A shorter post today, as I had a shitty day which left me feeling low and anxious and edgy. Lucky, therefore, to be in an addiction rehab centre where mood swings, anxiety and depression are standard behaviour and counsellors are on hand to help – as they surely did. But it blindsided me a bit as I’d been feeling incredibly energised and cheerful these past couple of weeks. It put me in mind of an article I’d read by one of my favourite writers, the late Roger Ebert. Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and fellow alcoholic, Ebert wrote openly about his alcoholism and how he’d been saved by AA. He also mentioned something I hadn’t considered before, which he termed ‘the ups’.
As I’m sure everyone knows by now alcohol is a depressant, so if you drink a lot of it – as much as I was drinking for instance – then you’re eventually going to end up feeling depressed, often severely so and over long periods of time. So if you stop drinking for an extended period, even a couple of weeks, the opposite thing starts to happen and you get the most amazing feelings of clarity, cheerfulness and confidence. Welcome to the ups. Problem is, if you are an alcoholic, you may convince yourself that you feel so good, that it’s okay to have a drink and then you’re strapped back onto the fiery wheel, rolling down again into oblivion. Also the simple feeling of feeling good again can just be a bit generally overwhelming. Listening to a friend recount a tragi-comic tale of drunken insanity involving being escorted paralytic by the police out of an airport and into a hospital, also left with me a sharp feeling of regret that I can’t ever drink again. Not if I want to live anyway. I’m not out of the woods yet.
And of course what goes up must come down again, and I think that’s what happened to me today. I’d had the ups and now it was the turn of the downs. I hadn’t slept properly the night before, the fucking smoke alarm in my room kept going off for no reason (I don’t even smoke), and some of the other rehab guests seemed a bit out of sorts too. Maybe it was the weather. I need to bear in mind that, however good I’ve been feeling, I’m still only three weeks sober and am still on an emotional hair trigger. Someone dropped their cutlery on the dining room tiles at lunch and I nearly shot through the roof. So I’m going to bed in the hope that a) I get a good night’s sleep this time and b) the smoke alarm doesn’t go off again because if it does I’m going to go at it with a fucking big hammer, or something.
So today of all days, I need to remind myself of my mantra:
One day at a time.
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