I broke up with my Paul. I really love the wretched, pathological bastard. It is all for the best, he is so very damaged. It hurts horribly.
My "best" (and currently only) friend absolutely stinks. She is everything I didn't like about her before, but worse now because she's older and wiser to the ways to hurt others. I truly don't like the woman, and I am putting up with her because she's all I've got.
I am completely on my own. I have never been so frightened. I want a quick fix, I want Paul to call and tell me we can work it out, he can commit, he can be the other half of a couple. He can't, and we both know it, but I could hide from the awfulness of solitude for one more night if we could pretend.
I am sober. It is not like the first couple of months, when I felt high on possibility and full of life. I have become depressed and anxious, two feelings I know all too well. It isn't a magic bullet, sobriety. It is infinitely better than the alternative, but it ain't no dream come true. The problem is, real life comes with it.
God, I miss Paul tonight. Like I would my own beating heart, but you know what? If he were to read this, this outpouring of my soul, he would sneer at it and call me weak or melodramatic. So what does that say of the people I choose to hold dear? And what of my "best" friend? The one who is only interested in her own feelings, even as I fall to pieces in front of her? Why are these the people I let in? Not too much of a stretch to connect it all, my drinking, my loneliness, my poor choice of loved ones and lovers.
I just don't like myself very much, and THAT is what I need to overcome next. It will be a harder fight than alcohol ever could have been.

I have found my daughter again, and she is glad to have me(Thank God)
I have been promoted and have far more responsbility than I ever would have thought anyone would entrust to ME
I have learned to speak to people in public without crippling fear
I have fallen in love
I have remembered how to laugh until my stomach hurts
I have figured out that nothing is ever as bad, scary or insurmountable as it seems
I have woken up clear headed and focused
I found my voice again, I am writing again
I have read a good book every week
I have hope for the future beyond tomorrow, beyond next year
I left the drunken idiot I lived with for WAY too long
I remember how good it feels to make other people laugh
I have a lot more money in my pocket when pay day comes around
I don't question what I said, did, or who I said or did it to the morning after
I don't slur (God, I HATE to listen to people slur now)
I danced at a party on an essentially empty dance floor
I can smell the air again
I can remember the sunset again
I can remember the sunrise again
I have realized that I am wiser, stronger and braver than I ever knew,
and that knowledge gives me faith that I will be okay
I will thrive, not just survive
I will live life and life will be glad to have me
Again, Carpe Diem.

I started a fight with a professional hockey team (well, 8 of them anyway)
I vomited between cars on a NYC express train, going about 80 miles an hour
I invited about 100 strangers home so the party wouldn't end
I punched my best friend
I tried to kill myself, twice
I slept with men I wouldn't LOOK at sober
I spent my rent in a bar, just about every month
I got arrested for drunk driving
I insulted (and quite cruelly, I might add) a myriad of people just because they were there
I crashed a "stolen" car in Barbados
I fell down the stairs on a first date
I got date raped
I beat my dog for chewing the trash, and she is still afraid of me
I slept in a park in NYC
I slept under a pool table
I cried at parties
I got my nose broken by my even drunker friend Kim
I missed my daughter's most important years either drunk at night or hung over in the morning, to varying degrees
I skipped college
I lost jobs
I partied with homeless addicts because it was the only party going
I allowed great cruelty to happen because we were all too fucked up to care
I learned to trust nothing but a buzz to feel better
I learned to trust no one
I learned to hate myself
I learned to lie to cover my addiction
I learned to stop looking for real and lasting love, because no love could replace alcohol
I lost myself.

It's amazing how 15 years can fly by, especially when you're drunk for most of them.
Tonight I need to regret, to embrace the ugliness so that I can start to let it go. I wish this list even scratched the surface.
Tomorrow I will list the beautiful things that have happened, just since last October.
I think, in order for utter darkness to exist there must be purest light.
Carpe Diem.

I left a man I had lived with for 5 years at the beginning of this past summer. We raised our girls together, went to church together, had a dog together, we lived our lives together.
We drank together.
I never loved this man. I needed someone worse off than me (he's cliche alcoholic, like an Afterschool Special) to feel better about my miserable existence and my more subtle (but not much less destructive) addiction.
He was not bright, not funny, not mature on any level. I suppose the moment you exit reality on a more or less ongoing basis due to drunkeness, you do stop growing emotionally. That places him at about 16. He crashed our only car twice, disappeared on weekend long binges, was hospitalized and arrested. I found him in the attic naked, he would urinate in our closets, he would hit me in childish drunken rages. I stayed because next to him, I looked like a saint.
He is still drinking, and I don't much care.
I left without a second thought, and that makes me sad.
I am sad for the years I stole from my daughter, the years I gave to alcohol and the foolish boy I chose to drink with.

In my defense, he IS really good looking

So a friend of mine is the mother of a young woman who has recently written a New York Times bestseller about "drunken girlhood".
I have known of the book from it's inception, my friend and I worked together during the time her daughter was writing it and negotiating publishing deals and such. My friend never really mentioned the subject matter, except that it was a big emotional experience for her because it is such an intensely personal account of her daughter's formative years. My friend is more than a little image sensitive, especially when it comes to her family, so I chose not to read the book. I would turn off 20/20 and The Today Show when her daughter (who is beautiful, intelligent, well spoken and a VERY gifted writer)was interviewed. Eventually my friend was interviewed as well, I would hear about it from people we knew in common. I was trying to honor OUR friendship, the level of intimacy she had chosen to show me instead of a blow by blow of her strengths and flaws as a mother as seen through the eyes of her daughter. It backfired, she took it as disinterest. I know how hard it was for her to process the book, to support her daughter's accomplishment while acknowledging her own role in the addiction that allowed it to be written in the first place. I think she took my distance as distaste.
I never told her about my own drinking.
I wanted her to see me as a plucky, stubborn, sophisticated and strong woman raising a child to the highest standards I could maintain, not a drunk. We drank together on her beautiful back porch once, opened good bottles of wine with the huge brass opener(which I later saw in the movie "Sideways" in one of the vineyard scenes) on the marble bar in her living room. We got drunk and laughed and bared some of our souls and she never thought for a second that I drank that much wine EVERY NIGHT OF MY LIFE. She certainly didn't, and I looked up to her.
At any rate, the daughter's book is now out in paperback, and I bought it. I won't tell my friend, a great distance has grown between us and I think it's a permanent situation. It is terribly painful to read, it is me as a teen, it is my sister, it is half the women I know. Now, sober, I hate to read about someone else who struggled like me. Thank God she stopped at 23, not 33,43, never.
So much time wasted hiding or drunk. I want it back.
Addiction takes so much more than you know until you're through it and looking back, even through some one else's eyes.