one day you just realize while you’re laying in bed at 2am that the reason you have tried to hold on so tightly to lovers who could not love you well and who sometimes didn’t even want to try is because you know that deep inside of your stomach and your chest and your bones is this disgust with yourself, this feeling that you are ugly and bitter to the tongue and that begging to be loved is the only way you will get it, that begging is the only way someone like her could love someone like you. but it isn’t true and you know this because for every person you left teeth marks in by holding on too tight there is someone waiting for you to love yourself enough to come sit on the floor so they can braid your hair and that someone else is waiting for you love yourself enough to tell them how scared you get sometimes when you think about being a little kid and that someone else is waiting for you to love yourself enough to say i did something to hurt myself so they can sit with you and make you coffee and feed you something warm you can eat with a big spoon. and i think that the absolute hardest part of being hurt over and over again you are small is that you grow up believing that loving you is so hard that you have to do absolutely anything to prove you are worth it even if you don’t believe it, especially when you don’t believe it. you learn walk around believing that love is something you only get as reward for becoming whatever the person in front of you wants you to be, because the person you are isn’t worth anything, you believe that with everything in you.
i do a lot of talking to my body and talking to my small self because i have done so much to hurt both of them. and i know if i can love pieces of myself really slowly eventually i will love my whole self, be kinder to my whole self.
i’m an alcoholic, it took me 9 years to admit that. i had already been doing dope for years when i found alcohol and eventually i stopped shooting up and thought that would be the hardest thing i ever had to do. but there still isn’t anything that compares to that feeling when you take your first pull of vodka from the bottle and everything inside you just gets really soft and warm, your brain stops counting and remembering, you get so quiet. there are things i felt in sobriety that were incredible, that were also warm and also soft, i know that substance use makes things happen in your brain that cannot be recreated organically, that it makes your brain do things it’s not supposed to do, but it still makes me sad to think about, that i can’t remember anything that’s felt better than the first mouthful of liquor in an empty stomach. booze has this fist around my insides that i know will only lessen its grip if i start to learn how to be alone with myself, how to be honest about who i am, how to believe that i actually do deserve good love and that the only way i earn it is by being alive. alcohol never asked anything of me, never wanted me to be a softer person, never wanted to see me stop hurting myself, it was complete acceptance of my brokenness. that sometimes is still hard to think about too, that i only liked myself and only thought i was fun to be around if i was pretending to be someone else. that i thought i had be fun at all. i thought i had to trick people into loving me by pretending to be someone else. sobriety is really hard some days. some days it’s just me and myself, some days it’s just me and someone who loves me honestly and fully. who knew i was pretending and loved me through it. who saw how much i hated myself and loved me through it.
i guess i just didn’t really know what giving up drinking would feel like, i knew it would be painful, i knew i would finally have to look at the mess i had made if my life. that i would have to set down all my anger and learn to make peace with the ways i have been bruised. but there are some things that no one can really warn you about, you just have to go through it. getting clean is one those things. it’s been so painful. i hurt all the time, but i don’t only hurt and i try really hard to remind myself of that. people loved me when i was hurting myself and lying and pretending. i was not a functioning alcoholic, i did not hide it well. it’s hard to reconcile that my 20s are almost gone and that i spent so much of that time drunk or high or doing something risky and stupid to hurt myself. my sponsor told me once that the reason alcohol is such a malicious beast is because it kills you so slowly. when i was shooting up i always knew the next shot could b the one that killed me. he told me he often hears people say, “i don’t have another blackout left in me” but he told me that in reality i have a thousand black outs left in me and if i wanted to i could spend the rest of my life being drunk and angry and scared.
i guess what i’m maybe trying to say is that i look at people in my life like charlie and lu and keila and they are people who have been there waiting with so much care for me, so much love for me just waiting for me to love myself enough to reach out and touch it, and they see how hard it is sometimes, how it hurts so much and how there is so much grief not so much in being deeply hurt by someone you trusted but in letting people love you well afterward. letting people love you even when you feel like you are rotted away on the inside. the reality is they love me the same way alcohol did, they look at me and say “i love you. i even love the parts you think are absolutely putrid.” they say, “i do not think any part of you is hard to love and that’s why it hurts so much to watch you hurt yourself.” getting sober meant i would have to finally face this really simple truth: that loving me isn’t hard, that nothing in me is deserving of being hurt, and that there isn’t anything poetic or beautiful about my suffering. the truth is sometimes complicated and cycles of abuse are complicated and people are complicated but if i accept that loving me is not difficult than i have to accept that nothing in me deserved to be hurt and it means that when i was small and a man who was supposed to love me took absolutely everything from me that none of me deserved that, and if i didn’t deserve that than he just hurt me because he wanted to. he hurt me because he was selfish. be hurt me because he could. it means that the disease i was born with isn’t a punishment for something i did before, in a different timeline or a different life. it means that i got handed a really shit card and that it’s my responsibility now to honor the parts of myself that were shaped by that hurt. i’m learning i have this idea of justice that has always caused me pain: good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. but goodness isn’t something we do to be rewarded and bad things happen for no other reason than because they do, but when you believe that bad things happen to bad people and something bad happens to you, you think you’re bad. and when you think you’re bad it’s easier to hurt yourself but it’s also easier to hurt other people.
i’m just grateful to be loved so well today, at 2am in december of what was arguably the hardest year of my life in every direction. i was really sick, i relapsed a lot, i lost some people i love to overdose and i lost other people i loved because of truths that were in conflict with mine and hurts we couldn’t heal. i fought so much with my mom, my sister stopped talking to me, i had to rehome my dog, i moved homes and was in rehab or the hospital so much that i have felt most of the year longing for something that feels like home.
but i also went to a diner one sunday morning with my best friends and we ate food and talked about toni morrison and what it means to be a girl. i also made so many things with my hands that i’m really proud of, i found a playfulness in my art practice that i haven’t felt since i was a kid. i also fell in love (and still am in love) with someone who taught me how to letterpress, and who i write poems about, and who showed up when I called them in the middle of the night to drive my dog to the emergency vet and who makes me feel safe enough to unmask and whose fucking smile makes my heart hurt because of fiercely i want to protect it. i also ate food cooked by people who love me. i also perfected cooking brussel sprouts just the way i like them. i also watched horror movies with my brothers. i also reconnected with some of my family in a way i didn’t think would happen after my abuela died. i also had so many moments where i was sober and i was happy, even if they were just moments.
i have to remember that when i’m drunk i don’t feel anything. and that hurting when you’re sober feels a lot better than the nothingness. i don’t know if i can say yet that i love myself. but i respect myself, and trusting myself is coming even if it’s slowly. i’m excited to meet the version of myself that love me, i’m excited to have the life i want because i know it wants me too.
i don’t know if these thoughts make sense together they were all just existing in my head at the same time
