I did the thing. It was harder than I expected it would be and it took longer than it should have to do it.
I am now in therapy.
The call to the help line that I had been meaning to do for weeks was painful and it was increasingly harder to stay on the line through the whole intake process. I hung up partway through the first 2 tries. When I finally stayed on long enough to be connected, I found myself getting mad and frustrated with the person on the other side of the phone, and was surprised by this response. I answered the questions honestly while the knot in my stomach increased through the whole call. I think that means I was taking it seriously.
I’ve read that it is common for relapses to happen just before someone finally commits to treatment. Sometimes this looks like getting high in the car on the way to rehab. For me, it looked like falling off the wagon soon after my New Years post, which if you’ve read – probably isn’t surprising. I had a few people reach out to me after reading it to ask if I was ok, and that alone should have been warning that it was clear that I was not ok. And if I’m honest, it happened earlier in the holiday season, with a little slip here and a little slip here, until I finally gave up again trying to stay sober.
When I wrote This Post I was feeling liberated and free from the shackles and shame of 2022. I was also drinking wine. I edited later, once drinking tea, and did feel hopeful in looking into 2023 about what I thought was important. This was a very clever and deceitful trick that I was playing on my brain, so that I wouldn’t think about the very obvious truth: I WAS DRINKING WINE WHEN I WROTE IT. All caps for me, not for you.
What follows wasn’t anything particularly eventful, except that life involved drinking a lot of wine again. Sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in secret. The first clue that the slippery slope had slippily slooped was when Darling DD started to take note again. The second came when I noted the number of bottles that had collected since New Years. And finally the last slapped me directly in the face when I found myself crying and drunk under the covers, lamenting to him that he and the kids deserved better, which still feels true. It is true. They do.
And that’s all I have to say about that right now. I gave it a year on my own, with limited success. Time to call in the big guns. This post is not at all a TA-DA, but that’s not the point of my writing about this over the last year. I’m writing during the healing and staying honest and accountable by doing so. That’s it.
Get thee to therapy. Wish me luck.