"I Got Wasted"

“I got wasted cause I didn’t wanna deal with myself tonight. My thoughts get drowned until I feel alright. I keep drinking til I’m someone I don’t recognize. I got wasted.”

These lyrics mean a lot to me. Because that’s exactly what I did. I would drink because I didn’t want to deal with myself or my thoughts. I would drink until I could pretend I didn’t feel so bad or alone anymore.

Turns out, at the end, I wasn’t alone anymore. Turns out I didn’t need to feel alone in the first place. I never needed to feel left out.

I was running from myself and my thoughts. I didn’t need to do that anymore. There was always someone there. It just took looking myself in the mirror and realizing I didn’t deserve to feel the way I did anymore. I wasn’t totally at fault for all the things that led me to what I did, but it was my choice to do what had been done. I just needed to understand that I was going to be okay, but only if I quit what I was doing.

“I wanna talk to somebody but I feel no one relates.”

That was something that I needed to get past and it took a whole hell of a lot and that’s the truth. I needed to understand that other people have felt the same way I was feeling. I needed to know there were others out there like me. I wasn’t alone. I never had been.

It was so painful at first, to stop. And then to start again and feel like I had failed myself and others. To feel like I had failed my own child when all they wanted was for me to be healthy and happy so I could take care of them.

It hit me one day that if I continued down the path I had been on, that I would lose a second child to poorly made decisions. I couldn’t do that. Not again. It would have cost me everything I had left in me and I couldn’t let that happen.

I started getting sober for my daughter, but I soon realized it was for me. It was a hard pill to swallow that I needed to do it for me. A hard realization that she did not in fact need me because there were others, are others, who can do for her the same things I can. But it would cost her her own mother and that is something that can never be replaced. It would have been something I would have never been able to fix.

So I learned to fix myself, for myself. Because if I couldn’t do it for me, I couldn’t do it for anyone. And things got better. I got better. I got sober.

Things changed a lot after that. I got calmer, more patient. I became a better me, and then because of that, I became a better parent. I was worthy of her love and her time.

No, I will never get my son back and that will haunt me until the day I die. I chose myself and my addictions over him. There was and is no excuse for that. But maybe someday he will learn that I changed and he will learn who I am and that I sincerely screwed up. Part of me doubts he will ever know anything more about me than he does at this very moment, but we never know what the future holds.

The only thing I can know for sure is that I am doing better and that I never want to go back to the place I was in before. I can know that I will always do everything within my power to make sure I do better because the people I created deserved for me to be better and because I did, too.

I can know that I am loved and I am forgiven. I can know that I deserve happiness and that those things I was addicted to and abusing weren’t bringing me anything more than a temporary escape with massive negative consequences.