newly sober: building castles around bullshit
trials, tribulations, and waking relapse nightmares
DAY 220:
it feels like i’m being tested.
over the last two weeks, i have gone through:
a sugar high; a panic attack that felt like a THC high; a big, long juicy relapse dream; a *mostly* amicable break up; recommitting to sobriety; alone time; flight delays, resulting in 26 hours of transit time; getting dressed in the Montana airport bathroom only to have the strap of my dress pop on the cab ride to my cousin’s wedding; arriving 30 minutes before the ceremony started;— my first wedding sober!—; a day with my extended family on a lake in Montana; and to finish ‘er all off, when i got back to NYC, my second bout of Covid this year.
i am truly #blessed.
i am still very ill with covid and my brain is very much mush, so i’m pushing out something i drafted before i got sick.
for now, i need to lay in bed and intermittently cough up boogers out of my mouth.
but do know: i danced my face off at that wedding, so much so that people came up to me— throughout the wedding and the day after— to tell me that i was their “favorite person at the wedding” and/or “the funnest girl at the party”. SO! goes to show you— you don’t have to get shitfaced to have fun! (you just have to be trapped in LaGuardia long enough that you buy a bottle of le labo perfume that makes you smell like a fancy fire to keep from drinking even though they only had the largest size available)!!!
i digress: here’s a lil thing that i wrote before i got covid brain.
ENJOY!
DAY 205:
i met him the first day i got back to New York.
funny, how it works like that.
is it fate? or am i just, as my mother likes to call me, “a dude magnet”?
i had felt a lot of anxiety about whether or not i’d be able to have s*x in sobriety.
SURPRISE!!!: i can still very much have sex in sobriety.
the first three weeks back, we spent endless days together. riding bikes, eating endless mounds of food, watching movies, going to meetings— the present was electric. but by the time the first three week summer session of Comedy Writing teaching came to a close, the lack of solitude was catching up to me, and the quality of my sobriety was compromised.
i was getting crunchy as fuck.
now, what does it mean to be “crunchy as fuck”?
it’s a term my sponsor uses for when one isn’t actively engaging in maintaining their sobriety. you can be physically sober— but not spiritually well. you can have not drank or used for years and years and years, but be a crunchy, dry bastard.
when i go to a meeting every day, when i am engaged in step work with my sponsor, when i call 3 of my sober sisters every day, when i am doing my morning pages and nightly gratitude list, and when i am well-acquainted with my spiritual wellness, i am a happy, sane sober person.
but if one of those elements gets compromised?
i get crunchy as hell.
for me it’s less about being ornery— though, that too (ask my brother Jordan)— but more about panic. as someone with general anxiety/panic disorder, it is easy to trip that wire, and if i’m not careful, i will fall down the well.
after i finished teaching my final Comedy Writing Class for Session 1, we were walking down the steps leading into Riverside Park. he had slept over the night before, and the weekend loomed in front of us. i was telling him about how i had completed my sixth step (“Were entirely ready to have God remove all our defects of character.”) over FaceTime with my sponsor the day before.
he asked, “So, what are your character defects?”
rather than saying You Will Just Have To Wait And See, I said, “I don’t know…” before i listed the obvious ones, like “Boy Crazy” and “Sexually Motivated”. but what i was really saying is that sometimes i betray myself by not being honest and i have a really hard time setting boundaries.
earlier that day, we had gotten into an argument about whether trust is earned or given. i said it must be earned, he said given— he was unhappy with that; he felt that i did not implicitly trust him. but i have learned through a life of doling over trust like short stacks at IHOP, you end up in fucked up situations if you hand over trust that freely.
but upon arrival back in NYC, i found myself open to life— when we first met, it felt like the city was yawning open for me. my adult life felt full and vibrant again. i would surrender to the moment, and then, in what was just a moment of freedom and unbridled joy, i would remember that i’m only six months sober and that i was literally engaged six months ago. i’d remember myself and clam up; get skittish; feel whiplash.
i know better: no relationships in the first year.
plus, it’s not like my first rodeo thirteenth stepping went over super well.
so, when i wasn’t coughing up my full list of character defects, that’s when he started to list his. instead of telling him, “Must we wave our red flags so flagrantly?” I just said, “uh-huh” and “yeah”, when i had not asked nor did i really want to know what was wrong with him— i could already tell.
suddenly, the sun felt brighter, and each blade of grass felt … animate, and i was thrust back in time, listening to my ex-fiancé monologue at me, day after day, about how he couldn’t make having children ethical or he would just start playing youtube videos of himself playing the marimba in college while telling me how i should really try to learn the bass so we could make music together, and i remembered how i would sink into my surroundings—stoned out of my gourd—vacating my body, as he went on and on and on about video display distortions, and i would just sit there and nod and zone out as my soul hovered above my body and i would forget that i had made the choice to sit there in the first place— a prisoner of my own design.
but when this new romantic interest tried to share something— he wanted to share a part of himself with me— a panic response fired off— a familiar feeling of dissociation— and suddenly i realized that i hadn’t been tending to my sobriety, that i hadn’t been to a meeting in two days and that i hadn’t called three sober buddies— it felt like my soul had slipped from my human shell, without weed. i couldn’t tether myself to myself; i was gone.
he wanted to walk towards the Hudson River, he asked some passerby’s if they knew how to get closer to the water. an old man answered, “96th, I think? you can get to it there?” a young boy walked alongside him with his arm in a sling, and the romantic interest asked, “Skateboarding injury?” and the kid replied, “Kinda. I mean, no… well. no. Bone infection.” and i was like am i on drugs or are they on drugs? and so i blurted out: “I haven’t called three people today.” and he was all, “Wow, you wanna call people when I’m opening up to you?” and i couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, but it did not feel like he was joking. and suddenly he realized i was serious, and so he changed his tone, and told me to sit on the bench and call three people, that he’d be just over there, and that i could come get him when i was done.
cue: after a short call with my sponsor where she told me to get my ass to an in-person-meeting, i found myself taking off my white TEVAs and lying on the grass, toes digging into the earth, holding onto anything within reach because i felt like i was tripping balls. the sun was bright, the grass was talking; and i was no longer on planet earth.
when i would get super stoned (March 2019-December 2021), my left arm would go numb, routinely. it was uncomfortable and unnerving, but at a certain point, i stopped telling myself it was a stroke because i could still move my hand. eventually, i understood that it went with the territory, numbness and being high. but also, wasn’t that the point?
and so, sitting on the grass, with my newly sober friend talking me through my freak out over the phone, trying to help me understand what was going on, i felt physically very stoned— not mentally, but physically— even though i hadn’t smoked any weed. arm numb, i hated every fucking second of this non-consensual high.
no one had warned me: the dissociating, the panic, the body high, while sober. the only way i could make sense of what was happening: i hadn’t eaten in a while, and so maybe i was burning fat, and perhaps latent THC had been unleashed in my bloodstream. maybe i really was high— maybe i wasn’t feeling the effects of drifting away from the program and feeling suffocated by a new romantic interest. maybe the problem was me— always me. not the marimba videos, not the trust, not the man— me, i’m the problem.
that’s around the time the romantic interest found me freaking out in the grass.
sometimes it’s easier to make up things than to listen to your truth.
sometimes a relapse dream is really a waking nightmare, and your AA boyfriend of three weeks accidentally meets your parents.
i woke up to the sound of my parents in the living room of my apartment, talking to romantic interest.
too much, too fast.
at a certain point, i made it known that i was awake. i went back into bed in my pitch-dark bedroom. i asked for my dad. i felt like i had been bludgeoned with a bat.
dad came into the dark room. i sat on the bed and he sat on the couch, and he asked me point blank: “Are you having a headache?” and i said, “Well, I feel like I’m post migraine—” and he said, “Don’t do that. Are you having a headache?” and I said, “No.”
he replied, “Early on in sobriety, you told me that your migraines were a panic response.” and in that moment, i couldn’t remember ever having had any sort of clarity; any sort of sense of what is and what is not. it felt like everything he was telling me, i had a hard time swallowing— i couldn’t process what had happened or what was happening.
a wave of grief washed over me, a sudden sadness that i tried to articulate: i am so sad that i didn’t think about the consequences of smoking weed every day, that i am still very much new and processing all of it. that this shit still lives in me. that this could happen again.
my dad accused me of not being “right-sized”, which he also said to me on New Year’s Eve when i cried so hard that i threw up in my mouth (which, maybe he had a point). i tried to finesse what it was i was feeling, and finally it was this:
non-consensually high— whether it was an influx of chemicals caused by panic, THC, or dissociation— reminded me that i used to so desperately aspire to that very state daily.
the life i used to live, i wanted to so desperately escape.
and maybe, in that moment, i wanted to escape this one too.
i asked my dad if it was obvious, how much weed i had been smoking prior to getting sober.
his eyes got kinda big, he shook his head and replied, “No, not at all.”
and then he followed up with this:
“But what was clear is that you build castles around bullshit. Don’t believe everything.”
and i haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since.
i woke up too early the next day to the romantic interest handing me a cup of coffee in bed and i hated it and he brought me a plate overflowing with food and i wasn’t hungry and i left to go meet Tatianna Gallardo, author of the brilliant newsletter Brazenface for a 9 am Sober Dance Party on a boat on the Hudson River called Daybreaker. i showed up stressed out and exhausted, and as soon as we got on the boat they handed us shaker bottles filled with nasty-tasting-Athletic Greens and i told her everything that happened, and soon it became really clear that i was still building castles around bullshit.
maybe it wasn’t that i was having a body high— maybe i had a panic attack because i had felt overwhelmed with the romantic interest, and maybe, it was time to knock down yet another castle.
maybe it felt easier to dive into the arms of a man than a city that i had felt had disgracefully discharged me.
maybe i had to do the very thing that scared me most: be alone.
eventually, we started to dance.
we danced as the boat cruised in front of the statue of liberty,
and then a beautiful queer painted metallic green on stilts waved rainbow chiffon fans in our faces. we danced some more. and then we talked about taking the day for ourselves.
sometimes it feels safer to build up unwieldy explanations than facing the truth.
but eventually, you have to face the truth.
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