Going under
"You're a fucking alcoholic. Do you want to be like Loretta? Because Loretta does that shit."
This is what a friend of mine said to me when she came to my place last night, partly to check up on me - I'd sent her a string of increasingly unhappy and kind of distressed messages - and partly to be supportive, because I felt like garbage and my outlook was correspondingly bleak. And she's almost right; I've recognized my own alcoholic tendencies for a while now, though I haven't exactly done much by way of keeping them in check. Whatever part of the brain that typically goes hey, maybe I shouldn't drink an entire bottle of wine on a Wednesday and while I'm dehydrated doesn't work in me, because drink an entire bottle of wine on a Wednesday while dehydrated is exactly what I did.
I'm a lot less concerned about my drinking habits than I probably should be, considering. Downing a whole bottle of wine in a sitting, desiring to get still more alcohol when asked what I want to do, keeping a tiny bottle of bourbon in my lab - these things should concern me, but they don't. The drinking isn't the issue, it's the void I'm trying to fill. Or at least that's what I tell myself.
I'd like a drink isn't even a conscious thought anymore. It's a reflex, a response to feeling any sort of negative emotion, a knee-jerk attempt to medicate the feeling away. It never works, but I drain glass after glass anyway. Even when it makes me feel worse, I continue to drink.
It feels like I write too much about the nuances of the friendship I have with KH (I'm tired of using Favorite Person as an anonym), but it's a topic that's always, always on my mind. The feeling that it'll eventually crumble - and that the friendship's failure will be entirely my fault - is ever-present, and I'm fairly certain that she neither thinks about nor is as bothered by this as I am. I have far more to lose here; at its most basal level, the power dynamic is decidedly tilted in her favor. If things are irreparable and eventually dissolve, she'll be just fine, because she has a network of other people. I, on the other hand, would be more or less destroyed. Even though I know that not every friendship is meant to last forever, the idea of losing contact with a person that has occupied the position of best friend scares me more deeply than anything else; it's a loss that I don't know if I'd be able to bounce back from, or if I do, it would take an extraordinarily long time. I still haven't fully recovered from the wound of losing a close friendship in the beginning of 2010; it would take decades to heal from something similar happening now.
I hope that there's something that I can do to fix the strain and tensions I've created.
On the flip side, though...I can't shake the feeling that she's already deemed this friendship no longer at all worth the time an effort. That the extent of her concern for me is that I don't end my life, but absolutely nothing else. It's not a nice feeling; my reflex is to try to do anything that I think would prove that I'm still a worthy investment, but I don't think that there's much I can do to that end at this point.
I miss just being friends with KH, and I hate myself for being so thoroughly broken that I've destroyed one of the few good things I've had in my life for these past few years.
This is what a friend of mine said to me when she came to my place last night, partly to check up on me - I'd sent her a string of increasingly unhappy and kind of distressed messages - and partly to be supportive, because I felt like garbage and my outlook was correspondingly bleak. And she's almost right; I've recognized my own alcoholic tendencies for a while now, though I haven't exactly done much by way of keeping them in check. Whatever part of the brain that typically goes hey, maybe I shouldn't drink an entire bottle of wine on a Wednesday and while I'm dehydrated doesn't work in me, because drink an entire bottle of wine on a Wednesday while dehydrated is exactly what I did.
I'm a lot less concerned about my drinking habits than I probably should be, considering. Downing a whole bottle of wine in a sitting, desiring to get still more alcohol when asked what I want to do, keeping a tiny bottle of bourbon in my lab - these things should concern me, but they don't. The drinking isn't the issue, it's the void I'm trying to fill. Or at least that's what I tell myself.
I'd like a drink isn't even a conscious thought anymore. It's a reflex, a response to feeling any sort of negative emotion, a knee-jerk attempt to medicate the feeling away. It never works, but I drain glass after glass anyway. Even when it makes me feel worse, I continue to drink.
It feels like I write too much about the nuances of the friendship I have with KH (I'm tired of using Favorite Person as an anonym), but it's a topic that's always, always on my mind. The feeling that it'll eventually crumble - and that the friendship's failure will be entirely my fault - is ever-present, and I'm fairly certain that she neither thinks about nor is as bothered by this as I am. I have far more to lose here; at its most basal level, the power dynamic is decidedly tilted in her favor. If things are irreparable and eventually dissolve, she'll be just fine, because she has a network of other people. I, on the other hand, would be more or less destroyed. Even though I know that not every friendship is meant to last forever, the idea of losing contact with a person that has occupied the position of best friend scares me more deeply than anything else; it's a loss that I don't know if I'd be able to bounce back from, or if I do, it would take an extraordinarily long time. I still haven't fully recovered from the wound of losing a close friendship in the beginning of 2010; it would take decades to heal from something similar happening now.
I hope that there's something that I can do to fix the strain and tensions I've created.
On the flip side, though...I can't shake the feeling that she's already deemed this friendship no longer at all worth the time an effort. That the extent of her concern for me is that I don't end my life, but absolutely nothing else. It's not a nice feeling; my reflex is to try to do anything that I think would prove that I'm still a worthy investment, but I don't think that there's much I can do to that end at this point.
I miss just being friends with KH, and I hate myself for being so thoroughly broken that I've destroyed one of the few good things I've had in my life for these past few years.
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