Last chance for honesty

I have to be real for a second here. Even more so than I have to be, I want to be.

A few weeks ago, maybe early-mid June, I realized….my birthday was coming up. And it was one of those birthdays. A milestone birthday, if you will.

30.

And it was then. In that moment. With that realization. That I realized….I have been battling addiction for almost officially half of my entire life.

Since I was 15 years old.

That was…eye opening for me.

And it was motivating.

It was silently and privately extremely motivating.

If you look/read back to whatever the fuck has been going on lately…I don’t know if it translates to my writing…but things got weird for me in June.

I had this….sudden desperation to get sober. Like, now.

A desire and an urge that I’ve never had before.

I knew I’d need time, I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Or fun. Or even necessarily doable.

But…I just had this intense need to be sober by 30.

To be sober. By this coming Monday.

So I started talking about it.

With my friends.

With my husband.

Writing about it here.

In therapy.

And do you know where it went?

Nowhere.

It went nowhere.

I don’t think anyone took me seriously.

And that…that sequence of events…..realizing the date. Realizing how long I’ve been doing this shit for. Reaching out. Asking for help with it. Being direct. And ultimately, feeling insanely shut down with it all.

Those were the series of events that sent me spiraling into the massive fucking pit of depression and hopelessness that I fell into in the more recent weeks.

I had so much motivation. I wanted to change. And I really thought, for the first time really ever, that I could be successful.

I wanted it. And I felt strong enough to attempt this really impossible thing that’s never been done before in the history of me.

But it didn’t work out that way.

And in fact, I believe it was the triggering event into making therapy, AKA my only safe place, really messy and hard and unstable these past few weeks.

Of course other completely random and unpredictable events have not helped that situation….but my sudden, seemingly probably out of nowhere intense want to immediately be sober didn’t help.

I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if this deadline for me was a one and only occurrence. If I’ll ever truly and honestly have this much of a motivation to change, to be sober, to do the hard fucking work that is involved with it all.

Now is the time for honesty.

There is no point in holding this back…. In continuing the secrecy in which I’ve felt shamed into keeping.

There’s a huge part of me that fears for my mortality.

I share the genetic disorder that my children do. And the life expectancy is…well, it isn’t good. And to be frank, I’m lucky to be alive from a genetic disorder standpoint.

I would prefer death to be on other terms. Not a timeline limited by disease, genetic or otherwise.

And I know that my health is complicated, risky, and uncertain.

But diving headfirst into addiction isn’t helping. It isn’t helping me run from it.

It isn’t helping me deal with it.

And it isn’t helping me overcome it.

My time for honesty is running out.

But I’m not going to end this year, conceivably the worst calendar year of my entire life, to dictate my timeline of honesty.

I wanted to be sober by 30.

I wanted to restart the clock. To have something to be proud of.

To start again.

To be….new.

A decade started with a clean slate.

She writes this post many drinks into the night. But chock full of honesty. Of vulnerability.

It’s 11:37pm on the second to last night of my 29th year.

A recap will come tomorrow.

But tonight?

Well, tonight is filled with contempt. And frustrations.

No shortages of feelings of failure.

I should’ve done better.

I wanted to do better.

Yet, here we are.

I can’t say I’m not trying.

Trust me……I’m trying more than you ever knew possible.