Part Five

Black Coffee, Neat Whiskey, Straight A’s, and Other Bullshit I Used to be Proud of.

I changed schools a lot as a kid. And I remember any time I’d be starting a new school I’d spend months in my head at night in anticipation. Which personality am I going to bring to this school? I’d ask myself; the way a confident, well-adjusted kid does.

The goal, with each school, was to improve upon my present self. The self that was insufficient. To be better, somehow, effortlessly. Ironically, approached with all the vigour, perfectionism and relentless self-deprecation that a “pleasure to have in the classroom” student applies to most situations, well into adulthood.

On a base level, like every other teenager in the history of existence, I didn’t know who I really was yet. But my ego couldn’t handle that I might just be in the same position as every other teenager in the history of existence. Being doomed to years of self-discovery, learning, and still having to develop a personality like the rest of you didn’t suit my insistence that I was not like everyone else. This mindset, objectively, is an egomaniacal one.

Some toxic combination of rebellion, pride, insecurity, and fear brought me to make some decisions about myself, which I ultimately deemed a sufficient personality.

1. My taste in music is better than yours. What do you mean you don’t appreciate Tom Waits?

2. I take my coffee black, as intended. This one comes from growing up in the coffee business, and pretending at age twelve I understood the depths of a bold cup that needn’t be tampered with. Later, some university somewhere did a study a few years ago that found a correlation between enjoying bitter tastes (like black coffee) and sadistic, masochistic, or psychopathic tendencies. When I read this, sometime in active addiction I ate it up. Being a masochist was pretty on brand for me at the time.

3. I drink my whiskey neat, or on the rocks. My bourbon, in a proper old fashioned, or, in more inventive times, from the  bottle.

Everything else about me was subject to the company I kept. My morals, convictions, and tastes ebbed and flowed by venue, by boyfriend, by dive bar. Essentially, I stood for nothing. I was miserable. For years, I wore the misery like a badge of honour.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it was I started to discover who I am. But I know it was sometime between my first and second medical detox from alcohol. I was twenty five. I’d had stints of sobriety between perpetual relapse, once as long as 22 days. I’d experienced clarity in bursts, vulnerability in waves, and finally started sleeping well.

These toxic, decided “facts” about myself didn’t vanish when I cut out the alcohol. But the clarity that came with experiencing the world raw allowed me to reassess them, and understand the broken mind they developed out of.I think that’s the difference between sobriety, and recovery. The AA adage, “it’s not a drinking problem, it’s a thinking problem,” rings truer and truer with each 24hs of sobriety I collect.

But “being yourself” when you never really knew who that was takes a certain level of brain rewiring. And rewiring your thought patterns requires pretty consistent maintenance at first.

A little bit ago I was having breakfast with a friend after a meeting. If you ever find yourself in a diner on a weekday morning asking “Where are all of these people coming from? Don’t they have jobs?” it’s safe to assume a good chunk of them are alcoholics. I ordered a coffee with cream, how I take it, now that I’m honest with myself.

As I opened the creamer I found myself instinctually clarifying, “I usually drink this black.” A move of defensiveness, judgement, and also, a blatant lie. I paused, realizing what’d just happened.

“No I don’t. I don’t know why I just said that,” I admitted.

I’m fourteen months sober, talking to another woman in recovery, someone who’d never give a sh!t how I take my coffee (turns out, most people don’t, actually) and I still felt that urge to jump back into old patterns; to lie to maintain that romanticized, bitter bravado I clung to so relentlessly in addiction.

And if I’m being really honest, I think my ego is getting something out of letting you in on this too.

I’m starting a new job next week, and it feels a lot like getting ready to go to a new school. That’s probably why this is all on my mind.

But I’m not a little girl anymore. I know who I am. Even though who I am is someone that’s still a little bit insecure about how she takes her coffee. But we’re working on that.

Progress, not perfection.