Who is sober Brittany

Perhaps some of you wonder what drives a person to addiction and, sure, I could spin you the same old sorry tale; childhood trauma, untreated mental illness, pain over your missing schizoaffective little sister who you failed to help, blah, blah, blah. But what I really want to know is how in the Sam hell does anyone stay sober? Like seriously, reality really and truly blows and there are people out there just coping with it in some sort of healthy and productive manner. That's what's truly mind-boggling to me.

I've even heard people say that they meditate to unwind. As if one could meditate sober without ruminating on every humiliating moment, shameful act, or failure in the entirety of their life. Is there a different kind of meditation that I'm not aware of? Even vodka, which I found to be quite effective at silencing my demons until it wasn't, doesn't work when you sit alone with your thoughts.

Being alone with my thoughts is a circumstance I like to avoid. They and I do not get along. Even now that I'm finally taking the mood stabilizers that my bipolar brain requires I'm still not a fan of my own thoughts, they're mean. I suppose I'm just a fan of escapism and always have been. Before I started drinking at the age of 15 I would escape between the pages of a good book. As my drinking amped up I still found time to read when I wasn't on a drunken escapade.

I loved reading so much that it inspired me to write my own stories but not finish them. As you may have guessed, a love of escapism does not foster a love of commitment and determination. Go figure. On a more positive note, escapism is self-fueling. The more you engage in it the larger the mess you sought to avoid becomes. Fun! If we could harness the power of escapism, we might have a solution to the energy crisis.

The only problem is that it does eventually explode in your face. I mean it straight up torpedoes your life until you feel there's only one way out. That's how I ended up in a mental ward for the fifth time in my life a week before Thanksgiving this year. Only this time I got there by police escort so I feel like that was progress and progress is always good. I'd finally hit rock bottom. Yay!

It didn't happen when I lost countless jobs, broke the lease on two apartments, had half a dozen cars repossessed. Or when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Not even when I saw my sister on the street looking worse for wear and was in no position to help her because I was basically homeless and living by the grace of another's kindness myself and so many more things that are too numerous to name. Perhaps all of these things pooled at the base of my skull until one day, seemingly at random, the dam broke.

I'm sure rock bottom doesn't sound like a good thing, but you can't fix a problem if your life is going well enough to ignore its existence. Well, maybe that's just me. I've known I had a problem for over a decade and even checked myself into the hospital before. On these other occasions when I checked myself into the hospital they also diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and I chose to focus on that because it gave me an excuse to keep drinking it was new information that I needed time to process.

What I didn't know was that the medicine wouldn't work as long as I was drinking my weight in vodka and cheap malt liquor each day. Not that it mattered because I quit taking medication after I was wrongly prescribed an antidepressant (bipolar people shouldn't take antidepressants), and that triggered a heightened bought of mania resulting in me having hallucinations at work and making a huge embarrassing scene. At the time I thought, Well, at least when I secretly drank at work I didn't embarrass myself until after I'd left the office and I usually couldn't remember. I now see the flaws in that logic.

Needless to say, I didn't like myself very much. No one who slowly poisons themselves all day, every day, does. So here I am, two months sober and trying to learn to get along with my demons as a sober woman. I gotta get me some of those healthy coping mechanisms I've been hearing about and that's the journey I'm on. I'll be chronicling my quest to find out who the hell is sober Brittany.