I chased escapes at the bottom of a bottle from the sixth grade up to about two years ago.
It wasn’t the consumption of a casual drinker; I was a seasoned professional.
I used to think, and maybe it’s true, I’ve thrown up, driven drunk, or blacked out more times than the average person has been intoxicated in their entire life.
I’ve experienced the shakes from not drinking, the shakes from drinking, and the occasional blood in my cough, for which I knew more alcohol was the cure.
I’ve experienced feeling like I had holes in my mind and watched helplessly as simple actions and thoughts slipped through them.
But, the positive outweighed the negative by a massive margin. I needed the escape, and I craved it; those shakes told me so.
I needed, if even for a temporary moment, and if even not truly real, to leave my skin behind and be someone, anyone, other than who I was.
I didn’t really like the version of myself I’d created, I pretended I did, but I didn’t, so I ran to the bottom of a bottle.
Those shakes weren’t only physiological; they were mental.
When I spent too much time being who I was being, the itch to run away grew with each moment until the first sip passed my lips.
That delicious moment when I found freedom.
I was running from who I was as much as I was running from who I wanted to be.
My dreams, my desires, my longing to give it all up and start from scratch doing what I had, since I was a kid, wanted to do.
Create.
I wanted to write, to invent, to innovate, to transform a spark of an idea into a tangible thing I could hold in my hand and say,
“I did this.”
But I was fucking terrified of trying.
I was terrified of failing, succeeding, of what people would say; I was terrified of standing out when I had worked so damn hard to fit in when fitting in was one of the things I wanted to escape.
There was no room for mistakes in my world of perfection. My worth balanced on the vertex of perfect and failure; one mistake tipped the scale.
I hated myself for not having the courage, and I hated living in fear.
I hated being unable to grasp this thing that was always out of reach, teasing me with its proximity, right there and in a different world simultaneously.
A world where I had the courage, and I was worthy. A world where what I wanted to create was available to me.
It was the unmitigated fear of being who I wanted to be, and alcohol was my reprieve.
A couple of years ago, I drank what may be my last drink, I don’t know what the future holds, and I won’t pretend to know, so until something changes, it may be my last drink.
I had just published “Blank Canvas.”
Six years of work, six years of facing the worst version of myself, a version I almost killed.
My publisher sent me 50 hardcovers in advance of its release.
Holding the book for the first time, and feeling the weight, physically and mentally, was without a doubt one of the most significant, emotional, and cathartic experiences of my life.
I’m meant to write.
I’m meant to take my experiences, new and old, and alchemize them through the written word to give something back to the world that gave birth to the experiences.
I can’t do that effectively when I drink because when I drink, I leave myself behind. I move away from the truth, and the truth is what serves the reader and the craft.
To effectively do what I’m meant to do, I can’t run away; quite the opposite, I need to run towards what I used to run from.
I need to be as much of who I am as I have the strength to be in each moment and then do what I can to go past that – and write it down.
I thought getting drunk was freedom; I was wrong. I was escaping into a prison cell of my own design.
Being who I’m meant to be and pursuing mastery in what I was put here to do is one of the greatest freedoms I know.
The chase ends when creation begins.
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