If I had to mark in time when alcohol became unhealthy for me, this would be it. May 2015. Nine months after Jerry died, my hero, my best friend, the love of my life, a big strong sexy Green Beret who was smart as hell and had a heart of gold.
May 2015. Too much vodka because my heart was shattered and I was with my husband’s friends, without my husband, and my heart just couldn’t take it. So i drank. Straight vodka. And the next thing i knew it was the next morning and I didn’t remember anything that happened in between. But there was this picture. That my father-in-law snapped. Of me being carried out of this bar. By another giant heroic Green Beret who loved my husband and helped deliver me safely to my room. Nothing bad happened, thank God. But this was a moment. A shift.
As horrible as I felt physically the next day, as well as humiliated, it did something in my subconscious. It triggered this faulty belief that if I drank, to the point that I was helpless, some big strong man would come along and save me, and maybe I’d get lucky and he’d love me, the way i desperately missed my husband loving me. Funny because my husband didn’t fall in love with a helpless or drunk version of me. The me he fell in love with was very capable and independent.
Yet the seed from this night in May 2015 was planted. And I chased it. Very rarely because opportunities as a single parent to go out and drink when you don’t live near family or have childcare are rare, but the seed remained. Ironically, the next time I stepped foot in this same bar was July 10, 2021, and the same thing happened, only this time, no one was there to save me, and the person I thought was going to ended up taking me away and raping me.
I didn’t mean to drink too much either night. The first night in 2015 I was just heartbroken and lost. In 2021 I had this naive, but poetic fantasy of meeting someone there and falling in love; it happened to be the anniversary of the night I met my husband. It was no fairytale what happened that night.
I don’t really tell many people about these experiences because they’re humiliating to me, but I think after all this time I’m ready to share, in case it might help anyone else to know they’re not alone.
In my experience, bad things have happened when alcohol was involved. And though bad things can happen (and have happened) without alcohol, what I do know is that NOT drinking alcohol has never caused anything bad to happen. In my experience.
