smothered hope

I've decided to climb onto the wagon for a bit. No, no, no, I didn't have drunken, unprotected sex with a stranger or knock over a convenience store while high on crystal meth or any such thing. (I did just accidentally swallow a piece of gum, though. Ew.) I'm just tired and a little creeped out by the paranoia which accompanies my mornings after. Saint Paddy's wasn't a major binge, but rather an early night; I started drinking at about 9.30a, followed up with a liquid lunch, and topped the whole shebang off with a few double cocktails and clumsy dancing at a Crescent Street bar. (The fact that I was drinking on Crescent is testament to the fact that I am too accomodating at times.) I then had a second pointless, muddled, semantic agrument with Matt over falafel I don't remember ordering (the first argument occured during the aforementioned un-lunch), and grabbed a cab home, wehre I proceeded to talk far too loudly about nothing to my roomies. I know I committed no sins, hurt no-one, kept my stomach contents in my stomach and awoke on Saturday sans hangover, but the fact that there are blurry chunks disturbs me. Blurry memories were never a problem until the Great Liquid Cocaine Binge of '99.

At least I think it was 1999.

Back in those days, when I was freshly kicked out of Fine Arts studies and had just joined the workforce full-time, I used to frequent a tiny pub near campus that had one pool table, a mediocre jukebox and a sweet bartender named Christina. A friend and I would get trashed on whatever we had enough money for, or could convince our respective boyfriends or others to buy us, while drawing silly comic strips about punkier versions of ourselves exploiting others for beer money in much more creative ways than we'd ever had the nerve to employ. But one morning, after awaking from a multiple-Liquid Cocaine-induced slumber, it occurred to me that I just couldn't remember some of the previous night's activities. I wasn't hungover, nor had I been sick (though my drinking & drawing companion had, violently so). Why couldn't I remember what so-and-so had said, or how I'd managed to get from Pub A to Pub B, or the presence of what's-her-face at all? It was scary.

The last time I'd been scared like that was after a rousing game of Medicine Cabinet with a certain Angie. Back when we were in high school, I hung out with Angie P. on the week-ends. We spent most of our time trying to sublimate the sexual tension between us by getting high on whatever medication we could find in the medicine cabinets at the parties we attended. (Yes, I know, it was terribly healthy and not at all risky.) One time, Angie came to me and handed me a fistful of pills she'd pilfered from god-knows-where, and told me to swallow them down "like a good girl." If anyone wanted to be a good girl for Angie P., it was me. What had I swallowed? A ton of Prozac. Did I become euphoric and well-adjusted? Hell no. My throat began to close up about an hour later, triggering a panic attack. N.B. A panic attack will go mostly unnoticed by a room full of people on their fifth joint of the evening. Especially when they're being distracted by a stunning brunette in a miniskirt (Ange) telling them she's lost her pills in the host's (Ty) bed. I could explain the rest of that one, but it's too involved, even for this convoluted journal entry. Needless to say, I survived, but recovering from the panic attack was less-than-enjoyable.

The other scare came shortly after, when Angie had her own adverse reaction to a round of Medicine Cabinet. Did I mention that we'd often enhance the experience with vodka and whiskey shots? No? Well, lemmetellya, that adds a whole new dimension of self-destructive fun into the mix. Angie survived without even barfing, I'd survived my own little ride, and we pretty much gave up on the game after that. I didn't see much of Ange ever again, come to think of it. I've spotted her on the streets here and there, but she either doesn't recognize me anymore (well, I did have half a head of blue hair and ten pounds of black eyeliner back in the day), or doesn't see me (either by choice or chance). She was still gorgeous the last time I caught a glimpse of her....

Now, don't be fooled; I wasn't a rock-and-roll hard drugs and booze survival story, the likes of which one sees in VH1 specials. I was a bored teenager in the suburbs, trying to pass the week-ends with some sense of excitement. The drugs stopped after high school, and I stayed clear of them for five years (my occasional pot habit only started in my twenties). The binge drinking was a short season, a stopover between stints as a full-time student and directionless wage-slave. I never did heroin or coke, I never ODed, I never had a problem my friends felt they had to intervene for. I liked to take risks, and had an angsty, self-destructive attitude in full gear. I wasn't a happy young person, and I self-medicated. I made tons of mistakes, but I came out unscathed, especially in comparison to others. What I'm trying to say is, although I'm kind of proud of my little tale, it's precisely because I didn't make a complete junkie fuck-up of myself that I am. I didn't ruin my life, nor did I manage to injure myself. I stopped myself early, and I won't lie, I had fun doing most of it.

But now I have to find a new way to have fun, a sober way. Not because I'm an alcoholic (because I'm not), or because I'm dabbling in other substances (I did have a toot from one of Ella's joints a while back, though I'm just not in the mood for it anymore these days), but because I'm self-medicating again.

I get anxious and awkward in groups or in public, and I know that the way I react seems to correspond to social anxiety disorder, but I'm not going to self-diagnose. I'm just saying that I know I'm being irrational when I assume everyone in the gym is staring at me and thinking about how stupid I look, how pudgy I am, how I'm doing my exercises wrong. I know that everyone at the grocery store are thinking about vegetables and dish soap, not me; the people on the crowded bus are not all blaming me, solely, for the lack of seats. I can't talk to people about normal things, I know this, and I screw up a lot of human relationships because of my stupid reactions to perfectly normal things. I do avoid going out, but the times I actually go, I fuss over how I look because I'm convinced that everyone will think I'm a total loser and refuse to give me a chance if I can't appear perfect. I can go on and on about this, but suffice it to say that I let myself drink a bit too much when I go out because it makes the little paranoid voice in my head shut the fuck up for a change. And that's really nice. It's nice to have fun, and not worry so damn much about things that aren't there, or don't matter. It's not nice, however, to wake up and forget, to wake up with the little paranoid voice back with vengeance. Waking up on Saturday was like waking up to an angry nun confronting me about the lesbian spanking porn she'd found tucked into my bible.

Not that I keep lesbian spanking porn or anything. Me? Pffft. Never.

So it's on the wagon with me for a bit. I'm hoping I'll learn to relax in public, at least a little. I shouldn't need it, and I definitely don't want it. I like waking up with my memory (and stomach) intact. And I'm a much better dancer when I'm sober.

back | forth

listening:
reading:
ingesting:
(see entries before 20.11.05)

previously on Smothered Hope:

unreal - 20.05.08
in which our narrator kinda just babbles on a bit - 15.05.08
drank several margaritas last night. they were great. - 04.05.08
spacey - 29.04.08
i will most definitely regret posting this in public - 28.04.08