Summer was in full swing and so was my drinking. I was spending the majority of my free time trying to hide and drink and drink and hide. All of this “hard work” was in addition to my full-time job. I never realized that living the life of an alcoholic was also a full-time job. It got so bad in that summer that I began to sneak a drink or two at work in the evenings when I had events to manage. It was horrible.
Sitting at my desk with a hidden bottle of wine and sipping on it when I had a chance during the night. This only happened a few times, but the outcome of this was my first rock bottom and it was beyond my control. I lost all common sense, the ability to stop drinking, and the ultimate price was humiliating myself in front of the staff. I cared deeply for them after almost five years of working together and they liked and admired me and often told me they loved working with me. As you can imagine, the next day I lost my job. It was probably the best job in my industry that I ever had and I was really good at it.
Now I was unemployed, in an unhappy marriage, and completely devastated and embarrassed. I told my husband exactly what happened at work and his response was, “You need to get help.” He had already experienced several nights of my excessive drinking and would tell me to get help. I asked him to help me on many occasions, yet I felt I was just a burden and now an unemployed “living companion” in a home where my feelings of loneliness drastically increased.
I could drink as much as I wanted during the day and cut myself off before anyone got home from work or school. I still did all of my domestic chores around the house and prepared dinner. In fact, I can remember rewarding myself with a drink once I completed a task. Then I discovered I could get more chores done quickly, but of course not efficiently, if I drank a little while cleaning and doing the laundry. I am surprised that I didn’t burn down the house cooking dinner on our gas stove.
This is where I feel I lost any and all power I thought I ever had over my drinking. I fell into a dark hole that I couldn’t dig myself out of, so what did I do about it? I drank more. And more, and more. The next few months leading into the holidays became not only more stressful, but my life was starting to become totally unmanageable. The hiding of the bottles, the dumping of them in a local dumpster, and spending so much time and energy to fill my dark hole. It became my only existence.
Leave a Reply