[My first Sober, if not somber, Christmas]
I quit drinking 754 days ago, on the 30th of November, 2013 to be exact. I joined AA 3 months later - It wasn’t a radical decision I made to actually quit drinking, no, rather – I did it because I had no choice due to an emergency under-the-knife operation and having to swallow antibiotics and other drugs for about a month for healing. When the doctor informed me about requiring the procedure about a week before this that November, I looked at him askance, and almost told him to go fuck himself - December without alcohol for an alcoholic?
Dude…
But I restrained myself from insulting him… [I WAS going to be out COLD under him in the very near future…] and told him instead to book the “Theatre” for the 2nd of December instead of the following day, murmuring excuses about I-don’t-know-what, I hobbled out of his clinic and into the nearest bar – nearest to my home that is, for minimum-staggering-distance.
And then the Depression hit.
That’s the thing about Depression and this Tribe of Depressives. You just don’t know when, or how, the Depression is going to take a hold of you. It doesn’t, to steal a line from a fellow Tribes-Girl, ‘..walk up to you looking all dark, tall, handsome and oozing sexy n deliciousness, lean down, nibble my ear, and murmur in a deep throaty tenor, “Hey girl, you’ve got gorgeous tits, can I fuck with you..?”
No. Depression does one of two things. It creeps in slow and slinky like a tide at sea, actually no - it’s more like a giant 7ft tall by 7ft wide garden snail, creeping in and leaving a trail of disgusting mucus behind it, squashing the life out of you, filling your heart and mind and limbs with the cold mucus, slobbering and slathering you in a numb helpless dismay where nothing is right, nothing.
Or, like that day in November, it just comes up to you and hits you on the head with a 100kg sack filled with rotten tomatoes and nasty smelly eggs. And snail slime.
The pain is unbearable. It’s pain in the head, pain in the heart, pain in the limbs. And there’s the weight. Heaviness of the head, heaviness in the heart, heaviness in the limbs. And it doesn’t go easy. Non-tribe people say, ‘…wish it away’. Fuck them… I wish.
So I drank. Alcohol eases the pain, oh yes it does! It makes the heavy numbness leave you and you believe that you CAN-Do-anything including Obama. Most Tribes people of this ‘Depressive Tribe’ are also quiet, shy and retreating, but Drugs & Alcohol give you an awesome sense of bouncing manic confidence, and voila, you’re sooner tap-dancing on tables and you’re the freaking party girl of the night and everyone thinks you’re the gutsy-est person ever. It’s better than Facial Foundation for black-head cover-up, no lie.
A few days later I realized that “this wasn’t going to work” after I had just called my favorite boda-boda-guy*1, and asked him for a home-delivery of a Litre of Whiskey – straight to my 4th Floor Penthouse apartment. In a panic I shot off an email to a gorgeous friend who lived out of Kenya and he promptly informed me he’d come for the entire month of December, to baby-sit me, kind of, after the Operation. I knew he would, where nobody else had even one second to spend on me, so horrid was I, always in and out of depression, moody and unstable, and now this looming procedure to have inner parts of mine removed. But BusomBuddy wanted to spend time in Nairobi as well, so I had a ‘home-nurse’, so to speak..
But before he confirmed, I got worse news. My X who in my mind I called The Devious Devil, [but aren’t they all? X spouses?] … sent me an email demanding that the kids must go over and stay with him for Christmas, brusquely pointing out that he wasn’t about to take NO for an answer. The entire month! 35 – 36 days! And he lives over 1000 kms away, well 917kms to be precise, a 13 hour road trip or an hours flight away, problem being the flight empties bank accounts. I had no heart or energy to argue and my blue funk sank even lower, Depression dug his talons into my spirit and soul ever harder. In retaliation I sent off a quick retort that X should ‘take-them-then’ before the Sunday when I was due to check-in to the hospital. “I’d rather they were away than here when I get home,” I lied, so upset was I. Yes, Tribes people have a habit of shooting themselves in the foot. Always. Depression lies and tells you that you’re good for nothing, that you’re stupid, daft and dense [a contradiction, as Tribe members are highly out-of-this-world-intelligent beings], Depression whispers and convinces us that we’re use-less, bad at everything we touch – the negative Midas touch belongs to us, we’re failures, ugly, a nuisance, too fat or too thin, never perfect at anything, lousy at work, lousy spouses, lousy parents, lousy to parents, disrespectful, not thankful enough and just plain rotten. Circles of depressive thoughts that run through our minds over and over again in horrid leery cycles.
And yet at the bottom of my broken bleeding heart, all I really wanted was my family around me as I recovered, but admitting that meant I was weak-minded and needy, sentiments I detested and loathed with my whole being, so I practically shoooed my kids off, dropping them off at the Silver Springs Hotel Impala Shuttle Stage on a freezing cold forlorn morning, so they could overland to KIA and take the 540flight to Dar-es-Salaam from there, asking them to check if they had their passports once, then twice, then thrice, fretting and making a motherly nuisance over them, then went back to the apartment I called home; and I remember wailing and crying like a baby in the lowest of depths, wandering around the emptiness and echo-ness and hollowness of teenage-less rooms and praying and asking God to not wake me up from the Operating table, so hurt was my heart.
Well I’m here aren’t I, He didn’t answer that one.
I’d drank like a loony that whole week before the operation, stopping only 2 days before, and knowing it was a ‘semi-stop’ or ‘pause’ for at least 30 days, but also knowing that maybe, if I hit 30 days, I could maybe do 31, then 32. But at the pit of my stomach was the unbearable question lurking like a dark specter in the shadows, how would I manage the PAIN? The Depression? A few months prior to this, at the end of October, I had just completed in it’s entirety a 3 month course on Life Counseling. I was equipped, I had been told, to handle the whole wide world, sober and fresh. And here I was, less than a month after graduation - thrown into this deep end of whole-wide-world, sober.
My Bosom Buddy answered my email when I was already back home after the Op, to say that he would arrive a few days before Christmas, but I was alright, drugged from my brain to my toes in pain medication and nicotine, watching Series day and night, curtains shut, on meals that were boiled and tasteless – post Op foods. Yuk. But so high was I that I got 2 fully SHADED tattoos done in the same afternoon as well as the horrid act of chopping off my 5 year old-gorgeous blond dreadlocks. Just before he arrived, Bosom Buddy reminded me that he couldn’t stand the smell of cigarettes and that in order to be considerate to him, for him to stay with me, I would have to stop smoking.
Fuck.
Desperation.
Well, I could stop for 2 weeks, yes? No? [bobs head Indian style].... the extent of things people of this Tribe do…. so for 3 weeks, I had no smokes, no alcohol. But I was still on those prescription painkillers, and let me tell you, those things give you a high that’s most definitely not legal. Still, somehow, that’s how I spent my first Christmas ever, SOBER. I won’t lie and tell you it was all rosy and gorgeous because it wasn’t. I was half out of my mind most of the time in a stupid depression that I covered with laughter and silliness. And that thing of being without the kids during Christmas? It was painful and heart-wrenching and I cried every single time I took a shower – showers disguise the sound of the soft wails and hiccups, and tears can flow and mingle with the stinging hot shower jets of water, when you can’t quite tell if it’s the shower water or tears on your face, and you can let rip, bang the shower walls with your clenched fists or slap the walls with the palm of your hand and sit in a forlorn wet puddle on the shower floor, naked, wet and dark inside.
They tell you that Alcohol is all about triggers, and avoiding triggers, and knowing your triggers. That’s all true. What I didn’t know was that my trigger was Depression, simple. I am a total Tribes-person. So every time I felt Depression knocking, I’d go running and looking for a happy cure – a good long sweet alcoholic drink, the higher the proof the better - it would numb the pain and horror of Depression. Fortunately, I’d been warned off Fucks – not giving, or receiving Fucks. Now that was one weird convo, but it’s a story and part of Chapter 2, also known as “I’m Leaving, On A Jet Plane, Don’t know When I’ll Be Back Again”- title copied from the song of the same by Peter, Paul and Mary in the year, 1967. Nice Song.
Yap, so since I’d been warned off fucks, I didn’t go down that path, but many do. As a Tribe, we’re prone to get low. Lower than normal people. And a quick solution is – a fuck. If it’s a good one and permanent, excellent. But sadly, due to Tribal temperaments, they are mostly non-permanent, kind of like a flying fuck, always drifting and gliding away silently; try and get that. We’re not like normal people period. So, we get low and we get lower than normal people. And when we go lower than our normal low, we usually panic and look for a pick-me-up. So let’s say normal people go low at -1. Tribes-people and Alcoholics can go as low as -10. Then they look for a drink. Or a high. Or a fuck. Whatever, who gives a fuck… and they’re up there in Cloud9 with everyone else for a time. But then, the high wears off, and where do they land?
Yap. -10.
Everyone else lands on -1.
That’s a huge problem. And you can’t tell by just looking who is Tribe or who is an Alcoholic always, which is why the happiest people commit suicide and you wonder how you couldn’t tell. Well, we can, sometimes, but sometimes we’re also so stuck in level -8 we can’t even help ourselves. Sometimes it’s easier to stay drunk. Sober is hard. Really hard. It’s the strongest that survive, because you get to take a long hard look at yourself and ask those nasty truthful hard-as-a-teenage-girls-tits questions. And those tits – sorry – questions - were up there in my face come January 2013, after BosomBuddy left for places out of Kenya. I waved him off then went home to ponder over how I felt – SOBER. I remember playing Pinks’ SOBER hit over and over again loudly, dancing by myself in a happy-ish manic glee. And I reminisced and decided on how to glue the pieces of my life back together, and in the process discovered that many were missing. Not only missing, but the question loomed, did I really want them back? And learning about circles and moods and that the trick is to know that Depression will always come calling [it’s a Tribe thing, remember that] and the aim is to make the repeat of time-circles bigger, the low-depths shallower, and the times in depression shorter.
So I went into a nice-ish mood, a good one, playing Naughts + Crosses with my life and coming up winning most of the time. I read many a book and prayed a lot too – to a distant GOD whom I knew loved me though I felt he was far-far away in a Peter Pan World, somewhere beyond the Third star and Jupiter and sometimes throwing Angel dust my way.
What a far cry from my former ‘religious days’ when I was a devout Church leader.
But my psyche had been severely eroded by a DMV relationship and it’s mishandling by probably well meaning but uneducated church members who would say I wasn’t ‘holy’ enough is why I got beat and depressed. Actually, in 20 years, I didn’t meet a single Tribe member. I remember once on a sunny lazy afternoon, with bees buzzing in and out of open windows of her cottage, confessing to a fellow woman church leader, reclining in her home on a deep burnt orange luxurious sofa, sipping sweet cups of Masala Tea and snacking on triangular pieces of crust-less bread slathered with real butter, ‘Honey, I need a psychiatrist or some such person to talk to, I need to look for a ‘detox’ or ‘rehab’, I feel like I’m going mental…..” and she looked at me and laughed for the longest time, while slapping in amusement, her meaty thigh with the flat palm of her hand, a dull thick sound, and gasping, ‘YOU? A REHAB? DEPRESSED? ALCOHOLIC…? NEVER. Go take a looong drive to Naivasha or to the Rift Valley, clear your head.. you’re fine….”, as she wiped the laughter tears off her eyes with her sleeve.
I also remember, once-upon-a-time in my university-hood, when I had locked myself up in my bedroom at my parents home for about a week, depressed, morose and not getting or feeling any better, I looked for and approached my mother [who never had patience for what she called my moods]… but in desperation I asked her please, could I pleeeeease see a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst? And the answer was a resounding NO. “You’re the luckiest girl in the whole world, you’re just plain SPOILT by your father..” and she fastened her lips together in a prim unyielding pucker that reminded me of prunes, and that was the end of the matter. Well I kind of carried that forward like a math equation, right into my church going-Bible-thumping Youth-Leader days when I believed that my moodiness and low-lows could be cured by ‘Positioning the Engine of Smile” in front of my thoughts and plastering said smile on my face. Add a bucketful of shitty violence in a 20 year marriage, and it’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself via alcohol.
So there I was, praying to an unseen god and looking for answers in the books and notes I’d made the previous year while this studying the phenomenon called “Life Counseling” and really sorting my bits out, I mean like …REALLY. I was happy. Content. Serene. Sober. Cigarette Free too! I was giving lectures and standing on podiums in front of hundreds of women proclaiming the goodness of ? that I had stopped drinking, smoking and all fuckery… and looking absolutely amazing to boot!
My son had began to fall in love with me again, I could see it in his eyes, that look that he’d give me when I walked into the apartment to see if I was sober. He’d come up to me, reaching my chin, and hug me, as well as unobtrusively sniffing at me and my clothes to see if I was ‘drunk’… but months passed, and nope, I didn’t touch the dreaded drink and his love grew and wound itself round me like pieces of gossamer thread, very there, but oh, so fragile!
And January and February came and went and there we were, at the end of March, and one cold morning I picked up my vibrating phone without caring to look at the caller.
As Tribes people we know how to avoid certain calls. Either you put a different ring tone, or if not, you look at the screen for a long couple of seconds before you decide to put it back down, face down. Face down stops the incessant ringing tone, thank the gods for that invention!, but yes, we avoid certain people with a merciless manic glee, knowing that if you pick that call, you will pay with hellfire. Well, that cold morning, I was still under-cover-of-blankets in my darling warm bed, feeling all gorgeous and sexy, warm and oh so sweet. So I stretched out lazily, gently pressed the green button on the smart phone screen and said Hello in a sultry tone, eyes still half closed. The voice froze my mind. Instant brain freeze. And I couldn’t hang up, or be quiet, or pretend that I hadn’t heard. Fear galloped through my veins, followed swiftly by a staggering desire for an alcoholic drink to stop the fear, to stand up to the fear, to get courage to stand up to the fear, to stop the numbness, the seeping cold that had somehow kept away from me for so long. This thing about Triggers is that they’re exactly that, Triggers. No warning, it’s like KABAOW! And you’re a stinking putrid diarrhoea mess.
I think I wandered about in the apartment for a bit, worried sick that I would give in to this desperate need for a drink, but I soon gave up and called the same boda-boda guy, who was so shocked at my request for a home-alcohol delivery, he actually hesitated. I heard it clearly in his soft gasp. I also asked him to come with a 12 pack carton of cigarettes. Immediately after that I called a person who I knew was a strong member of AA. And wailed like a baby. Gone was my confidence, gone was my self control, gone was my total understanding, gone was my graceful delightful spiritual self, gone were the days of calm, here was Fear with a big letter F, staring at me with a rock hard unyielding face and I was petrified. How could I face this particular fear – face to face – sober?
Well it turned out I didn’t have to. The AA member dropped everything she was doing and came to set up camp at my home, and she refused to leave. She allowed me the cigarettes, but gave the unopened Litre bottle of Whiskey that I’d been staring at on the kitchen counter top with a quiet frantic desperation - back to the boda-boda guy as a free gift. She sat with me, held me, spoke to me, and told me not to allow myself to be overcome with fear, cooked me food, covered me up in a blanket to stop my fear shakes. And I began to understand that I had to let go of past hurts and not sink in the miry clay pit of depression, or if I did, to know that there was a way out of this concentric circles of endless consuming Depression – and that I could get out of it, and away from the Alcohol. And that I needed to talk to others like me. Like me? I asked my friend who said I needed to go for an AA meeting, disbelief and the neediness and desire of the numbing pleasure of alcohol ruling my tongue for the taste; yes, she replied, like you. And the next morning, early, she called for a Taxi Cab, and took me to my first ever AA meeting where I said, with tears running down my face;
Hello, My name is Nyakio, and I’m an Alcoholic.
The Beginning.
*1 boda-boda-guy – motorbike rider, who can be hired at a fee to deliver home shopping; mostly for fast transport in urban areas, or out of way places where public transport is not accessible.
Nyakio, for the XpenSieve Report© December 2015
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