If you have been following my posts you would know that I am by now almost, but not quite, four months sober.
The same amount of time it takes a fetus to grow legs strong enough to start kicking its mother.
Incidentally I am also trying to get pregnant, thus the baby analogy.
I could liken my experience of getting sober with coming out of a cocoon thinking you're a worm and discovering you are a butterfly.
Not the most beautiful butterfly, not the most intelligent, talented or the best organised. Definitely not the best organised...
Close to being the worst organised butterfly in all of existence.
But still better than a worm.
Of course, this might not have the same significance to everyone.
For me it is a new life, one that I have never experienced but often witnessed (and with great jealousy and incomprehension) in others.
To completely understand this statement I will have to tell you a little bit more about my drinking habits.
If you are an avid reader of my blogs you might have suspected a teeny weensy problem but you never know for sure until
the fat lady sings.
And boy did that bitch sing...
I've always liked wine. Specifically red wine. Tassenberg was for sale at my favourite club for R20 a bottle.
It was cheap and highly effective. It even tasted okay sometimes, differing from bottle to bottle.
Black Label beer also fell into this category.
Back then I had very little money because I was a student and worked at Spur for "party money".
I was the world's worst waitress.
Customers often looked at me slack-jawed when I asked the man at the table to open the bottle of wine if it had a cork.
I could not afford cork wine, always screw top, so I did not have the expertise necessary to flawlessly execute the opening thereof.
I constantly slipped on wet spots on the floor and fell on my ass, spilling buffalo wings and lemon wedges into my hair.
I had no clue how to pronounce Quesadilla (it came out kasadia) and often brought absurdly wrong food to my tables.
Case in point, I was skint.
So I often had to make do with less than R50 on a Saturday night, depending on how wrong I got that week's orders.
So Tassies and Zamaleks did the trick quite nicely. I could get a nice buzz on and not break the bank.
This is probably something a lot of people could relate to, most students drink whenever and wherever they get the chance and I was desperate to be "a typical student".
A nice normal young person.
Of course life will have its trinkets and soon became harder.
My first real job as a hygienist gave me insight into why alcohol was invented, to the max.
Every Friday my bff and I would meet after work to lament our loveless lives and torture jobs, sometimes drinking red wine and other times Martini's. Hers with Vodka and mine with Gin.
We would cry rivers into napkins and then eat what we called "traumazini's", often throwing them back up later that same evening.
This was still okay because we were both going through terrible heartbreak and really only drank over the weekends.
We were after all, still too broke to really invest in a bright future of alcoholism.
Over the years, this changed, however.
She basically stopped drinking and I kept powering on, drinking more and more frequently until finally it was a daily habit.
I was still functional, still working and paying bills and brushing my teeth and washing my hair, but it all started becoming more and more taxing.
As the day wore on I would start thinking about that first round glass of red, still spanking and free of grubby finger marks and lipstick. What a relief it would be to take that first sip, feeling the sting and the beginning of a tiny case of heartburn. Even before that! The sound of the bottle uncorking and the wine decanting into the glass (I had mastered this art by that point).
Phwop! Gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog.
I loved it all.
Wine immediately cheered me up and the good Lord knows, I needed cheering up.
Everything was a complete disaster.
My boss had started seeing problems with everything I did, my marriage was a nightmarish soup of horrible fights and lonely nights and I had gotten down right chubby.
Wine was my friend and she could be found everywhere I went.
Except church. Not that I was exactly in the habit of going there anyway.
Everyone else went to church and I went to Cool Runnings.
That was where I healed my hurts.
I had many problems and alcohol sure as hell wasn't one of them.
It was the only thing keeping me from driving off a bridge.
Except when I was drunk, Then I tried to steer clear of bridges.
As most of us knows, especially those of us who tend to stay up all hours of the night, it is often darkest before the dawn.
The divorce drove me absolutely insane. I went out of my way to destroy myself, making incredible, mind-numbing mistakes (I am not going to go into detail here but if you want you can go ahead and cringe as if I did.) and isolating myself more and more.
It is a miracle that I am still alive.
Until one day things started looking up. Someone (now my husband) came into my life and treated me with so much kindness that I was deeply suspicious of him. Who sent him? What did he want from me? Blood?
I mean had I not bled enough?!
And just when I had made peace with the fact that this will now be my life, drinking wine, sometimes mixing it with a sleeping tablet and falling asleep watching horror movies, with my cats and laptop on top of me.
I had sworn off contact with other living beings as far as possible while not getting fired from my job.
For years my mantra was simply "Step one; don't get fired today".
I was so overwhelmed by the muchness of my life that I even made a rule that people can only ask me questions on Tuesdays.
Mondays were reserved for catatonic, drooling-on-myself, gibbering with fear of what the week will bring but on Tuesdays I sometimes came alive for a few hours and steeled myself for adversity.
On Wednesday I would come to the realisation that all that steeling myself only set me up for more disappointment and so I would go back to drooling on myself until Friday came and released me from the hell that is getting out of bed.
On Sunday I would seriously contemplate suicide but then the wine and sleeping tablet would kick in and I'd be back to Monday.
Just a few days ago I was asking my husband a bunch of senseless little questions and he replied with my standard statement of that time: "Questions on Tuesdays".
I laughed, at first more out of surprise at the reminder and then laughed harder at the silliness that was me.
Then stopped and reflected on the insurmountable gratitude I felt at not being there anymore.
How difficult must my life have been for me to not even be able to reasonably respond to a simple question like "what would you like to eat tonight?" on any other day except for Tuesdays?
The answer is, of course, very. Very hard. I know this with my mind but I can't truly remember exactly how it felt because it scares me to even try.
Just the other day I was telling someone about my latest adventures in the land of iced tee and she said: "I can't stop drinking now, not with the divorce" and I found myself wondering how I would have coped without it when I was going through that.
Where I am sitting now, I believe I would have handled it better. The wine did distract me and kept me warm at night (that and the uncontrollable sobbing, so loud the neighbours called the cops once) but did I really have a chance to just feel?
Just sit there and acknowledge that my heart was shattered and still shattering and my mind was slipping like a toddler on ice skates and that all of that is normal.
And will pass.
Maybe, maybe not. But I do know this; if ever there was a time for me to not "need" mood-alteration anymore, it was when Mr T (now husband) walked into my life and made everything bearable again.
And yet Phwop! Gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog.
I didn't think too much of it because judging from Facebook posts by my acquaintances, I was pretty normal.
Three or four glasses of red wine per night seemed okay and they were really only two because I never really finished a glass before refilling it. So actually just one.
Right?
Then one night I was lying in his arms (little birdies and bubbles would have been surrounding my head if I were a cartoon, from all the wine I had that night) and he said these words:
"Baby, I see you struggling and I want to help you but I don't know how. And you are so much better than this."
And suddenly and in stark relief I realised: I am an alcoholic.
I am Elmien, and I'm an alcoholic.
