Is Recovery Truly An Option Or Is Coping The Best You Can Hope For?
My teeth grate stickily with last night’s vomit, again. I keep my eyes closed against the optical violence of London’s suburbs as they sprint past me outside the Tube window. No, wait. It’s not London, it’s Dublin. It’s Dubai.
It’s Hong Kong. It’s the MTR, and all I see in the window is a reflection of the same impenetrable face I’ve avoided in the mirror for as long as I recall.
Bad days end with fistfulls of potato chips, alone in my apartment after midnight, if I’m lucky. God forbid I find myself with alcohol in reach on one of those nights. Imperceptible urges empty my wallet and fill my gut on those nights, and leave me senselessly wondering how I made it home in one piece again — another kind of luck that is going to run out sooner or later.
Self destruction becomes so much a part of you that it fades into the wallpaper after a while. It certainly doesn’t feel like what it looks like to others, and you come to just expect yourself to be how you are. You’re an oblivious asshole.
After I broke down in tears on the street one day, following a conversation with a student pushing Greenpeace propaganda in my direction, that asshole got dragged out into the daylight the way it occasionally would, and I decided — one more time — to try something tangible. It wasn’t as if I had done nothing in the past. There was a stint in therapy, learning what mindfulness was, looking inwardly at myself and my relationships, and utterly ignoring the elephant-mounted gorilla in the room that I didn’t want to talk about.
What if I went a different way? After all, it was the loneliness that was crushing me, even though I was married at the time, and close to the peak of my productivity and business success. With the internet my constant source of support, I found a penpal on the opposite side of the planet who — through a combination of asking obvious questions from a safe distance and accepting whatever I said without judgement or doubt — made me acknowledge the patterns of self harm that I (with no example to take as a guide) had mistook for normality all my life, and then made me tell her why I was doing it.
That was new.
In six months, through dozens of messages a day as my business life slowly fell apart — another story, but one that is intrinsically connected — she stripped me like a pencil in a sharpener, until I’d said all the things I had never said to anyone about who and how and when.
Fifty years. You know what it’s like to hold something like that inside you for half a century, letting it fester and pressure-cook? Every day, knowing that the whole world could see it on your face — even though you’d long since stopped re-living the acts themselves, and now just wore their after effects and what they made you. Dirty. Disgusting. Pervert.
Everyone could see it, and I knew it was true.
By that time I was into my second marriage by over twenty years, my first having only lasted a couple. A year or so in, I’d tried to tell my wife what had happened, but she refused to hear me, once again hammering home what a shameful, disgusting creature I was, and how crucial it must be to lock up the past and hide, hide, hide.
My penpal forced me into the daylight, refusing to allow me ignore the betrayal and hurt that my wife’s refusal to accept my truth had caused. She pointed out the ultimate obviousness that no matter what the circumstances, I had been a child, an innocent, in a fractured family where affection and warmth were unavailable, and in which the voice I would have needed to speak up and speak out was denied me.
I read this back and I remember the pain of peeling away the layers in those months. I remember staring myself — my selves — in the face for the first time ever and seeing the obvious truth of it all. Suddenly experiencing the blinding spotlight of understanding, shining on the events of my life and showing me how those events in my childhood and my reaction to them had shaped every single thing I’d done was excruciating but also a salvation of sorts.
Revelations. Extraordinary emotions.
I can never thank my penpal for what she helped make me do.
So I’m better now?
You get to a point in your life when the options to take a less difficult route begin to dwindle. That’s unfortunate when you hadn’t realised it was so necessary until you get there. A horseshoe is forged with fire and sweat in minutes and holds its form until it rusts forgotten in the ground. Fifty years is a long time under the hammer.
Another — infinitely more fruitful — round of counselling ensued, in which the tiny steps taken via email with my penpal were retaken as more confident strides. I moved to the opposite side of the world and started a new life. I met somebody and fell unexpectedly in love.
But I cannot move on from the shame.
Even though I know what I know and I see with eyes finally open the path that led me here. Even though I am loved, now — although not necessarily by the people I would hope to be loved the most — shame still haunts my every day, and coping still draws me in the direction of the same mechanisms when bad days expose the rawness.
Taking off the armour makes you fragile. The possibility of falling remains.
Coping is the only way.
