In two weeks, one year will have passed since the day my marriage ended. How long ago that seemed, back before I knew the pain and the withdrawals I would go through, before I knew how much I would transform, before I knew that this year was not the eternity of lonely penitence I once thought lied in wait ahead of me. I have to be honest, part of me believed it was all just a test back then. If I did the right things, if I got counseling, wrote the letters, went to church, prayed enough...things could go back to the way they were, reconciliation would happen. I only thought this in the early days, to be clear. Looking back now, I believed this because my codependent brain couldn’t cope with the ending just yet. I needed some sort of reassurance, even just a false one, that things wouldn’t be the way they were.
For the past year, I have tried to walk a fine line of being both open and being more reserved about what happened. I do believe in respecting other people’s privacy, but at the same time, I also have always believed that it’s important to shed light on your struggles, and on your truth, because it lends strength to others who perhaps have gone through the same thing. I have always tried to walk the route of being more open and candid with my life, even if it doesn’t always shed me in the most beautiful light. I’m a very flawed, divorced, chronically ill 27 year old who has struggled with depression, eating disorders, anxiety, and her share of familial issues for most of my life. I’m not merely a passerby in any of that. I’ve played an active role in the drivers seat, hurting people I love, being too rough on the edges and making mistakes along the way. But I do believe that learning from it (and by extension, processing it through writing and candidness) is helping me continue to grow into the woman I am meant to become.
So I wanted to talk to you tonight about addiction, about alcohol, because I have spent a very long, long time thinking about it. Years, actually. It has played a center part in my life since 2016, two weeks after I walked down the aisle, when I learned I was married to someone who struggled with this. The paramedics called me one Friday while I was interning at the hospital, still a student.
“Lacy Mason?” They asked. I answered yes. “We found your husband on the side of the road. He’s injured, and we believe he’s been drinking.”
I felt like a train had hit me, but the most overwhelming feeling was one of confusion. What? How? Why? I had known literally nothing about this until the moment they called. Had I been that much of a fool that I really hadn’t known? Had other people known and not told me? Had I really missed all of the signs?
I was angry, too. Selfishly, I was. Anger is a first instinct. A human one. And often the thing we feel before we start to take a step back and process things. I missed my best friend’s wedding rehearsal dinner that night as I picked him up from the hospital and let him sleep it off. I lied to everyone and said it was a biking incident, full of shame and denial. Even my clinic instructor who I frantically explained a fake situation to so I could leave and get him. My heart hurt. My head hurt. I felt like I was in a dream.
I think the hardest thing was hardly being able to talk about it. How do you have a conversation with someone who barely even remembers what happened? How do you tell your friends who just helped you live your “happily ever after” mere weeks ago that this has happened? I couldn’t begin to figure out how to start. So I didn’t.
It was not an isolated incident. Not that summer, not that year. Sometimes months would go in between, sometimes shorter, other times longer. I felt worried when I was gone, worried what I could come back to, worried about the bottles in the kitchen I had yet to get rid of because I didn’t fully understand the gravity of depth of what was happening. I wondered if I had done something wrong. I wondered if I had caused this.
At 22, mostly I was just confused. I was hurt. I hadn’t seen any behavior like this before, and it seemed to start without warning. Truly, it just began on a day that seemed exactly like every other day.
I know now after many years that addiction is a difficult thing. It’s not a linear healing process, and that’s something I struggled a great deal with, as I believe I unfairly expected that for a long time. I think as someone who personally has never struggled with this particular battle in life, my lack of experience didn’t equip me to provide the kind of emotional support necessary to either let myself thrive instead of just survive, or help the person struggling through it properly. Nor to recognize the right steps to take to get either of us through it.
While I recoiled in anger and hurt, I should have extended an olive branch and built a community. I should have set structure and accountability. I should have pushed the 12 steps more. I did try to do my part. I didn’t mention it to friends. He wanted to keep it private. So I did. And I did do everything I could do establish that protective wall of privacy around us, even at the expense of my own well being. Even when I got questions from friends. Where did the entire bottle of whiskey go from the pantry of my friends house that weekend we stayed? As I pulled more into myself, I clung to old bad habits. I didn’t give myself enough insulin. I lost weight. It was to give myself a sense of control, but it was a silent cry for help, too. And when I didn’t think I could take it anymore, I’d try to walk away, and then I’d inevitably return to the cycle, unable to face my fears of loneliness and loss, digging a deeper and deeper well of hurt into not just myself, but both of us. The “flight to health” - the act to push away any of the deeper, residual hurt in order to soothe the bad feelings and return things to normal in the face of a blowup - plagued me for years, as I was unable to break out of my own toxic cycle I created. I became consumed with my own hurt and emotions over everything, demanding more, turning to things I shouldn’t have, and shutting myself off. I built my own walls. And it stunted my own ability to heal, let alone my ability to help support the person I was with. I wish I hadn’t done all of this, but that’s the thing about growth - it often takes the “what not to do” to learn the “what to do.” (If that’s not the case for you, consider me jealous of you.) In the end, all of this left two people unable to move forward and heal. I was angry about the past, my illusions of happiness shattered, and I became a harsh critic because of it. People rarely respond well to this.
At the same time, I was just young. I went back and forth between feeling I was too harsh and too soft. I have an innate desire to please, and a hard time saying no and telling hard truths. Lacking healthcare or feeling the strain of a single income for a long time, it was hard to prioritize getting the mental help needed for either of us, believing that with enough hard work this could be handled without professional help. When I was pressed to bend the rules, to “allow” a drink, I eventually caved in, on multiple occasions that led to bad outcomes later on. I brought the occasional bottle of wine home. I followed all the wrong steps.
When I got sad, I tended to pull deeper into myself, instead of reaching out. I think I could have avoided a lot of pitfalls had I talked to someone with similar experience, perhaps, or just reached out to a trusted adviser or confidante more. But I felt shame, and felt I’d betray trust it I did. I wanted very much to preserve the illusion that everything was fine on the outside.
It was hard processing a lot of this hurt alone, because there were so many things that happened that only I remembered or witnessed. It was hard when those happened and they made you more paranoid: every little thing became more noticeable. The smell of their breath or skin. The cups hidden behind the nightstand. How full was that bottle the night before? A “good night out” put me on edge, just waiting for the other shoe to fall.
I also think one of the harder things when things finally ended was having it thrown back to me. There was the, “I’ll admit I had a bit of a drinking problem... then,” and the “I struggled so much because you didn’t join Alanon to properly support me.” I still don’t understand how it all started. My once dear friends who told me I was lying and manipulative to ever accuse the person I’d lived with for 5 years of having a problem hurt very deeply. There were the incidents revealed to me even after, that I hadn’t known about. It made me question several years of my life: what version of reality I could actually trust.
And all of it is just water under the bridge now. But I’ll admit it hurt for a long time, and even when I talk about it to my counselor... I’m shocked at what an emotional reaction it evokes from me. The tiny shakes, the quiver of my voice as I told back tears. The ache in my throat. I wanted to sob. I held it all for a long time. The times I felt alone, the guilt I carried for all I thought I could have done better. And I’ve spent a year letting it go. It feels good, to let the universe play its part now as I have set this part of my life free. I learned, I grew, I changed over the years. I hurt. But I was who I needed to be then, and that helped me become the person I need to be now. It takes strength to move past your mistakes and let them refine you.
I want to say this: you might think you can’t, but you are strong. Whatever you choose, whatever you are facing, you are strong. Looking back on a year... it sits so well with my soul that everything happened as it should have. Could it have been executed better? Yes. But it took strength, nonetheless, to come out of this situation whole. Strength takes sifting through the oftentimes messy weakness to find what lies beneath.
I want to tell you to trust your heart. I want to tell you that choosing to repeat cycles that only perpetuate your pain in an attempt to sacrifice for someone will inevitably come back to sabotage and ruin the original sacrifice. Because neither of you learn. Whatever that means to you, know that you cannot expect to heal without FULLY confronting pain and hurt. Not partially. Not just laying things aside and not processing how they’ve effected both parties for the sake of preserving the temporary peace.
The good thing about setting something free is... you can hope for a happy ending from a distance, as though you are reading a fairytale. We should all want what is best for our fellow humans.
You no longer play an active role, but there are little reminders and whisps of memories you’ll get every so often, and you’ll smile at them and think, “for all of this that happened, I was made better. They too, learned in ways that they needed to. For all of this that happened, I played my part in the universe’s grander scheme. It is no more, but it was good.” These thoughts will pass. The lessons have been learned, the story seen to conclusion. The final page of that chapter turnt. It is here that I wish for peace and goodness, it is in this space that I feel whole and complete: the work I did to heal has made me feel whole again, because I rebuilt myself from the ground up using what I learned.
The journey, for all its pain and poignant beauty: it was good.
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