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I am not exactly sure how we got to Thursday.  The last time I remember feeling normal, I was sitting in the sun, poolside, drinking a post-brunch mimosa with good friends while Nova napped in the house.  That was Monday, Memorial Day.  There is nothing particularly damaging about this, in fact it sounds quite fabulous -- a beautiful afternoon with cocktail in hand and our toes in the pool -- but even at the time, I kind of knew that I was pushing my limits.

​Some may recall a post I wrote last October about my unhealthy relationship with alcohol.  I’d had a rather eye-opening epiphany when I realized that perhaps my then- struggles were not all about George's death, but that my continued reliance on alcohol was also a main contender in how I was able (or unable) to show up.  This was a defining event for me -- taking responsibility for my choices, acknowledging my weaknesses, removing George as the crutch and putting my habitual drinking on trial.  Calling the kettle black.

I really thought back then, that I would never have a drink again.  

It’s amazing (and yet entirely comprehensible) how the mind can rationalize itself back to a state of -- Hey, no problem here, as long as we fall into the same pits with eyes wide open, we won’t get hurt, right?

Hm.

Now I’m not saying that the mimosa I had on Memorial Day gave me the stomach flu, but perhaps that on top of the drinks I had at our neighborhood brunch on Sunday, on top of the drinks I had visiting friends in the east bay on Saturday, on top of the beer I had with dinner on Friday and the wine before bedtime on Thursday… all of that on top of the fact that in the core of my being I know that I have ultimately failed in my attempts to either extricate or recreate my relationship with alcohol… I mean, it’s possible that my body was trying to tell me something.

It’s also possible that I just caught the stomach flu.  Regardless, these last few days of involuntary fasting have given me a few things to think about.

What exactly happened there?  Why did I fall back onto my daily ritual with alcohol?  Last weekend was only one of a string of examples.  I had returned to the safety net months ago.  During that time when moving out and moving on and having to make what seemed like a million decisions about my life and the stuff in it, made my brain scream:  Please, turn it off.

I turn off, tune out, with alcohol.  It lessens the overwhelm.  (Of course, I know there are much healthier ways of doing this, but I have neither the time nor the patience to dust off my meditation practice.)  And alcohol is one of those things like sugar, or caffeine, i.e. highly addictive substances -- once a pattern is established, it takes a shit-ton of willpower to cut the cord.

Additionally, my association with alcohol has its place in the happier moments in life -- celebrations, holidays, sunny days, park days, lunch with friends days -- and so it becomes a social staple, making happier events even happier.  But how can one substance be responsible for both decreasing negative emotion and increasing positive emotion?  It doesn’t quite make sense.  Something I will need to dig into when I’m feeling back to my normal self.

But what screams in my head now, is not -- turn it off  -- what screams in my head now, is -- How am I still, at 38 years old, struggling to untangle myself from this attachment to alcohol?

The untangling, I now realize, is more complicated than a declaration of abstinence.  There is something about the way that I use alcohol that is so deep-rooted -- a way to fill in some emptiness within that I didn’t think existed anymore -- and until I expose the truth I will not be free.  Because either that emptiness is false and my brain needs a rewire, or that emptiness exists, and I need to fill it with love.  

Either way, alcohol no longer fits into the equation.  I am no longer that girl who needed alcohol’s social lubricant to have meaningless conversations with strangers, and even friends; whose insecurities ran so deep that I needed a drink in my hand to numb the pain; whose own identity was largely a mystery well into adulthood, masked by the identities of those that I followed, trying to find a safe place to fit in.  I am no longer that girl.  I am a grown woman now, and I am carving out my place in this world.  The excess energy I have spent to maintain this toxic relationship is no longer available.  I have better things to do.

Here begins an investigation within.      

I have been feeling scattered lately.  Unproductive.  Unmotivated.   Tired.  Frustrated.  How long is this grieving going to last?  How many times will it pummel me to the ground?  Suddenly I am down again.  My body and mind want to retreat.  I do not want to socialize or be in public.  I want to be left alone.  Last month, I was back out there in the world, embracing the people around me and enjoying new experiences.  Now, I am back in hiding.  And so it goes.  

And then I have an epiphany.  I have been blaming grief for all of these ups and downs, all this drama in my head.  But yesterday I was forced to look at something greater than grief as the cause for all this mental and emotional turmoil:  I was forced to look at Me.  This is what happens when you keep a journal for years on end.  You cannot deny your past, or who you were, or what you struggled with.  It is all there, in writing.  Your writing.  And it hits you right over the head.

Yesterday, in the midst of my restless desperation to find direction, to find answers, I picked up an old journal, one of many stacked on the shelf, not knowing the time period it reflected.  I opened it.

September 2011 - May 2012.  I had returned from my travel adventures that June, ready and excited to start a new life with George.  In October I began my studies in Chinese Medicine, finally going back to school to make the career change I had been dreaming about for years.  I had a whole new life, a new home, a new partner, a love I never imagined I would find.  I had everything I could have asked for, and more.  I was finally living the life I wanted, a life I had created.  And I knew this.  I wrote this.  Over, and over, and over.  I wanted so badly to feel the gratitude that I knew I should feel.

Yet the feelings of discontent, inner conflict, and restlessness jump from the page.  I was still searching for something.  I began exploring new possibilities in consciousness, and stillness, and states of awareness.  I experimented with food, and fasting, and alternate forms of nourishment.  I was striving to grow, to change, to elevate my spirit, to reach my human potential.  And I was struggling immensely.  Against myself, my environment, my lifestyle and my habits.  What I wanted on the inside and what influenced me on the outside were at such odds with each other that any attempt to enact conscious change eventually landed me back to square one.  I did not know how to reconcile it.  I wanted to go back to the temples of Southeast Asia, and back to the treetop bungalows, where life was simple and my mind was clear.  Instead I spent my free time socializing, in restaurants and bars and at parties, because this is what we did.  My relationship with alcohol reared its ugly head, again.  

Then slowly... the fierce need to get back to myself, to find my truth, dampened... and I stopped searching.  I settled in.  

I think I forget sometimes, or rather choose to ignore, the fact that I have a psychological attachment to alcohol that has been destructive since the day I started putting it into my body.  I have tried many times to stop, eventually coming to the conclusion that I am too attached to let it go entirely, that I can find a way to live in balance with it.  I no longer think this is true.  It's not that the quantity I drink is so destructive to my body, because I generally drink in moderation; but the mental attachment, the grasping, the association of alcohol to pleasure and escape, the crutch it provides when I am feeling overwhelmed, when life gets intense, and its ability to soften the edges yet keep me in a state of complacency when I am too afraid to move forward, to really change -- is killing me.  

After George died, I used alcohol to soothe the pain.  It helped, of course.  But it is a downward spiral, and I feel myself slipping away.  

Grief is hard.  I miss George immensely.  And I do not know how to reconcile his death.  But I realize now that there is more than grief at play, and this is not all about George.  If he were here, I might still be struggling, just as I did before.  This is a difficult fact to acknowledge, but an important one.  I cannot hide behind grief, and I cannot blame it for everything that I don't want to feel.  I have work to do on myself that has nothing to do with George, nothing to do with grief.  It is a journey that began when he was still alive, and one that somewhere along the way, I abandoned.

It is up to me now to want more, to resume my soul journey, reignite that spark, and find inspiration within myself to become the woman I was brought here to be, so that I can be of service to others.  It is time to dig deep.  To elevate.  To know that a life of happiness and fulfillment are only bound by the limitations I place on myself.    

​I have been waiting for this opportunity.  For the strength and the space to follow my path.  I am scared.  But I know I can get there.  My life, and my daughter's life, depend on it.