Addiction – ooglykraken

The Next Chapter

For almost a year now I’ve been living at my parents home recovering from a painful divorce and an ongoing battle with alcohol addiction. If these two occurrences were characterized as wars I’d be losing both. Most mornings I wake up hating myself for being as useless as I feel, an unemployed father who can’t be there for his daughter. I feel like a leech attached to those I love, stealing from them just so I can slowly rot away with no purpose. Due to my inability to fully heal from my wife leaving me and change my drinking, my parents have decided it’s time for me to move onto whatever is next for me. I agree. I’ve been wanting to be on my own for a long time but didn’t trust myself to do the right thing. So I have two options: 1. Check myself into an in-house care facility or 2. Find my own place. I am fortunate that I have money saved up from my time as a Software Engineer that I could do either. As a result, because I’m just ready to move on, I bought a car and applied for an apartment closer to my daughter (who lives on the other side of the country). I’ll be driving out there soon and then I’ll try to find any job out there. Its the riskier option but I’m tired of feeling this way and the only real path I see to move on is to do what I want to do, not what other people want me to do. I’ve spent most of my life following directives from others. If it wasn’t my parents it was my wife. For the first time I can just do what I want.

That doesn’t mean living alone in a drunken stupor where I’m not directly impacting anyone, it means being self-sufficient and responsible for myself. I’ve been in therapy, psychiatric care, working with an addiction clinic, and attending Alcoholics Anonymous which are all useful tools for someone in my position and I encourage anyone who feels a similar powerlessness to use them. AA specifically is free and provides a lot of support and community for alcoholics and will be the one thing I continue with going forward. Once I’m in a better position I can be involved in my daughters life again, the only thing that’s been keeping me going. Despite friction between my wife and I, I’m determined to make sure I am a good father for the person I love most in this world. Right now I may need her more than she needs me but one day that will change and I will be able to proudly support her.

Bottom line I’m not in a good place but I can’t give up no matter how much I want to sometimes. I just need to keep moving forward.

House M.D.

Somehow a show about “medicine” and “doctors” is more about psychology than anything. The clear pathology that House displays essentially every episode would never ever be allowed. If one were to take any of this seriously then it only works in perspective if all the characters are Jungian shadows in House’s head engaging in some sort of cerebral self-examination.

The Shadow allegory holds more strongly in the first few seasons as a person only has so many shadows. However even the patients could be seen as problems for House to solve as a means to incrementally examine his knowledge, beliefs, and experience while moving towards reality. This is mostly just me making high-minded examinations while I watch entertainment television which ironically has its own diegetic dumb day-time television doctor show, a meta-acknowledgement of its non-reality. Though for me this is how I have fun watching television, scrutinizing it and trying to pull some greater meaning out of what is essentially, entertainment. With absolutely zero medical experience it’s not like the constant volley of medical terms has any real meaning to me nor should it be used as a replacement for real world medical knowledge. Which is why I think the character’s constant need to psycho-analyze each other is reflective of the real focus of the show: psychology and sociology. In the end that’s all one can really hope for that at least it’s fun to watch and watching House be House in House is fun.

Just to entertain possibilities, House could be seen as a doctor who’s lost themselves in their Vicodin addiction and he’s making his way through it by working at a mind palace, the hospital, populated by shadows who are projections derived from real people in his life. Wilson is his conscience though being house’s conscience means he too has his own problems. The various female characters like Cuddy or Cameron are tokens of his sexual objectification, desires, and inability to treat them like actual people. Though he doesn’t treat anyone like real people, even though he wants to heal his patients, they are more puzzles than people. Someone like Foreman or Chase are who he could’ve been or couldn’t be and uses them as more counterbalances against his inherently arrogant expertise.

Breaking the Habit

Perhaps I was just in the right frame of mind, but I was reflecting on how over-exposed I allow myself to be to those things I enjoy. For as long I can remember I’d played video games nearly every day usually much more than I should have. This also extends to film, TV or music. While games require participation to function these others do not so I could always fill my time with them even if it’s little more than ambient noise. Thus, over years this became less a conscious choice and more a habit. Having, over the years, indulged in alcohol and seen what happens when over-indulged it made sense to ‘quit’ playing games, watching movies, or listening to music just as I might quit drinking alcohol. By the time I had decided to do this several days had gone by being busy with my daughter, maybe making the choice easier. With my wife out of town for work I became a solo dad and couldn’t afford to indulge. When she came back I could but realized I shouldn’t. That was at the beginning of December and while I now decompress at the end of the day with some TV and listen to music during my morning exercise, I still haven’t played video games.

It’s funny for me to think that this may be the first time I’ve spent so long away from gaming since I was maybe a child. Even in my roughest college semesters putting in 80-hour weeks I found time to play then, but now I don’t. This isn’t going to be an indictment of gaming but an examination of ‘breaking the habit’ of playing and what it’s like, for me.

First and foremost, I’d like to point out my mental and emotional stability
is obviously not as stable as one would like but I do try to do better. That
said I’d been playing games consistently since I was young, began smoking weed in high school, and began drinking in college. For all that time it might be said I was distracting and self-medicating myself and after a week or two
without it my head felt like a room full of people shouting over each other.
Once that started the first few days were the worst. My attention was
constantly jumping, and I had trouble remembering what I was doing. Breathing exercises, journaling, and keeping a to-do list helped in the beginning (and still does) but after a while instead of maybe 30 voices it was down to three. Then two. Now it’s usually just a single line of thought with occasional interjection. I’ll try to avoid any armchair psychology or speculation but here are my thoughts.

I’m finally growing up. After an extended adolescence through my late 20’s I’ve finally had the self-control and will to try and be an adult…. all the time, as opposed to just when things need to be done. I have a schedule for when I exercise, when and what I eat, and never sit down to rest if there’s ‘easy’ labor to be done around the house. ‘Easy’ labor being started laundry, folding it, running the dishwasher, picking up clothes and other things out of place, etc. Basically, anything that takes less than five minutes of effort. Instead of playing games when I have ‘free’ time it’s now spent reading, writing, and preparing to change jobs. This has revived my passion for stories and writing in general. I did try to write two trashy young adult novels as a middle schooler but gave up because they were dumb and trashy. Now I have a full ten-chapter book planned with world building, character arcs, and historical research in effect. Already I’ve got the first chapter written with editing left to do. While it’s hard to focus sometimes journaling and lists keep me on-track. Not to say I’d left all this labor to my wife previously but now it’s a seamless single-person process to do it all and have it always done every day. I think what this really means is that these addictions I had were crutches I relied on when I needed to face the world but instead found a way to shield myself from it, in them.

At best this may be self-aggrandizing or at worst a self-indictment but by sharing I hope others can turn a critical eye to habits in their life and how those habits affect them both daily and over time. (If a certain Linkin Park song comes to mind while reading, yeah that’s intentional).

Jekyll & Hyde

I started writing this blog to have a place to voice my thoughts and share with anyone who cares to visit. Despite the many ideas I wished to record I engaged in a habit that sapped me of my will, determination, and curiosity. That was habitual alcohol abuse. I chose this particular title because it got to a point where my wife recognized me as a different person when drunk. Angry and illogical I become a cruel shade of myself, trapped by my addiction and an inability to change. My Mister Hyde released after the imbibing of a potion. Any problems, troubles, or anything negative that I discuss in this story I provide not for pity but honesty. I made these mistakes, now I’m trying to fix what I can. I’m not the first and I will not be the last but maybe writing this will help me, and if you read it maybe it will help you or a loved one.

When the Covid-19 lockdowns started I had no problem staying at home. I prefer my solitude. However, as the lockdowns continued, I found myself growing increasingly bored and disappointed in myself. When my wife and I spent a portion of the year in Tennessee I started drinking a lot more. Partly because I had been a habitual pot smoker for about a decade and stopped all at once living somewhere where weed was illegal, and partly because of the boredom. It was simple at first, drinking a few beers after work while watching TV. Eventually it became habit and my consumption increased from a few beers to a six-pack. Not only that but being stuck where we were in Tennessee left me feeling trapped, like living in a hotel room for months. We went out when we could, but we were very remote. The only food available to us being microwaveable food as we didn’t have a kitchen. All of this and reduced exercise made me 50 pounds heavier after a few months. This all seems like text-book depression and maybe it was, but when I was high school, I suffered from a savage depression, and it didn’t feel the same. Eventually we left Tennessee and moved to Colorado, while here I picked up my smoking habit again but severely reduced in consumption. Recognizing how much weight I had put on I knew I couldn’t continue drinking beer and that I needed to be exercising daily. My misgivings over drinking had already started to exist but either out of indolence, foolishness, or addiction I continued to drink but now hard liquor. Of any of the signs my body gave me to stop the one that has changed my life the most it’s that my digestion stopped working properly though I hadn’t yet determined drinking as the cause.

Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a turn for the worse. My drinking had accelerated to a gallon of whiskey a week. I was occasionally day drinking, but certainly drinking far too much each night. This is when I started to lose control. When I started to argue with my wife. When she started to notice something was wrong. Too much alcohol and I can’t manage my emotions well, I start complaining about things to my wife. It becomes a debate. Then a fight, hurting us both. One could correctly guess this affected my wife’s disposition as well, quite severely. A tension had always existed between us as she’s highly motivated and hard-working, and when we met in College, I was struggling student who didn’t work as hard as he should or could have. After the alcohol she lost faith in me. She became afraid of me. Why didn’t I stop.

My wife had a hit breaking point with me and asked that I get into therapy. I met with a therapist for a few months but ultimately didn’t feel like it helped, and not for the first time. I had therapy as a high schooler when I was dealing with my depression. I attended several sessions back then but talking to my therapist I got the sense she either didn’t care or didn’t understand. She even suggested that my internal anger arose from contempt towards my mother because she and my older brother argued when he lived with us, based on me looking up to him as a kid. That’s absolutely a load of bollocks. I knew it wasn’t going to work with this therapist and I would have to figure it out on my own. Which I did, in a sense. One of my biggest inspirations back then was my French teacher at the time. This teacher really cared about her students and put a lot of effort into teaching. When I started to slip in grades, she’d talk to me about it because she wanted me to improve. She did all this while going through chemotherapy for cancer and she never lost her optimism. Not the overly bubbly kind but hopeful and determined. Knowing she’s probably suffering while doing all this it showed me that you must have hope and you must work hard every day to keep it that way.

Late in 2021 my wife and I discovered she had become pregnant. I had stopped smoking weed at this time in anticipation of my first-born, a daughter. This is also when I started studying seriously to change jobs and my first real attempt at managing my addiction. As a software engineer it’s required to demonstrate aptitude through a variety of tests and interviews. This means months of practice and studying. So, for three months I had purpose. Still drinking but I was too busy to drink a lot. For the first time since maybe college, I felt like I was working hard and had something. This was only a bright spot in a streak of darkness. I failed to get another job and I think the disappointment killed my remaining passion and optimism. Then I stopped studying and shortly after we moved back to California. My wife suggested it’s possible the constant moving prevented me from building solid habits.

I didn’t immediately relapse but I did start drinking again and it grew as a habit. Tensions with my wife, my own personal issues, a pull to change jobs, my day job, and most importantly my unborn daughter all weighed on me, asking me to find reprieve in a bottle. So, I did, and all that stress poured out of me whenever I drank too much. The pressure evolved into anger that I would direct at my wife when we disagreed, usually over my drinking. I never struck her, nor had I ever hit her, but the uncontrollable anger I exhibited frightened her. At least once she felt she should leave the house for her safety. Knowing if I want to be in my daughter’s life in a capacity that I would be proud of, I had to stop. I resolved to do so. Thus, this tragic tale of human foolishness reaches its present terminus (I apologize if I come across as pompous or anything of the sort).

My wife and I are trying to work through our shared problems. She’s suggested I see a therapist for my own issues. We’re also setting up time with a couple’s therapist. I’m looking into local AA chapters. Right now, the last bottle I drank is sitting on my desk empty with the date I began my abstinence “04-27-2022”. Hopefully in a year I’ll be writing about one year clean and how great it is to be a father.