Rock Bottom Visit #4578

“Progress isn’t linear,” I tell myself again and again.

It’s hard not to feel like a massive piece of shit in this moment. It’s hard to accept that I don’t really have as much control as I’d like to believe.

Just a few days ago, I was driving to work, congratulating myself on all of the progress I’ve made in the last few weeks: I’d been writing and doing yoga every day, I’d ended my dead end relationship, I was cobbling together a bit of a social life. I was feeling good about myself, and most importantly, I hadn’t really been drinking.

I really felt like I had turned a new leaf.

And then I agreed to hang out with some coworkers over the weekend.

Flash-forward seven hours later, I’m smoking a cigarette outside of my coworker’s house, hands bloodied, trying to start my dead car. My pants have a hole in the them, and my tailbone is throbbing. What even happened?

I must have fallen asleep or something after realizing my battery was dead, because there’s a two hour period where I missed calls and texts. Eventually I called my son, who I was supposed to pick up at 5:00, and explained that my car wouldn’t start, and hoped he wouldn’t be able to tell how fucked up I was. It’s scary, because he couldn’t tell.

I had also apparently made plans to go out with my friend Alex, and then stopped replying to his texts during the blackout period.

I still don’t fully know what happened. I try not to even think about it, because if I was too drunk to remember, then I probably did and said things that are better off forgotten.

At some point, Joey came to jump my car. He left a fucking funeral to drive out and save my pathetic, drunk ass. He asked my why I was smoking cigarettes. He picked up Taco Bell for me, and brought me a new Juul, and plugged it in for me and put me to bed.

I don’t deserve that shit.

It must have been very overwhelming for me, to be taken care of by someone who has every reason to hate me. Especially when I was being such a disgusting piece of shit. Who loves someone that much? Nobody has ever loved me that much.

I woke up several times that night, shaking and talking to myself. I don’t think I’d ever been that drunk, and I’ve been very drunk many times. Every time I woke up, Joey just held me and told me over and over again that he was there, and that I was ok.

I said a lot of things to Joey that night. Some of them probably needed to be said. Some of them definitely didn’t.

If one positive thing came out of that experience, it made me realize that I can’t do everything on my own. I don’t want to do everything on my own. Needing someone else isn’t weakness; it requires strength to admit that sometimes you need help. Sometimes you need love. Sometimes it’s ok to accept love that you don’t feel like you deserve. It’s just up to you to try to become worthy of it.

I have spent 32 years running away from people. I have felt imperfect, and ashamed of that imperfection. I’ve been trying, my entire life, to become someone that I’m proud of, before ever allowing anyone else in. I haven’t had respect for anyone’s love, because I’ve felt that they’re crazy to love me. I have self-sabotaged, and thrashed around, and given people a million tangible reasons to abandon me, because being abandoned is something I’m familiar with.

I still don’t feel worthy of Joey’s love.

After this past weekend, I can’t even say that I love myself.

I hate fucking up. I hate waking up and having to reconcile the fact that I am the girl who often gets shit faced and can’t seem to escape her own self-destructive cycles.

Of course I always tell myself that I’ll never drink again, and that I’ll be a better mother and a better partner, but I don’t even trust myself anymore. I’ve told myself that lie too many times. I look around, and the fact that both Joey and my son still love me doesn’t make any sense to me at all. It makes me feel guilty.

This is a new space for me to occupy. A space where people don’t leave.

What I’ve been doing clearly has not been working. I have tried to do everything myself, tried to be the only person to love me, and the only person to take care of me, and that pressure has obviously been too much. I start to resent myself for being such a loner, and then I just tank my own progress because I don’t think I know where to go from there.

I am a perfect girlfriend for about six months, and then I start to suck. I think subconsciously I try to test my partners. Like, “Yeah, you think you love me, but what if I’m really… LIKE THIS!” And then I rip off the mask to reveal the grossest parts of myself. What if I stopped doing that, though? What if I stopped being the grossest version of myself, what if I stopped testing people? What if I just put that energy into loving the gross parts of other people? I feel so guilty that I haven’t been doing that before. I can’t change what I’ve done. But I can change what I do going forward.