CHAPTER 29
The first afternoon out.
‘So, how are you doing?’ she asks, the woman who’s been assigned to help me on the outside.
‘OK,’ I say.
What I don’t say is that it feels like my skin has been lifted off – not bit by bit, inch by inch, like I’d been trying to do for years, but all of it in one swift movement. Like a magic trick I didn’t know was about to be performed. A flash and a puff of smoke distracting from whatever sleight of hand I’d missed.
But OK is pretty much all I can manage with this stranger who I’d hoped – now seeking softness and kindness wherever possible – would have a kind face. Her face was a mixing bowl of hard edges, flat surfaces and shadows. She smiles knowingly. ‘Yeah. OK.’ She holds my gaze as the silence drifts and I try to match it for as long as possible, worried that to disconnect would be a sign of my weakness, my illness. My inability to handle intimacy, honesty.
I take a gulp of my coffee, grateful to feel the hot, bitter, sugary burn lift me off my feet momentarily. She tells me these days are the worst, that I’ve hit my rock bottom and that it can and will only get better from here. That I’ve saved my own life. That I just need to take each day in isolation, one day at a time. I cling onto her words like a woman with a half-inflated life raft between her thighs, cutting into the softest bit of her skin.
She’s taking me to my first AA meeting on the outside, in a church uptown. Chairs pulled into a circle around a circle around a circle. She sits down next to me, and I can feel pairs of eyes land on me as we sit. A question: ‘Is there anyone who is here for the first time?’ I raise my hand. A nod that I take as permission, invitation to speak.
‘Hello,’ I say, voice shaking. ‘I’m Terri and I’m an alcoholic.’
It still feels like a lie as I say it. An exaggeration at best. It still gets stuck in my throat. But they would say it is my disease talking, so I plough on.
‘Two weeks ago today I got drunk until I blacked out, like I normally do. I ended up overdosing on pills given to me for borderline personality disorder that I didn’t take.’
Tears hurtle out of my eyes and charge down my cheeks. A few of the other members are exchanging looks, or at least I think they are, but again, my disease is controlling my perception, twisting what I see. What I think I see.
‘I woke up with two empty pill bottles; I’d taken both, and before I knew it I’d been committed. Then I spent a week in a psych ward. I got out of the hospital this morning. This is my first AA meeting in the world outside. I’m going back to work tomorrow. I really want to drink but I know I can’t. This isn’t the first mess I’ve found myself in because of drinking. I’ve broken bones, cracked my skull, vomited on myself, wet the bed. I ended up in a police station …’
I list my indignities like last week’s shopping list. This is the deal, right? I hand over the last soiled shreds of my privacy, dignity, and they give me back happiness and the chance to wake up and not want to die within a handful of seconds.
Even though I’ve disconnected from the talking, performing part of me, I cry even more, my shoulders shaking. I feel outside of myself and yet consumed by grief, sadness and humiliation. I eventually slow my breathing and the woman leading the group looks at me awkwardly.
‘Erm, we’re not at the sharing part yet. It’s not time for you to speak.’
The room splits in its reaction: group one looks at the floor; group two looks at me with a mixture of sympathy and mortification. Group three, a smaller group, looks away with irritation.
I try to make myself as small as I possibly can in my chair, horrified, replaying every second, every word I just spoke. Minutes when everyone apart from me knew I was fucking up, but no one knew quite how or when to tell me. I don’t speak again.
The speaker for this meeting, a young attractive brunette who’d been the leader of group three comes over to me.
‘Hey,’ she says, with a hard stare. ‘You know, you’re not supposed to do that. And I know you’re new but the best thing you can do right now is listen.’
I nod, chastened. I can’t believe I’ve been in Outside World AA for all of six hours and have already royally fucked it up.
‘Take my number and call me if you need to chat,’ she says, with the sound of a woman with a gun barrel nestled in her spine. I take it, save it, and then as soon I’m back out on the street outside, greedily swallowing air, I delete it.
There are a few things you learn when you stop drinking. First, booze is everywhere. Every billboard, every advert on the telly and on the subway; every article, story, song; every film, every TV show, every conversation. The giant glass of vodka, condensation on the glass, hovers over my head, poised to drown me. The glass of wine you pour yourself for that heartfelt conversation, the one for relaxation, the one for grief, the one for joy, the one for sadness. There is a glass for everything.
The second thing you learn is that not being able to artificially improve yourself, your perception of the world, the version of yourself you put out into the
