Pure Hell Pt. 2
My second journey through my personal hell.
Trigger warning.
The morning sun shines through your window and warms your dry skin. It's 8am on a Tuesday. You're supposed to work in the office today. Your skin feels clammy. It's the height of summer and your attic apartment feels more akin to a steaming oven. You roll over and check your phone with trembling hands.
Your head is pounding with a terrible headache and your mouth is dry. You're very thirsty. You have drank way too much again the previous evening. Nothing new though, right? Drink some water and swallow one or two painkillers and you'll be good as new. You disregard the blatant chronic sleep deprivation compounded by your drinking problem that you keep shoving under the rug.
You stumble out of your apartment, barely keeping your eyes open. You get to the office and greet your coworkers. You're feeling joyful generally. You haven't been sleeping properly for months but you keep your head up. You make jokes and gossip with your friends at work. You've been at rock bottom before and got out of it. "Nothing I can't handle" you boast to yourself internally.
Your performance at work has been declining steadily. You haven't been able to concentrate properly for some time now. The effects of your unhealthy lifestyle is slowly but surely taking a toll to your body and mind. You're not 18 anymore, after all. But you don't have time to think about that right now. It'll all work out eventually, right?
Pressure at work is building while you battle with bills, unorganized thoughts and bitter family feuds. Your relationship of many years has ended not too long ago and with it ended a stable foundation and safe emotional retreat. You let your drinking get completely out of control. "I'm just having fun!" you tell your closest friends. You want to enjoy being a 'free' woman by partying and letting your inhibitions go. They're being overly cautious, surely. You feel blue often. The breakup was very rough on you. You thought, you could speed up the healing process with a glass of whiskey in the evening after an exhausting day. After all, it calms you down, right?
Day after day, week after week you spend your evenings in the same bar crushing large beers as if it's water from a mountain stream. You see the same people every day, doing the same thing as you. You don't drink that cocktail because it tastes nice but because it gets you drunk faster. You don't even like Jameson, but it's cheap and strong. Suddenly, you stay out all night on a Wednesday, completely plastered snorting cocaine of a phone screen. You're not sober for more than 2 days at most. Your body got used to alcohol in your blood. It certainly feels impossible to live without it at this point. Like barbed wire around your neck, addiction takes a hold of your being and strangles you till the blood vessels in your eyes pop and paint your vision red. At this point you stopped recognizing yourself in your own head. You're a different person. Angrier, more irrational. You lash out and fight over every small thing. You call it confidence and standing up for yourself, not seeing the absolute madness everyone else around you sees. Your memory of your drunken rampages gets more and more blurry. You can't remember most of it. You forget you met people and things people told you. You constantly look terrible and the binge drinking made you gain weight. Your mental health plumets and you find yourself in a darkness you're all too familiar with.
It dawns on you that you're not really having fun anymore. The drinking has become a habit. Part of your routine. Something to numb the pain, something that helps you forget how miserable you truly are. A way to shut up your internal monologue. Stuck in a vicious cycle of hangovers and tabs at the bar. More and more often you gamble with the thought of bringing your trusty old box cutter out of retirement. You admit to yourself that you have a problem and that you're on the highway to the morgue.
Alcoholism creeps up on you faster than you might think. You decide to put the bottle down and reconnect with your intuition and gentle self. It's not easy, but worth every step of the way. You are sober and happy. You broke free of the chains of the devil that reeks of cigarettes and cheap whiskey. And you are god damn proud of yourself.