“Today is the day the Lord has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it. ”
Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you.
I’ll take the stones, please. Silence is a privilege at the moment, a privilege I haven’t sat under for a while. I haven’t had time to focus on anything other than life and somewhere down the line my creativity went with it.
This would be the moment I rage, pick up a bottle and indulge myself with chaos of any form, just to feel normal. Silence has a way of pulling shit out that you’ve ignored over time. Idle hands will play, but right now my hands are empty. It’s easy to numb the mind with a good time and medicine that makes you feel invincible. It’s hard to stay present and soak in the emotions of your being.
Every single day is different now. My heart sometimes sinks, the hair raises at the back of my neck, my chest tenses up and my temples pulse. It feels so out of body, like my skins crawling on its own. Those are the days that hurt the most, where my smile is the last thing on earth holding it all together. I’ve become a good actress, especially while sober. I could fall into a deep sleep with pills. I could get lit for days off coke. I could douse myself in ethanol in order to shut off my thoughts for a few hours. I could spend all the money I’ve worked hard to save for years, in a matter of minutes. However, after about 6 hours the come down happens and I’m back to square one. Heart sinking. Hairs rising. Chest tensing. Temples pulsing. Skin fucking crawling. That routine controlled my life for a long time, so now I sit in silence.
These last few weeks have been a whirlwind, regular Xoch would have gotten through a rough patch and threw away the hard work on a single night of partying. Those single nights turn into a binge week of laziness and bad habits. Exactly the triggers that cause my depression in the first place.
There’s no part of me that chills at this time. I’m like a loose cannon, never quite safe and always on the verge of destruction. That takes guts to realize, most people refuse to recognize when they are unhinged. That’s the ugly truth of sobriety, you’re not looking at things through a clouded lens. There’s nothing to prohibit you from knowing, feeling or internalizing what is happening right now in your mind and body. It’s fucking terrifying, but bring on the horror because I refuse to go back.
People think the problems go away once you’re sober, if anything, the problems begin once you’re sober. Emotions I’ve strapped down into the abyss of my soul start to show face, like, remember me?! Yeah, bitch, I do. I thought I was over it, thanks for reminding me I still have issues I have to work through.
It’s all relative, once the piles of shit are on display for you to rummage through and attempt to organize, you realize it’s all the same mess. Just garbage you have to learn to throw away, we just can’t begin to understand how attached we are to these ugly memories. They subconsciously become your identity, sure nobody knows about what you’ve said, what you’ve done or what you experienced but YOU know. Where we may not know how to let go of the person we once were, we do have to try to attempt to be a better human and work towards not making those same mistakes over and over again.
That’s the beautiful thing about mercy, I have every single day of the rest of my life to attempt to be better. I don’t want to say that I was a bad person when I drank but I definitely was a menace to society. Certain inhibitions turned off and a flip would switch to “fuck it” then all hell would break loose. I can say that now that I’ve had my months of sober clarity but I made a lot of excuses for a long time and now I’m able to admit, alcohol was hindering my self control and blocking a solid foundation for my relationship with Christ.
(Pause)
Like an actual pause. Typing out that sentence gave be a headache, I had to step away for a few hours to process it. (Side note - this ended up taking me weeks to write.) These realizations aren’t easy and I’m not going to pretend that they are. Reality is, I wasn’t the best Child of God even if in my mind I had it all together. My heart hurt for a really long time, I can’t describe it, it was like chronic pain, yes it hurts, but you’ve gotten so used to the pain it becomes second nature. You’re used to the anxiety attacks and nervous breakdowns every so often, so I drank. And drank. And drank some more, until my health depended on it.
We’re all allowed silence for a while, unfortunately most of us have seen silence as a privilege that only some special few attain. We’re constantly inundated with information to process, our brains are constantly going and going and going, when are we allowed silence?
I’ve realized that silence was a fear of mine, silence allowed me a chance to process and digress who I was as a whole. It’s a hard pill to swallow when you’ve been clouded since you’ve been 17 years old.
Up until then I’d spent my life in a shell, trying my hardest to be perfect to avoid any additional chaos. My older sister was always “the problem child,” suffering from her own mental health and educational disabilities which forced her to rage. I lived in a “my house, my rules, my way” type of home. My parents didn’t tolerate any sort of defiance, if you fucked up you were out on the streets. Period. It happened to my sister over and over, my young 11 year old self being so afraid of letting my sister in the house to shower while my parents were at work. This was before ring cameras or cell phones, there would be no way of knowing she was there, but my fear was large enough to keep her out. I’d been the high achiever, the talented one, the goody two shoes always getting awards for my academic and musical accolades. At the time, I was a constant. A reliable kid who would make the right decision because that’s who I was. Yet all I could remember from that time was despite all of my awards and achievements, I yearned for the love and passion my parents showed my sister. Here I was stepping up when my sister fucked up, trying to make things easy on my home, being the best I could be, and instead of appreciation I felt like it was expected.
High school hit and that was the end of that shit. I was fucking around chilling with thugs, smoking weed and having parties. Overall, I did well in school and made up for my weaknesses with my grades and extra curricular activities but by the end of junior year my counselor told me that if I didn’t buckle down and really focus in for my senior year, I wouldn’t graduate on time.
First semester senior year was amazing. I was focused and on track to finish on time with options for college. My relationship with my first love was thriving, he was really encouraging me to do what I needed to do to finish, he was kicked out his second year and wanted me to see it through even though he couldn’t. We both were extremely traumatized from the experience of my first abortion in August of 2004, I waited late to tell my sister and mom I was pregnant, so I had to experience labor on my own in my bedroom and upstairs bathroom due to a 3 day process to kill my 4 month old child. It’s a morbid thing to say but I’ve made peace with this decision. I was a child who knew no better, I no longer have the opportunity to know whether that was a good decision or bad but that one decision changed every outlook on my life until I found Christ. I’ll spend the rest of my life repenting for the decisions I made at this point of my life, thankfully I have a Lord who has offered me his forgiveness through His own blood.
In December of 2004 all of that changed when I took my first line of cocaine. I’ll never forget how euphoric and powerful I felt. I went from making the best decisions after my abortion to the worst. Cocaine had been around me for years at this point, I chilled with people years older than me and I had family and friends who had picked up the habit but I never gave in. A switch automatically went off in my head that I was invincible. I was no longer the little girl who would follow the rules or authority. Shortly after this, I was kicked out of my home and left to live with my sister or whoever else would let me lay my head on their couch. It sounds horrible but living this way invigorated an artist soul who had been stifled and boxed in for so long as if I had no defiant bone in my body. Coke made me feel strong, powerful, loud, and free, until I came down. I HATED the come down. I remember looking at my dirty hands in disgust as my brain wandered and sprung into mania as my body was forced to stay awake instead of sleep. Pride will have you believing there is no problem with taking a load off and having some drink to take away the edge or a line to pick you up, even though your entire lineage derives from addicts.
I’m now aware enough to realize that I too was an addict. Sure, I didn’t stop drinking because of my drinking, but now that I’ve stopped I’ve realized how functioning I actually was. I ran to booze for any slight inconvenience or bad news, never quite resolving any issues. Just a continuation of piled on mess that’s never been dealt with. Sure I was fun and outgoing but the rage always lived underneath. I’d recognize it the second someone or something triggered me, then I was the problem. I no longer want to be a problem y’all. I want to be a solution, even if it’s just for me.
Silence is golden. Yes, my mind started getting quiet after a while but so did my mouth. I stopped responding. I stopped jumping to conclusions. I stopped begging for answers. I stopped posting on the internet for validation. I stopped arguing and I started listening. Shit don’t sound the same when you’re not combative. You can really see a persons true intentions when you’re quiet enough to hear what they’re really saying, drunk words are sober thoughts, now I’m quiet enough to hear them all. I’m aware enough to be vigilant on the little things, something I took for granted for so long. So now, it’s time to embrace.
Sobriety is a true and honest reflection of who I am as a whole and accepting it for what it is. I’m really enjoying finding out about myself, finding the nuances that make me, me. I’m not as complicated as I once thought I was, it’s a stark truth that has surprised me over the past almost year of clarity. Yes I have emotions and shit to work through, but who doesn’t? It just feels encouraging to go through my shit piece by piece, item by item without piling on more mess that came from the constant use of alcohol. I’m a beautiful person who has made a difference in this world, while I myself struggled immensely. Now I allow myself to heal and feel and grasp onto each moment with gratitude and light. I want to hold onto each surviving second of my life with honesty, some days are good and some days are bad, but hopefully each day will be met with compassion.
Compassion is not only something I’d like to offer myself but to others. I understand, whole-heartedly, this is my journey. It isn’t my place to throw this sobriety thing on other people as a way to emphasize my own. I can only move towards living in my own testimony, speaking my truth with hopes of leading by example. If you feel that alcohol is limiting your life or hindering your progress, it probably is. That’s it. Just be honest with who you are and what you become when you drink, if that causes you to step back, good for you. However, if you find yourself struggling to meet honesty head to head, please know you’re not alone. You are worthy of understanding and silence of your own. You don’t have to label yourself as an alcoholic, you don’t have to join AA, you don’t have to testify to the world that you don’t drink, but know your boundaries. Understand that sobriety does give you extra time to reflect, it’s incredibly hard especially when life throws you curveballs. But, you’re worth the fight.
God loves you and so do I,
XOCHI