Getting punched in the face
Sobriety was the easy part. It's all the other shit I had neglected that crushed me.
This post has been simmering for almost six years — since I got sober. I had finally found the wherewithal to quit. To change my life. To save my life. I had finally decided to prioritize my kids, my family, my livelihood, and my health over alcohol and other addictions.
But something you don’t really hear or maybe understand when you start down the path to sobriety is just how invasive the need for alcohol is in every facet of your life, and how much it masks underlying mental health issues you might have.
I have been fighting a major depressive disorder, along with impulse control issues, anxiety, OCD, and close-to-debilitating tics since roughly 6th grade. I suffered from Tourette Syndrome, which went undiagnosed until I was 39. According to my neurologist, the above litany of physical and mental issues I carried came with my particular case. It took him 30 seconds to diagnose me and said I was the oldest undiagnosed case he’d ever heard of.
I had been to a couple of therapists in my 20s and 30s for depression, but medication that treated the depression exacerbated the impulse control issues, OCD, anxiety, and tics. I took the meds until I decided I didn’t want to and suffered the emotional see-saw figuring I could weather the extremes. Drinking and an inordinate amount of risky behavior helped buffer the constant mental struggle — well, at least in my addicted mind.
They didn’t help. They just entrenched my addictions more deeply, and I even stepped up to the line of contemplating suicide several times. My drinking, risky behavior, and unchecked mental issues also hurt my (then) wife and eventually my kids, and many friends and family.
In the months after I stopped drinking, all my mental issues, now completely laid bare, crushed me. There was no longer anything deadening the pain and noise.
It took me almost eight months of hell to finally see a psychiatrist and ease into a regimen of meds that would eventually help my faulty chemistry get back close to a midpoint where I could practice healthy coping mechanisms and avoid the brutally extreme swings between the mania and paralysis of depression and anxiety.
Returning to the lack of awareness and understanding around what comes after I removed alcohol and other addictions from my daily life, this is a note I wrote in an old spiral notebook about four months after I quit drinking and was being punched in the face by every mental issue I’d neglected to address in 48 years on the planet:
Inert. I am caught in a perpetual stare. This paper. Pen scratch. Ink in its immediacy. Salt on the back of a car in front of me at a light. Music and its infinite depths. The cadence of others’ conversations, not the content. The draft every time the back door opens.
This sucks. This hole. I see I’m in it. I see how deep it is and how shallow it is at the same time. More like just being frozen in place. Lazy in place. Numb and uncaring in place. Not hungry or thirsty. Unaffected. Not being bored. Not sad. Capable, just not willing. Even now, seconds pass staring at the point of my pen. Shadows from my hand on the paper in layers from various sources. I can cast a shadow. That I can do.
This shit is what I don’t let other people see. You don’t see me when I’m in the hole. When shovels-full of dirt and hot coals are being thrown in on me and I don’t care enough to do anything but let them accumulate. To sit and burn and burn and rail like an injured, trapped animal at the top of my lungs in my head. Burn and sit in place with my head down because I already know what I’ll see if I raise my head and that I can’t reach it anyhow. If I end, I end.
Enough fucking metaphor.
Depression is not what you see on television. It is not the sad mom lamenting her unused paintbrushes or looking so pitifully out the window at her husband pushing their kid on a tire swing in the backyard, while they look back with such hurt feelings and loss. I know this is marketing’s way of trying to help the general public understand what depression is or see the signs, but it has nothing to do with how your husband, wife, mom, dad, kid, cousin, or co-worker feels.
To the person who is depressed, it doesn’t matter fuck-all how others feel, and trying to make me feel guilty that they feel bad is the worst way to try and motivate a depressed person (and it’s also not as simple as “I’m sad. And now I’m not!”). Here’s why:
There is no motivating or cheering up someone who is depressed. If you can they’re not depressed, they’re “sad” or “down” or “feeling blue” and none of those are depression. Not even close. There is no feeling when you’re depressed. Except for anger. That’s the easiest to feel and has no filter. More on anger in a minute…
When you’re depressed you are sad, blue, stuck, guilt-ridden, tired, frustrated, hopeless, hungry, overwhelmed, anxious, weak, distracted, lonely, empty, unhappy, resentful, bitter, loveless…in every thought, breath, and heartbeat, right to the nucleus of every cell in your body.
But the only thing you feel is anger fed by everything else — or by your lack of ability to deal with, handle, walk away from, ignore, or diffuse everything else as you might do — or partially do — under normal circumstances. I say partially because in every second of every day, depression is there. It is a disease. An alcoholic is always an alcoholic. It doesn’t go away. Same here. There is not a minute that goes by — or a day that goes by if I’m feeling healthy — that I don’t say or think I should run. Just run. Away from everything. Because that — short of death — is the only thing that a mind perpetually on the irrational edge can think of to do.
Even with eating healthier, exercising, practicing yoga or meditating, or any other lifestyle change — they are filters for life. Distractions. And to that end so are sex, drinking, socializing, risky behavior, attention-seeking, meds. So are pastimes – hobbies or sports or the arts or projects. The point is, it’s always there.
I find no pleasure in anything I enjoy. When I’m in the dark, I feel nothing. My head is down and it’s not just a matter of picking it up. “Fake it till you make it!” my mom used to say (and as I found out as an adult, they say in the 12-step program). It’s not something you can talk yourself out of or convince yourself to turn away from or not to do. And it sucks.
My head says — look how you’re ignoring your wife or kids. Look how uninvolved you are. Don’t you feel bad? Or in the first person, I should get up and take a shower. Write a poem. Do some yard work. Do my regular work. Go for a run. Take the boys fishing. Talk to my wife. Hug the kids. Apologize. Explain. Do what’s right. Snap out of it. Fucking snap out of it!!! I can’t fucking snap out of it. I don’t care enough.
I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel motivated. I don’t feel anything. But anger. Period.
Depression is thousands of miles and decades of regret and choices that your mind simply gets lost in at the first chord of a song.
Depression is empty weight.
Depression is a mind that is always noisy. Always. Noisy. And a completely inert exterior.
Depression is not having enough energy to even make a facial expression in response to something even when your mind has a million things to say.
Depression is I don’t care. I care, but I don’t care enough to participate or reciprocate.
Depression does not discriminate between friends and strangers. It does not recognize or care about the personal meaning inherent in one or the other or the effect actions — or lack thereof — have.
Depression is a two-and-a-half-second-blink while driving anywhere, at any time.
Depression is staring into the road salt on the back of a car in front of you at a light and every last bit of you is lost in that one particular swirl out of all the swirls on the entire back of the car, and your eyes get soft around the edges and it’s like being in a tunnel.
Depression is seeing geese in flight or deer in a field or fish holding in the current and feeling absolutely blank.
It’s all of these and more, all at once, all of the time.
My head is never quiet. There are times when things might soften, I suppose. Sound or feel more distant. But it takes so much effort. And here I’m talking about my every day, not just when I’m at the bottom. It used to be when I was outside — fishing, hunting, trail running, walking the dogs, hiking — my mind would quiet, or at least focus on things around me and what I was looking at.
Birds, water, animals, trees, sun, and my interaction with them or relation to them physically — like from my tree stand while hunting or wading in the current, or time of day or season. The noise was there but distant. Secondary. Now it’s not. I’m anxious. Distracted by what’s indoors or in my work life or in my everyday instead of what I’m surrounded by. And so the noise is loudly, intensely ever-present. I find fault in everything and everyone but myself. I manifest the worst because that’s what I see in everything.
Mantras. The chorus of a song, then just the first few words of that chorus over and over and over until another thought — a list or to-do appears, or a memory, or a faint cell-spark that ignites and dies. A constantly flowing tapestry of ringing, buzzing, rolling, banging, howling, screeching, whispering, laughing visual and audible and emotional noise.
As I sit here, I just stopped, ran my hand through my hair, and left it resting on my neck inside my collar while I stared out the window, cars passing up and down the street, everything brown with patches of snow, thinking about the conversation I have to have at 5:00 with my son and his mom about him using a weed pen and then thinking about woods out back of our old place across the street, the barn, my phone on the couch, the dogs sleeping, and I’m so, so heavy sitting here. I could sit here till I end, I’m sure, and simply do nothing. I could just sit here and end.
It’s been five years, 8 months, and 11 days since I started my life over as a sober human. I’ve come miles since the day I wrote that note.
I wouldn’t have the love and beautiful relationships I do with my wife, kids, family, and friends if I hadn’t.
Make no mistake, it’s fucking work every day. But it’s work that I’m proud to put my shoulder into.
I’m just beginning this journey with my youngest now. Thank you for helping me understand what it looks like from the other side.
And thank you for putting in the work every day. This world would have a lot less shine without you in it.
It's a hell of a thing to face that. The 12 step meetings, the Drs, and the books only scratched the surface of what I needed to work on to get to where I am today.
Thanks for sharing this.
I'm proud of you.