MEMBER STORY - Jun

Once upon a time I drank for twelve years. The reasons I had weren’t great: I had grown unaccountably sad, tired and frightened.

It was a time marked by the twin sensations of terrible isolation and helplessness. I was unemployed for most of that time, I maintained almost no friendships. I felt unknown, and unknowable to anybody else. If you had asked me why I lived as I did, I would have struggled to explain. I only knew that it seemed necessary: that everything outside the circle of loneliness and drink hurt me and appeared worthless. It was a desert. For reasons that are still obscure, hurting myself was better than allowing myself to be hurt. This caused great confusion to my family and the few people in my life who cared for me. I was harming myself, and it was enormously painful, but because of a mysterious, bone-deep self-loathing it also felt right. The feeling was almost moral.

When I finally had to end that time it was terrifying: I was being thrust out into a world I feared stripped of the only manner of coping that had ever worked for me. It looked like chaos out there, with other people. I didn’t go willingly. For years I had tried to exert a minimum of control over my consumption. I would drink for days or weeks on end, then stop, forcibly detoxing my body. It was very painful: I would be wracked by an anxiety so great that my muscles would tense to the point of feeling physically pulled apart. Tremors would run through me like a wave or an avalanche. This cycle, drinking and stopping, kept me going in a degrading orbit for many years. Until one day, when I tried to stop drinking, a lightning bolt ran through me. It was a shock that ran from the back of my neck, through my chest to end in the big toe of my right foot. It sent my heart hammering, constricted my chest, made my breathing shallow. A few minutes later I was struck again. And so I started drinking again. I realised now that I couldn’t stop, my body wouldn’t let me. If I did, I was frightened I would die.

So I was forced into the world of recovery. I was medically detoxed and entered a rehabilitation program. It has not been what I expected. I suppose I expected some kind of punishment, that finally the judgement of myself and my failures that I had been hiding from for years had found me. But the punishment never came. Instead I found a great kindness.

I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into kindness. I had never asked for help, and now that I needed it I didn’t trust what was offered. But what I found in recovery were many brave, patient and gentle people willing to unravel the knot I had tied within myself. Slowly I unlearned the great fear that I had of others, of revealing myself to them, the animal reflex that told me that they would hurt me for my weakness.

When I first started running it was something ferocious that I did to hammer anxiety, anger, thought out of my body. It was a purging to cope with emotions that I had not yet learned to sit with. Over time though it became a practice that I anticipated with joy. Finally, one morning I went running in the rain, and realised that far from being a burden or a struggle, my body seemed to delight in being pushed, to feel its strength once more, and the slow growth of its capacity. A poor body that I had harmed, maltreated and made a proxy for my own self-hatred, was growing again.

When I look at the events that have truly changed me, not things about me or the circumstances of my life, not changed something about what I am, but really changed who I am, they are very few. They are heartbreak, or grief, or trauma. I survey these events, and the vast majority are damage – we are changed by suffering. When I look for the events that have changed me through giving, that have added to my self through care, respect or kindness, they appear vanishingly few. But my recovery has been one of these. It is very rare and precious to me, and I am glad of it.