I know I mentioned before that I had gone through a bit of a self destructive streak for a while but I don’t know that the depth of these behaviors settled in, long in the past, until a couple of years ago. It started in grad school when I was trying to square the fact that I came into a grad program with an open heart. I was ready to learn everything and participate fully in a life that I wasn’t able to before because I was wrapped up in the trauma of watching my parent’s marriage implode under the weight of what I saw as a mutual inability to find a way out of the holes they had dug for themselves. My mother, no surprise, was still fighting and is still fighting the mental illness that probably plagued her from the time she was a kid and saw her mother go through the brutal reality of coming out of alcoholism. My dad, well, I think he was so set on being a “good Christian” he couldn’t see the clear path forward that would allow us all to move on with our lives. My own self destructiveness took the form of drinking too much. I would go out with my fellow grad students and we would spend hours at the bar beginning in the afternoon in some cases and drinking well into the night.

When my daughter came along and I was at home with her most of the time or trying to juggle classes and being a parent because that was my issue to figure out since I wasn’t working, I would just wait until my ex came home from work and ate dinner and passed out. Family asleep, I was finally alone and would leave the house and close down the local watering hole with a new group of friends that were theatre artists in town. We went pretty hard and I had so many nights when I would wake up in bed and not remember how I made it home. I would try to piece together the last parts of the previous night and I think, looking back at it now, I was trying to give my ex a reason to leave me without looking like the bad guy. I woke up hungover every day and took care of the baby hoping that at some point my ex would realize what was going on and say something. She never did. I was a reeking mess and not one word about it.

The summer after our daughter was born, she got a job in Commerce and was gone from Sunday night until Thursday night and I was absolutely alone. It was probably the most alone I’ve ever felt. I lost my identity as a theatre artists, a scholar, a drunk and a human being that summer. We spent another couple of months in Denton and then she got a job in Garland working for the public library so we moved to Plano. I didn’t really have a good reason not to move, I was in school again but could do my student teaching anywhere and “my drinking buddies live here” wasn’t a good excuse. So we moved. I spent most of my time at home again and a couple of nights a week I would drive the 40 minutes to Denton and close down the bar and drive home, just further this time. As many times as I should have been pulled over and arrested, I never was. I always had some way of flying under the radar and figured if I could operate my manual transmission vehicle that I was ok to drive.

I made it until the summer and moved in with my dad and step mother. I had reached a point where I felt so much like a housekeeper and platonic roommate that I couldn’t take another minute of it. I was translating my daughter’s speech for my ex because she didn’t spend enough time with either of us to fully understand what our cries meant. This isn’t meant as a blaming post, I take full responsibility for not being straightforward with where I was and she was just trying to provide the best that she could for our family.

Saturday as I drove the streets I hadn’t driven in almost 10 years, these are the things that came back to me. I never want to be in that place again, mentally or physically, where my only escape is breaking down my body and mind. I don’t want to ever feel like I need to escape my everyday again.