Recovery diary: July 3rd
This one’s another one of my journals about recovery. I’m always unsure about sharing these, but in the absence of any other posts recently, I thought I would check in, and this — until I finish my current piece of fiction — is what I’ve got.
Earlier, I looked at my ‘sobriety’ diary, which really is just a count of the days in a tiny black notebook. I write the number before I go to sleep, every day. On June 3rd, last year, I didn’t write that number, because I was drinking. It should have been 185. So today I’m a bit nervous, very superstitiously. For good reason, I think. It’s the anniversary of the relapse that nearly killed me.
I’d been sober for six months, pretty much. It should have been good, and I was desperately hoping it was good, but it was hell. I’d finally got myself well enough to go elsewhere, to go on little holidays, but they were all utterly miserable and lonely. Finally I’d published a collection of ten years’ worth of prose, my biggest book yet, but the press was a joke, I didn’t get paid, and as soon as it went to print the publisher bullied and gaslit me so horribly that it tainted the whole thing. It’s only because a few people have responded so positively to the book itself that I don’t regret it entirely. It will find its own life, outside of any association I used to have with that press.
Anything I tried, this time last year, went miserably. In the five weeks approaching the start of July, I wrote on quite a number of occasions, in my sober diary, alongside the day’s tally, that I wanted to die. Or something like it. That was my last thought before going to sleep. This didn’t become an actively suicidal impulse until the start of July 2024. At that point, I decided to relapse. Very deliberately, and on purpose. It became pretty extreme.
There is zero risk of my relapsing now. I write this on my 261st sober day. I don’t know what is different this time round. What I do think is the case is that last year I was simply sober: this year I am “in recovery”. The distinction for me is not one I really understand, or feel the need to — the outlook is just different. I am a different creature, perhaps having been a lot deeper in hell and closer to death last summer than I ever had been before.
For a lot of people in fellowships, what they mean by that distinction is “going to meetings, or not”. Doing the steps, or not. They may tend to say you have “dry drunk syndrome” in the latter case, with all the bitterness and resentment that entails. As it happens, I am not going to meetings. I haven’t been to a meeting since I sobered up in October. I’m not doing the steps and don’t have a sponsor. Perhaps it is simply knowing that these meetings and structures are there, if I ever do need them. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s realizing that I actually can do this on my own, now that I’ve found the right approach. Anyway, another true thing is I simply don’t enjoy fellowship meetings, and clearly I don’t need them to stay sober — early on, that felt cavalier, perhaps; but not on day 261 — so I don’t go.
I will say right now with some reluctance and a great deal of anger that it came down to money. ‘Help’ when I relapsed last year didn’t come from the NHS. A fortnight into this relapse, I spent all day in A&E, and when the doctor finally spoke to me, however hard I pushed to get on a detox, his job was simply to get me the hell out of the building. He made a point of not listening to what I was saying about years of trying to get help for his, and what it had done to me, and repeatedly told me to go home and manage my withdrawal symptoms on my own. I was to wait for a phonecall from a local recovery hub — a call which never came — to maybe, if I was lucky, get onto an outpatient detox programme, so long as I proved my commitment by trying to cut down first. Well, trying to cut down was what had just landed me in A&E. And I hadn’t even gone too fast. It was just interacting so badly with my seizure disorder (which at the time I thought was mere anxiety ) that a friend rang me an ambulance.
There’s nothing like your life being in danger to realise that, contrary to grim diary entries, you actually do not want to die; and I realised I did not. I’ll be very clear here: if I hadn’t had savings enough — and people to borrow from — to get myself into a private detox clinic for ten days, I believe I would be dead. Yes, it wiped every penny of my savings and yes it created financial debt to loved ones, but I don’t regret it. Of course I don’t: I am still here because of it (is my belief). I’ve tried to self-manage my addiction before. I’ve been refused places on detoxes before. That was my entire 2021, and I’m astonished sometimes that I made it through that. And this time last year, I was in significantly more danger. The NHS just wants alcoholics to leave the building’ and the recovery hubs gatekeep their detoxes beyond what I could survive last summer.
I have a photograph of the moon from the witching hour, some night in mid-July 2024. I remember taking it. I was thinking: all I have to do is get through two nights and one more day. This time was torture: the withdrawal symptoms were hell, and were setting off my seizures for hours on end. It was torture. I didn’t eat for three days because I couldn’t swallow anything except liquids. The inside of my mouth filled with white lesions. But eventually the hell was over and, a few days into the detox clinic, I finally got some sleep. It must have been ten nights without anything like proper sleep. (Edit: I’ve counted. Fifteen!)
To understate it, it makes me very happy that I made it through. This year, it turns out, is the year I get my life back.
It’s very incremental, and there’s definitely been deep sadness and loneliness on the way, but it’s happening. In early April, I met up with some very beloved friends and went to the cinema with them — my first time since 2020. It was pretty deep-end: I spent the whole day in there, watching the entire first series of Twin Peaks. What was even more important than doing something like that for the first time in almost half a decade was that I met up with friends to do it. Not having a social life makes you so unwell. I knew this already, but was shocked at how tangible is the change. My body remembered what it is like to have friends around. To be sat at a table with them, to hear their voices and laughing. My life changed that morning. So imagine my delight when I not only met up with friends, but also bumped into friends at the cinema who I hadn’t seen for years!
Intermittently at least, I have a lot of creative energy when I am not in active addiction: in the first half of 2024 I published two books; and this time round, four months after sobering up, I’d written a novel. (If you are a subscriber to this substack, you may have read it.) I’ve a new book of poems almost ready, a month or so away. Inescapably it involves addiction and recovery, because I wrote it; but it also involves hope and sex, because I wrote it. It’s my “weirdest book yet” (says a friend). Very unusually for me, I’ve been doing a lot of composing, recently. I’m going to start putting my music online soon.
From March to June I organized and hosted an online poetry reading series, called CRISIS CRYSTAL. Twenty-nine poets across ten evenings, every Sunday. It was good. It’s continuing, actually: visit www.crisiscrystal.net for details.
Probably the most significant change in my life is that I am now in a relationship. He is, they are, wonderful. Of course he is: I have very high standards!
(One person, either pronoun. It so happens I also use both ‘he’ and ‘they’ now, too. I realized this, walking by the canal last month. I don’t understand it yet, but realizing these things — which was instant, for me, like a bolt of happy lightning; and out of the blue — realizing them matters more to me than understanding them, which I expect will happen its own time. I can nudge it a bit maybe, go on a sunny walk and think about it, but I feel no urgency.)
Tonight I’m taking him out to dinner, to thank him for something — and also, I “confessed”, so that I could make a point of spending this nerve-wracking anniversary sober, and in the best company. I explained the scary anniversary, and in accepting the offer, they did use the word “reclaim”. We’ll likely go see a film beforehand. Then, we’ll go to the pub. Film, dinner, pub. Low-key. Lovely. We did those three things on our first night together in mid April. Immediately after I’d asked, in good fun, “Are we dating?” a pint glass at the empty table next to us shattered, which was genuinely weird, and good fun. (We decided, whatever dating is, that we were probably doing it.)
The early weeks of the relationship were frequently attended by weird moments like that, all of them feeling like particularly ostentatious moments of luck or coincidence. The sort of remarkable, strange things which it’s sincerely joyous to decide to be superstitious about. It has been a truly happy time. Despite all the complaining about what a hard time I’ve had, I do often think to myself what a treat it is to actually get to be there for someone else — to take on someone else’s problems, to be a safe and consoling presence. I think that might be what I missed most of all in the 5 years of isolation, actually: moments where I got to look after someone else. Just to be supportive, even in the most minor way; it feels to me like the very best of being human.
And all that I said about friendship and company turns out to be all the more true of sex: I didn’t realize just how bad was the effect of being totally isolated for so long, or just how profoundly healing it is to be intimate (and how fast you feel the difference). A few times I’ve thought about time travel: for all of 2021-2023 I think I only so much as touched another human about ten times times, and I very rarely spoke aloud. It’s insane how long it took me to realize I was having a breakdown. But that is the word: I was not sane. I am sane now, and sober, and it’s summer, and I am happy. I am also, at long fucking last, looking hot. I have a lot of love to give, and I deserve love, and I more than deserve the hot summer I’m having. It’d be fun to teleport to 2021 — even to 2024 — and just tell myself… how it’s going.
You’ll forgive me how sentimental this post is, I hope. My seizures — unrelated to alcohol, this is a long covid thing — are carrying on, and I’m still waiting for a referral, but I’m managing them better. My nervous system in general though is finding its own slow way to settling back to health, and my soul (whatever I mean by that) is healing like I’ve never known it heal before. I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. I am grateful.
Superstitiously, I won’t post this until the morning of the fourth — if and only if I stayed sober. So if you’re reading this, I didn’t relapse.
I’m getting a new seralized story ready for this substack. I won’t paywall this one, and the chapters will be shorter this time round.
Take care!
RS