Do you remember the point in your sobriety where you realized that having a drink wasn’t the first thing you thought of to deal with something hard, something heavy?
It’s weird how these things happen, you just deal with the thing and then only later do you remember that you forgot to think about drinking as a solution. And that feels normal.
I had my first cancer scare in December 2015. I had been sober for 3 years. I finally went to the dermatologist because you just do things like that when you don’t drink, and they found a melanoma on my back. I Googled melanoma after the dermatologist called me and said a bunch of words I didn’t understand and when I asked her to say them more plainly she just repeated the exact same words I didn’t understand. She sucked.
We went to visit my in laws that Christmas and I thought it might be my last Christmas. Not in a real way, I knew I was most likely going to be fine, but also what if I wasn’t? What if this was the last time we came out to Folly Beach on Christmas Day? The last time I saw the boys swim in the ocean even though it was Christmas Day? I hugged my husband tight on the windy grey but warm winter beach, tight like you hold people when they might go away. When you might die.
I can clearly remember something else from this time- the day, maybe a Wednesday, that I’d walked my youngest up to the bus stop, waited with him for the bus like I always did, the crisp morning air making our cheeks pink. He was seven. After the bus came I walked back home, got in the van to go to the grocery store, pulled up to the stop sign at the end of our street, the same place I’d been with my little boy waiting for the bus.
The sun was so bright, the day so clear. Cars were going by, I was looking back and forth, waiting for the right time to go. Life was happening all around me, totally unaware of me, my possible cancer, that I probably wasn’t but that I might die because of. I felt time stop, everything else was so real and ongoing. In that moment I found my own mortality, and instead of feeling afraid I felt such relief, almost joy.
If I died, everything else would go on. I would not be here, in the van, at the bus stop. I wouldn’t be reading bedtime stories or going to the store for groceries or kissing anyone goodbye, waving to my baby on the bus. But they would be here. My boy would still catch the bus, cars would still go by, the sun would still rise and shine in the impossibly bright blue late fall sky. Life would go on. Without me life would still go on.
This moment made me not afraid of dying. It made me so grateful for my life, and life would still happen without me. What a relief. My children would miss me so much but they would get to live. They would laugh when they remembered me. They would ache from missing me so much. But life would go on.
I’m trying to remember if I wanted to drink then because I was scared and I really don’t. The way I remember things I have not really struggled with needing to drink when things got hard throughout my sobriety, mostly because I think I understood from the beginning that drinking was what made things terribly worse, but that’s with the perspective of ten years without a drink.
I went to have my shoulder checked out at the beginning of October- my guess was it was frozen and I was right. But the radiologist noticed something highly suspicious on the x-ray: a 1.8 cm nodule on my thyroid. We scheduled a CT. Then an ultrasound. Then met with an endocrinologist. Then scheduled a fine needle aspiration.
“Your second cancer scare mom,” my oldest said in the car on the way to school.
“How much should I worry?” I asked the endocrine doctor. “Five percent?” he said. “If you need to worry at all.”
I learned that thyroid cancer isn’t that scary, even if you have it. Maybe they would have to remove the left lobe of my thyroid, but the right lobe could do the job just fine. I might have to take irradiated iodine, the person would walk in in a huge protective suit and hand me a pill to take, ha ha.
It’s not a death sentence. Maybe.
I thought about what if I was going to die would I start drinking again? Did I miss it like that? The answer came back so quick- no.
It’s so strange to live in a death sentence and not understand that’s what you’re doing. To think about the fact that I drank for so long, for twenty seven years I lived in that liminal space of life and death.
One of the things I know, deep in my bones, is how lucky I am to be alive. That I didn’t die when I drank, and then these reminders of my mortality that have happened as I live sober. Sometimes I’m not sure how to take it.
I think about how afraid I was all the time when I drank. Afraid of myself, afraid of my life, afraid of my pain. The only safe place in the world was when I had enough to drink that I didn’t know if I was alive or dead. That fucked up place of blackout surrender. I had no idea what I was risking.
Life is so hard sometimes. It hands you thing after thing after thing like it doesn’t know you’ve only got two hands.
I can’t imagine drinking during these hard parts. What I would be missing if I just got drunk instead of felt how I feel? I’d miss the way I’d felt in the car on my way to pick up my youngest for school- bursting into sobs driving down I-85 because the sun coming through the clouds was so beautiful and I didn’t know yet if I had thyroid cancer or not.
I drank because I couldn’t stand myself. I couldn’t stand how much I felt, what I thought, I felt always wrong and dumb and ashamed of being me. It’s interesting how we try so hard to mute the intensity of life, like being numb is the life worth living. It feels so hard to feel, and I’m so grateful for how alive I feel because I do. I thought I couldn’t take it, I thought I had to not feel because I couldn’t handle my emotions. That was bullshit.
Why? Why do we teach ourselves that we can’t handle things without a drink to take the edge off? That the best way to deal with scary things is to drink? Someone said to me once “I don’t know how you deal with things without being able to drink.” This still amazes me. And I also understand it.
The growth was benign. I feel the relief of that, understanding I’m not going to die of thyroid cancer, that my second cancer scare was just another scare.
Most of all I’m proud of how I handled things. Me maybe having thyroid cancer was only one hard thing in a few hard things that happened last fall. I showed up, I didn’t run from my life, or my feelings. I felt scared and worried and afraid and I also felt reassured and hopeful. I felt reminded of how lucky I am to be alive, even with my hands full of worry and sorrow.
So no. I don’t remember the point when I realized that I forgot to think about drinking as a solution to a hard or terrible thing. And yet I do, I remember every single time.
More soon,