I SEE YOU

I watched you on YouTube the other day. I was shocked but not surprised. I was more angry than anything. Seeing the blue lips, bloated face, under eye bags, and the bloated stomach made me want to cry or punch you in the face.

You’ve continuously lied about your sobriety throughout the years. I knew you probably lasted a month or two, something wouldn’t go your way and you would be back to where you started.

I also know that you believe drinking wine instead of Jack Daniels means you’re doing better or you’re not “that bad”. I also know that your drinking has cost you career opportunities, lost friendships, and drastically changed your appearance. In your business appearance is part of the job.

You use juvenile behavior and humor to cover up the pain you don’t want to deal with. I noticed this in the 90s when you first started to get into trouble.

No one wakes up and says “I love wine so much, it tastes so good that I think I’ll drink it all day until my lips and teeth are permanently stained blue, I lose my looks, my career, friends and family”.

We drink because there’s a pain or something missing that we don’t know how to explain or deal with. Whether it’s grief, abuse, mental illness, etc. it’s there and instead of recognizing it we self medicate. Sometimes we aren’t capable of recognizing it. We something isn’t right, we different than other people, but we don’t know why and are afraid to find out. It’s easier to self medicate than deal with the real issues.

In the back of my mind I knew from young age I was different. Who wants to admit that they aren’t “normal”? No one. You do whatever you can to fit in no matter the damage it causes.

You will never get better if you don’t ask WHY you started drinking or using drugs in the first place. What were you feeling that first time? I know what I was feeling at that exact moment. I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t pretty, I couldn’t talk, I didn’t look like other girls, I was too quiet, no one was going to like me, I was fat, everyone was going to laugh at me, I could go on and on. After my first few drinks all of those thoughts and feelings vanished.

It’s difficult watching people going down that same self destructive road. I can’t exactly contact them and tell them what I think. First they would think I was insane and it doesn’t work that way.

For some people there is no “rock bottom”. They will drink themselves to death. I would’ve. I had plenty of moments that for anyone else would have been “rock bottoms” yet I continued drinking.

The one thing that helped me to stop was learning why I was drinking.

Once I was diagnosed as Bipolar w/Social Anxiety Disorder and PTSD I finally understood why I felt the way I did from such a young age. I had stopped drinking before my diagnosis but it was extremely difficult. I was staying sober by locking myself in the house. It was no way to live. Finding out there was an underlying reason made a huge difference.

I won’t say I’m in a great place now because I’m not. But it has more to do with my physical health interfering with my mental health. At least I know what the problem is and know how to deal with it.