sense of melancholy, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness, perhaps innate or perhaps cultivated in order to survive the things that I’ve seen, the feelings I’ve absorbed that now live in my cells. Perhaps I’ve had to seek out stimulation so as to not simply be sucked down into darkness.

This beautiful melancholy – I remember a winter sunset, it was 4:15 in the afternoon, which was evening. Early winter, outside the house, I stood by the shed, in Alhambra. The cold was biting, I could see my breath, the leaves had fallen, my face moved slowly as it was already freezing into cold, slow motion. I can smell the leaves decaying slowly, smell the frost itself. Nothing bad happened, not to worry. I was simply struck to my bones, to my cold toes, by the beautiful desolateness of the early winter, early evening sunset which would fall in mere minutes. This time of year was the beginning of the death of the earth, entering into its hibernation, crying out, not wanting to go, the sun setting in a full horizontal display of rays of blue and orange and purple, reassuring itself that the warmth would come again soon, after a long, hard winter but first the winter would triumph over her, dragging Persephone once again into the underworld, feeling Hades’s silent, cruel scream, delighting in the sadness and pain of her mother, in the cold winter air.

Perhaps it is this, this dark sensitivity. I must have been born with it, a gift if it is viewed that way. I see it as such, although it is hard sometimes. It is the same as the tragedy of an Italian opera, of perhaps every Italian opera, the raw, captivating beauty of tragedy, of pain, of a minor key, of a tenor’s vibrato. But combine this dark sensitivity with real sadness and you can end up with a depression you might never get out of. In any good opera, there is tragedy, but there is overwhelming love and passion as well. This is what makes any tragedy sustainable for the audience. This is what makes a story that can last for centuries, because the elements are all there; agony, ecstasy, love, hate, jealously, betrayal, life, and death. These are usually resolved somehow but rarely with happiness; this is the sole realm of Disney. The resolution, however tragic, finally arrives in the third act.

Imagine a childhood with no resolution, of seeing nothing but sadness around you, misery. Knowing, even at that tender age, say 8, 9, or 10, that your parents are not happy. They barely speak, and once you start to notice, you can’t unsee it. So you wait, hope, and pray for the resolution that never comes. This was what I saw. There were no major events, no terrible tragedies, just a constant low-level vibration of misery. This and the strangeness of how we lived. At this time, I began to have that outside world awareness that how we lived was not the same as other families that I saw in the tiny towns around us. We were not ‘normal’. My mother did not dress as other mothers did, and my father couldn’t speak to others as other fathers did. He was happy in the garden, at the lumber store or building something, or at the many auctions we would go to together to hunt for treasures. She wore muddy garden boots to pick me up at school, to my horror. Had they been happy, it might have made a difference. This strangeness might not have bothered me so much. The two elements together – strangeness and misery – were simply too much for a little girl to take. A natural loner, prone to sensing the beautiful tragedy in everything, this feeling of hatred towards my parents, my family, and thus towards myself, defined me from a very early age.

So here I am, almost 40 years later, trying to release this misery that I have carried with me for so long, and now knowing that it won’t release itself. Merely stopping drinking, stopping smoking isn’t enough. I must ‘work the program’, understand the 12 steps, take a long hard look at who I am today and unpack the millions of tiny boxes stuffed into my head to figure out how the hell I got here. I know it’s all the same story, because it’s my story, it’s me. It’s one long conversation with myself, and with the other people in my life that I am lucky enough to have. I know that it is just one long twisty, turny path that I’ve taken to get here. I know I started using drink and drugs to escape, to numb, to feel something good. Was I ever truly addicted? I don’t yet know. I know why I did it all, I just need to pull it all out of my forgotten memories and finally learn from it all, so that one day I can tell the story of how I came out the other side.