Quit Date: Today

Today was supposed to be Q minus 3 days. My quit date was going to be Friday. But this morning’s email contained a challenge that I just couldn’t pass up, so it’s Q day today!

Betrayal

I was off alcohol altogether — not a drop — for over a year, a few years ago. So, knowing what I know, why on earth did I start again?

Because my abstinence buddy fell off the wagon. I felt so betrayed. I was hurt and angry — we had a deal, dammit. We had a deal and he broke it! And what made it worse is that he didn’t even tell me himself. I found out entirely by accident, and by the time that happened, he’d been using again for months. Months. I was devastated. The rug had been pulled out from under me, the wind was taken out of my sails, I was knocked flat. I tried to forgive him. I thought I had. But I really couldn’t.

You see, when I found out he wasn’t with me, really, and hadn’t been for months — that we’d been living a lie — well, something broke inside me. Somehow abstaining just didn’t matter to me anymore. And then all hell broke loose. I felt that if he wasn’t going to honour our agreement, I sure wasn’t going to. In fact, there wasn’t even an agreement anymore.

So, I started drinking again, slowly at first, but catching up pretty quickly to where I’d left off. At first it was just a glass of wine with dinner at a restaurant, but no booze in the house. Then it was just a glass or two with dinner at home a couple of times a week … and next thing you know, I was right back to square one. Hurtling down the mountainside with a maniacal bus driver with a death wish. And I blamed him. If he hadn’t broken our deal, I thought, I would never have started drinking again. And so I held onto the pain of the betrayal, clung to the disappointment, unable to let it go, for years.

Now I think I might finally be able to set it free.

All this time, I’ve been completely fixated on the fact that he lied and on how betrayed I felt and on how that reflected on our relationship and on and on and on. My obsession has been stopping me from seeing the obvious: maybe the lying wasn’t because he doesn’t love me or doesn’t respect me or our relationship. Maybe he lied because he was ashamed. Because his own self-respect had taken a big hit and he didn’t want to admit it to me because I was being strong about abstaining and he wasn’t. And what if he was afraid that if he told me I’d start drinking again? And he would have been right. What if his withholding the information from me wasn’t about me at all, but about him?

That something in me that broke so many years ago finally seems ready to heal. The hard little shell that’s formed around the broken bits finally seems to be melting, softening, giving way to something else, something greater than anger or fear. I am beginning to be able to yield to compassion rather than standing in judgement and blame. I’m feeling like I’m truly opening to love again, after ever so long, after way too long.

And where is this coming from?

I mentioned the event in counselling the other day, and I think just talking about it crystallized things for me. My counsellor observed that while a buddy system makes sense for going to the gym, an abstinence buddy hardly ever works out, for exactly the reason that it didn’t work for me. If one or the other of you falls off the wagon, chances are you’ll drag the other guy off with you.

Perhaps the realization that I’m not alone in this and that others have had the same experience is what has shifted my perspective. Perhaps my perspective has shifted just because we talked about it at all, regardless of the content of the talk. Talking about it has moved this story out of my dark little heart into the light of day, where I can see it more clearly because now it’s outside of me.

Now that I can see it from a different angle, now that it’s outside of me, now that I’ve written about it, and I’m revising the story, suddenly it’s not eating me up inside anymore. I’m humbled, but I’m grateful and I’m done here. Finished. Moving on.

Thank you. Namaste. Gassho. Blessed Be.