Love is patient, love is kind. Love is God
I can’t tell you the exact date or month when I stopped drinking alcohol, but I’m certain it was in 2019. Most people would commit such a huge milestone to memory but I knew I didn’t want to memorialize a time that was marked with so much pain. That’s not to say that I miss alcohol. The pain was multifaceted. I spent years of my life using alcohol as a way to anesthetize trauma from my childhood but inadvertently I ended up causing pain to my loved ones through my drinking. Which in turn brought about the pain from shame and guilt. I knew that I shouldn’t be harming myself in such a way but I repeated the dangerous cycle again and again for years. Then there was the pain of quitting, which wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I had already reached a breaking point where my back was up against the wall. Fortunately my drinking hadn’t gotten to a point where I lost my job and my family but I lost enough of myself that I was beginning to crack. I can honestly say that God was with me during this time because there is no other explanation for the absolute hard stop. Through I did have moments where I felt lured by the mere camaraderie of drinking with others, the desire to drown my sorrows in vodka was no longer a battle.
This was also a pivotal time as it was sandwiched in between two very important flash points that I cannot gloss over. Some months or maybe a year prior, I was lying in bed crying to my then partner lamenting over the fact that I did not know who I was. A sudden rush of an identity crisis came crashing down and I was struggling to find me. Then after I stopped drinking I was hiking in the hills of Oakland California in early 2020 (right before the pandemic) and yelled out to God from a peak that I had climbed saying I’M READY! MAKE ME THE PERSON THAT YOU CREATED ME TO BE LORD! 2020 was also the year I turned forty and this was crucial since I had prophesied at a young age that thirty, more importantly forty, would be when my life would get progressively better (yeah imagine an eight-year-old child wide eyed about turning forty…crazy). Remember that crack I talked about earlier? Well it would be around this time in my life when those cracks started to give way and I became completely undone.
I was in therapy finally addressing old wounds that I had been running away from for so long. And while this was one of the most difficult times of my life due to the internal changes and rupturing that I was experiencing, I was confident that it would all be worth it and I would come out on the other side healed, shiny and new. Fast forward to today and I felt that rupturing again. There are many new yet familiar things in my life that are cropping up and the one difference that is crucial to note is that I’m not drinking. I know I’m repeating the drinking thing but you have to understand how much of a crutch this was in my life. Work getting on my nerves? Drink. Celebrating something great!? Drink. Trying to be social and engaging with people? Drink. Chilling at home watching tv and just glad that I made it through the week? Drink. But the most important reason for my drinking was to keep everything else out and keep me locked in. Truth be told I hated the taste of alcohol, but once I got past that first or second (sometimes even third) gulp, then I was good. I felt as though I needed vodka and wine to hide from the pain and create a happier, more tolerable avatar that people could like, maybe even love.
In hindsight I recognize that I have a tendency to identify myself through the lens of pain. It wouldn’t be until years after that pivotal moment when I stopped drinking that I began to untether myself from pain. Not to say that I was making a commitment to never feel pain again (that’s impossible) but rather to begin the process of stripping away the narratives that I had painted on myself. Narratives such as being dirty, unholy, spoiled rotten and an all around bad kid. There were other narratives of being an orphan, unloveable, unworthy and damaged goods. I believed that everything I touched died, disintegrated or disappeared. I was able to quiet these narratives through alcohol. So when I sit here, type these words and tell you that I’m in a new state of rupturing without alcohol, without edibles or shrooms (yeah I went there) or even my favorite drug of choice…distraction, I’m forced to look at my life through a clearer lens.
When you see everything through pain it’s hard to see the joy and the good in life. Pain also gave me the false notion that love was unable to be alive within me. Trauma caused me to guard myself, put up walls, barriers, blockades, blinders, moats even around not just my heart, it extended out at least six feet from me. And good luck trying to get in cause those walls were so thick that they were impenetrable. Oddly enough I did my best to pour love out to any and everyone I came across. But because I didn’t know love for myself, I wasn’t really able to give love to others. And as long as I was looking at life through those pain colored glasses, I wouldn’t know how to truly open myself up to the full essence of love.
About a month ago I got baptized. This was an act that I felt was important to me, something that marked a change that started percolating within me just weeks prior. While I had a connection with God, I never had a relationship. And now I wanted to not only know God but feel the fullness of His love for me. Listen, opening up to love can feel terrifying because there’s always the risk of being hurt. But hurt comes even when you’re blocking yourself from the very thing that you’re trying to avoid. Sometimes the hurt is even worse because the rigid stance that we have to brace ourselves for the impact of hurt makes us more brittle and the propensity to crack is greater. I would be insane to think that I could somehow avoid being hurt or hurting someone else, that’s just not realistic. But avoiding pain means that I’m avoiding love, and that is a risk that I’m no longer willing to take.