Tidbits

By Robyn Joy

THINGS LIKE THAT HAPPEN SOMETIMES…party fouls, bar causalities, drunken mistakes. You get to a point where it’s normalized and “sometimes” starts happening more often than “normal.”

A scraped knee, a sprained hand. An impulsive haircut behind the closed door of the bathroom at a party because you are too nervous to host anymore.

A hundred bucks spent on coke that you can’t remember if you enjoyed or not.

Your unpaid bar tab.

Again.

Missed rent, bad skin, acid reflux, misfired text messages.

The fight because of the stupid thing you said or did.

Again.

Things like that happen sometimes…when you are drowning yourself instead of noticing that your endearing tics and habits and silly notions have shifted into something more destructive than cute.

FOR A MOMENT I FELT LIKE MYSELF AGAIN… but just for a moment and then I lost the sensation. I tried to get it back, grasping at tea tag quotes and horoscopes in the free weekly. But I couldn’t find it. I looked under that damn rug where I hide everything else, but it wasn’t there either.

I looked in the mirror. There. But no. Who is this woman staring back at me? Who IS she? I don’t recognize her. I recognize the skinny girl with long princess hair in the photographs of 20 year old me, but who was she, really? Her face is happy if you don’t look close, a little sad and empty if you do.

I looked in the closet, that’s where I’ve heard other people hide things. I wasn’t there either though.

I went outside and called for me. HELLO? I yelled into the sky. Where are you?? Where have you been?? Why don’t I know you??

I looked in memories of Christmases past, but that took me to a rabbit hole of sad and mad, so I quickly stopped looking there. 

And so I sat. And waited for the moment to come again. This time I would pay better attention.

THE SUDDEN WARM SPELL HAD EVERYONE DREAMING of margaritas on back decks and BBQs on days when your skin felt sticky from the all-day fun you remembered as the sky turned purple and blue and pink.

I felt anxious.

Don’t drink, don’t smoke

                what do you do?

Nothing felt comfortable to me anymore. I didn’t relate to much that I had found familiar from the view of a barstool. All I could think of were the times when my best friend, alcohol, had let me down; turning my tongue into a serpent, making danger seem enticing, making my clumsiness a safety hazard instead of an endearing quality. 

The sudden warm spell had *me* dreaming of a do over where no one remembered Drunk Me and everyone was excited to get to know Sober Me without the life-of-the-party-social-butterfly expectation attached.

Random Thoughts While Sober and Vulnerable

You can wait and hit the bottom and see what that’s like, or make a big transition to somewhere way above the bottom. But there isn’t an official invitation either way. And a surprising lack of fanfare for the choice to rise up.

I’ve been exhausted and needing to nap most days for weeks. I think it takes a lot of energy sometimes to wake up and face myself every day without anything to make the babbling circus in my head stop. I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, and everything hurt and felt hot. My skin ached and my throat was swollen. In the morning I was fine, it was like I just had a weird fever dream, but I was still so tired. This might also be how I release the demons.

–Robyn Joy

Writers for Recovery