[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.0.47″ custom_padding=”58.7812px|0px|0|0px|false|false”][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.0.48″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.0.47″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_text admin_label=”Fragments” _builder_version=”3.0.84″]
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ custom_padding=”0|0px|28px|0px|false|false”][et_pb_row custom_padding=”29.3906px|0px|0|0px|false|false” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_image src=”https://thestrand.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/hed-4.jpg” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ custom_padding=”0|0px|0|0px|false|false”][et_pb_row custom_padding=”0|0px|29.3906px|0px|false|false” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_text admin_label=”Byline” _builder_version=”3.19.1″]
written by tamara frooman
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.19.8″ custom_padding=”0|0px|0|0px|false|false”][et_pb_row custom_padding=”0|0px|26px|0px|false|false” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.19.8″ inline_fonts=”Noto Serif” admin_label=”Text”]
Content warning: alcohol, substance abuse, suicide, self-harm, mental illness
There is not much I remember when it comes to alcohol. I don’t remember the precise moment I stopped drinking. I don’t remember when I started or when it became a problem or when I realized it had become one.
I piece together a narrative from missing memories, my own life narrated by others. Larger gaps increasing in frequency, blackouts I escaped to. In retrospect it seems insidious. Escalating through high school and culminating at 19 when I obliterated four or five nights a week—until New Year’s Day waking up in my mother’s sweatshirt, encrusted in my own vomit on the kitchen floor. My father had babysat me until 5 am, she told me. I was a mean drunk.
I thought I could leave that all behind when I quit, but I’ll be picking up the pieces for a long time.
How do you reconcile the unforgivable?
Who was I? Who was that person—the one who I was when I said drinking was the only way I could feel happy? I remember saying it but I no longer know what it means, how it relates to the way I conceptualize myself now. When I drank I chiseled off parts of myself I may never get back. When I quit I left splinters of myself behind, discarded on the cutting room floor. But I am struggling to recognize the person in those pieces, the one who articulated herself as never-once-got-detention-but-got-suspended-for-drinking-on-school-property. Not really “caught” so much as “saved” from my own activated charcoal naivety of drinking on meds, not knowing to check for interactions, 98-percent-sobbing-on-the-F-wing-bathroom-floor-GPA because I thought I was going to die or because I wanted to die and because I thought my mother was an angel, a hazy figure above me. I don’t need to remember her expression; I know what it was. Resurfaced in the hospital, IV-hydrated ivory vision, both parents at a loss again. My dad said: “Vodka and tequila, not a good mix,” but I only ever drank rum, graduated from Kraken to 151. And anyway it was the meds, the ones my doctor had not bothered to tell me could increase blood alcohol content by 38 percent because I was 16 and it shouldn’t have been relevant.
The numbers added up at the time, but that was before I lost myself inside them.
Fast-forward ten months to another me, still drunk and crying, parallel lines as evidence of my unhappiness, still fresh. Another ashen expression on my mother’s face from a 2 am American police car. I paid off the fine from my arrest with grade 11 scholarship money, highest standing in three advanced classes, creamy cheques transferred from Canadian currency directly to the state of Maine. I’m the best of both worlds, I remember saying. Carefully cultivated A+ reputation and I can captivate a whole room at a party—the police car that arrested me just another punchline: license plate 420-666.
But it was an accident, anyway. Not my fault I didn’t know about the 38 percent, didn’t realize New Year’s Eve shots would set off sleep attacks like fireworks in my narcoleptic brain. Who would want to die unscarred, I remember saying. It was all just an accident—wasn’t it?
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row custom_padding=”0|0px|5px|0px|false|false” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_image src=”https://thestrand.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/pullq.jpg” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row custom_padding=”0|0px|38px|0px|false|false” _builder_version=”3.19.1″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.19.1″ parallax=”off” parallax_method=”on”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.19.1″ inline_fonts=”Noto Serif”]
“How do you recover from 17 years down the drain?” I wrote at the time. “19 years and nothing to show for it,” I wrote at another. At ten, I requested a pocket knife for my birthday, and it wasn’t an accident, was it?
There’s only so many times I can type “I’m sorry, if I die it wasn’t on purpose” in 4 am overdose iPhone notes without wondering if maybe this time it was. Electroconvulsive qualified ideation certified hotlines sobbing incoherent on a pre-dawn golf course in the rain cigarettes in the distance like fireflies borderline all night and fading quickly now moods like constellations I had to tightrope between I woke up in a room I did not know existed with a guy on a mattress and I don’t know what happened and now I never will ceramic shards smashed on cement floors in my brain flickers snippets snapshots flip through more pages in time dissociated moments tracing pocketknife parallels, a physical manifestation of my mind.
Fragmented.
Fragments of memory from drunk nights and days, fragments I split off from myself to survive, fragments of thoughts I tried to drown. Was I drowning myself in the process?
Diluting myself did not drain away the numbness, it just deleted me. I thought it gave me substance but it only was—an excuse to hide parts of me away, separate slivers safe in my self-erasure.
I’ve been reeling myself back in for two years now. I am learning it is okay to be my own leftovers in the wake of a tempest. I can be recovered from the discards on the cutting room floor. Who am I now? A patchwork of cracks and crevices still, but at least my mortar is my own today, not distilled.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
Comments are closed.