"If you are afraid to write, that's a good sign. I suppose you know you're writing the truth when you're terrified." (Yrsa Daley-Ward, Bone)
At the age of twelve, I came to the realization that I was born into a family of alcoholics. I couldn't comprehend what this meant exactly, but I knew that whatever it meant, to be an alcoholic was ripping my family apart. We don't perceive alcohol the way we do with other addictive substances. Drugs are always viewed as the worst things we could ever get our hands on, but I'm here to shed a little bit of light on alcoholism for those of you who don't know much about.
When I was in high school and all my friends began drinking around the ages of 14 and 15, I was still scared shitless. I didn't know what being drunk felt like but I knew that I did not want to become anything like my family. Many people will argue that alcoholism is not a valid excuse for a disease, but it is. It is not a disease like cancer, it doesn't show up just out of no where ... and it is self inflicting. Anyone can become an alcoholic, really — you just have to drink enough, and by enough, I don't mean weekend flings here and there that lead to a gnarly hangover, I'm talking about binge drinking for a couple days. You drink until the point where you hit an edge, and this edge determines what your body will do next which is usually one of two things. Your body will either reject the alcohol or begin to crave it, and this is what it looks like.
You no longer get to choose to have one beer on the weekend or one cocktail with friends, because as soon as any alcohol finds a presence in your blood stream, you've already gone into cravings. The chemicals in your body are already sending messages to the receptors in your brain that you need more. There are no more limits, there are no more boundaries. You will pick alcohol over food, water, sleep, and the people you love. You don't have a choice in how the alcohol affects your mindset anymore, because when you are an alcoholic, your personality changes and you're no longer you. This is where bad decisions come into play, sometimes decisions that change your life forever.
The hardest part is sometimes being the outsider looking in. How can you understand?
We can't. We are not living this disease, we are just exposed to it.
The hardest part is removing yourself from the situation. The hardest part is to not be the enabler, the baby-er, the one who is always trying to fix the alcoholic. You have to understand, just like anyone else who has addictions, they have to want to help themselves. You must love this person enough to give them the chance to love themselves. Sometimes, you have to walk away in order for them to help themselves. It is not selfish, it is not cruel, it is necessary and sometimes necessary isn't easy. I have fallen to my knees over and over again trying to understand why.
The truth is that you may never understand why people want to hurt themselves. These addictions have roots deeper than you and I could ever comprehend.
The truth is that you cannot always play the victim. Whether you are on the outside looking in, like me. Whether you are on the inside looking out, like my family. There are always more options. You can sit and wallow in self-pity, preach about how hard life is and how challenged you are. We know life is hard, it was never meant to be easy. We are not here to live in a heavenly state, we are here to learn. Learn from the pain, the shortcomings, the little moments of triumphs and especially from our own mistakes. We eventually learn to get back up again and again, and it's ok, it is ok to be human.
