“O Captain! My Captain!”

— A journey to the center of the self

Under the stiff swollen belly of the sea, life arose.

His eyes said it all, and I sank deeper. In fact, I was sure I had turned inside out by this point. I had certainly puked enough of my guts up, unable to even keep water down or the anti-nausea medicine for that matter. But the weighty pull in my heart was far worse than the retching.

It’s not that I had never been this sick before or that I hadn’t ever passed out, blacked out, hit my head, or thrown up all over everything. It’s that they all saw it. They weren’t stupid college friends, and this wasn’t a Saturday night out with my best buds, not that I had any. This was my husband, and this was his whole family, and this was Christmas… Well, a Christmas party, but you get the point.

And that was truly it. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was found out. No longer behind the glass, them on one side, me safely on the other, fooling them all into thinking I was just like them. They knew. They all knew, and I was sure they all hated me. And my husband; I broke his heart.

It could’ve begun when I was seven, sipping flat empties with my cousin Victor at family parties. Sour and almost warm, even then I loved that hoppy carb-tastic flavor. My parents were only social drinkers, but at parties alcohol was always present, usually beer or wine, maybe some Limoncello. Every Sunday my father’s side gathered for dinner at my grandparent’s South Philly row. Four or five back to back tables dressed with olives, ravioli, pasta forno, braciola, and broccoli rabe, spanned the length of their basement. Throughout the night my uncles would drink tall glasses of a red wine more akin to vodka than merlot. My grandfather brewed it every year. Crushed the grapes by stomping and fermented it in giant cedar barrels in his basement. Everyone would get gallon jugs to last the year, and then the process would begin again.

I didn’t get to taste our family wine until much later. And with the miniscule amount we scavenged, Victor and I never drank enough to really feel anything, but you never know. Maybe it was enough to flip a switch in me. Maybe it was that plus the time my mother gave me flu medicine with alcohol and dextromethorphan in it. I became a zombie for the night, my first black out. Or maybe I found it romantic to be an alcoholic. A troubled poet. I fantasized about being a famous poet and wrote constantly. And poets are all alcoholics, right? Artistic talent+ alcohol = important and famous! Poof! Or not. Yup, some poets are alcoholics, but so are some doctors and waiters and lawyers and mechanics and cashiers who work at Kohls. Alcoholism isn’t picky, but it does bring on the trouble. Trouble that pins you down like a stone. Trouble that tamps your voice and convinces you to give up… almost everything.

My mother’s father died at age 47 and was likely an alcoholic from the stories I’ve heard, so maybe it’s just in my genes. Besides his likely possibility, there are many definite alcoholics in my family, mostly active and in denial, one in recovery for decades, and one dead from his own hand at age 32.

Maybe it’s all of those things, and maybe it’s also life and my lack of coping skills. Maybe it’s my fear. Sounds like a perfect storm.

Plus, I wanted to be a poet.

Every summer my parents, brother, and I would pile into our olive green Chevy Cavalier and head down 95 on our way to Wildwood for our one and only family vacation. It was a giant boat of a car with green vinyl seats and optional seat belts. Oldie’s 98 was always playing, and lunch was always ham and sun melted cheese with mayo on an Amorosso’s. The drive over the Walt Whitman bridge marked our passage into another world. I knew Old Walt was a poet, and though I never read a word of his work, I knew he must be great because he was also a bridge. I’d stare out the window taking in the powder blue sky, the silvery ripples of the water below, and the steel beams cradling the asphalt. I’d feel as big and mighty as it was, as he was. This was a moment I looked forward to but always passed too quickly. And I would watch it fade behind us, growing smaller and smaller until it was just the road, and the trees, and I was just me.

Behind glass looking out at the world, I was on one side and everyone and everything else was on the other. I felt like I had a secret, one that I couldn’t share, one that no one could hear, one that no one would ever believe. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel this glass between us.

Maybe it was that… the glass.

I didn’t really pick up until I was 18. It was my first time away from home. I was at college, and drinking was what all college kids did. I didn’t realize, though, that what I was doing wasn’t the same.

My first bottle was hidden in my dorm room closet within the first few weeks of classes. It was a fifth of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. I hated rum, and I didn’t know the difference between spiced or not, but none of that mattered; I had a box of cheerios right next to it to use as a chaser — problem solved.

“O Captain! My Captain!” I’d say picking the bottle up by it’s stiff, cold neck. Then I’d hold my breath, press my lips to its mouth, and take in a giant burning gulp of my captain, following it blindly, with a fist full of those Cheerio bad boys.

This was the beginning of my 11 year drinking career.

In highschool the opportunity never arose. Really. My closest friends were good as gold. We had sleepovers with truth or dare, sang karaoke, had pillow fights, and hung out at the mall. We had boyfriends and drama, but we never “partied,” not even at senior week. A boy we had never met invited us to a party, but before I could say yes, they said “No!” and pulled me away. They were all still kids at heart and hyper-focused on college and career, unlike me. I was a good student, but they were in AP classes, and I wanted nothing to do with college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life besides write, and I was buried deep in depression and self-loathing. They, along with my parents, convinced me though, and off to college I went.

All entering Freshman classes were divided into small groups and assigned a Peer Orientation Person (POP) for a week or so before the semester began. At the end of Orientation, our POP hosted a party for our group at her Sorority house. Black and Tan, Jungle Juice, and a vodka infused watermelon; whichever was first slid down my throat and immediately lit up every cell in my body. It was like some devine light poured out of me and all of my atoms sang out at once “Haleluja!” For the first time, I felt the sense of ease, comfort, relief, that I had been so desperate for my entire life.

And the perfect storm began to rage.

It was all I could think about. I planned my weeks around drinking. My friendships were built around drinking. And for me, there was no onramp, no honeymoon period where everything was just fun and then it all turned to shit. That happens to some people. They’re going along drinking like a normal person, having a couple glasses of wine or a couple of beers here and there and BOOM, the vodka hits, and they have one bottle behind the cleaning supplies and another behind the shoe boxes. Not me. The very first time I drank, I blacked out. And every time after was some combo pack of black out, pass out, throw up. But I wasn’t completely predictable, I’d vary the order from time to time, just for kicks.

It was just about the middle of my freshman year, and it was a frat party like any other. When I woke the morning after, my body was cold and everything was loud and vibrant, especially their angry voices. My friends said they carried me home, couldn’t tell if I was breathing, and none of them could find my pulse. But we were all underage so… They didn’t tell anyone and instead carried me into the shower and turned on the ice cold water. Eventually, I began to shiver and then puke, and puke some more, and then they cleaned me up and carried me back to one of their rooms. They laid me on the floor by one of their beds, so they could make sure I didn’t die. I didn’t believe them. I didn’t want to believe them. I didn’t remember any of it, so it just seemed too surreal. But this is what I did. And it didn’t stop. And it did get worse. I woke with bruises on multiple occasions and didn’t know where any of them came from. My roommate saw one of them and asked “Oh my God, doesn’t that scare you?” But that was one of my secrets: my fear. So I laughed at her and at the bruise and said, “No!” and pushed past her to the showers.

After winter break, I came back to find that my roommate left me. She said I was an alcoholic. She couldn’t take it anymore. Well, that was fine with me because she stole my bottle of Vodka from my underwear drawer.

I promised over and over to my friends that I’d “stop being an asshole” and then that I’d “never drink again.” I actually wrote and signed papers saying these asinine things. But I couldn’t stop. And then one night at spring fling weekend, it happend. I was raped, possibly by more than one guy, but I’ll never know for sure because I was passed out and in a black out. I only have blips of memory and tons of emotion. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, was constantly running to the bathroom, and couldn’t stop shivering for days from an ice so deep in my bones I thought I’d never feel warm again. But I stopped drinking. I had hit bottom.

For a week.

I refused to talk to anyone about what happened. I was behind the glass afterall, growing smaller and farther away.

My friends convinced me to join them at a frat party the following weekend, and I didn’t drink but quickly wanted to. The guy collecting money at the door looked at me and said “YOU’RE not drinking?” as though he knew me. But I was certain I had never seen this guy in my life. My chest tightened, and I began to sweat. My eyes darted everywhere. It was loud and stunk of cologne, perfume, beer, and puke. At the keg, I was met with the same astonishment from guys I had never met. One of my “friends” handed me her red cup. “But I didn’t pay.” “Just take it,” she said. And I did.

I drank to run away from the fear, to run away from the depression, to run away from the memories that wouldn’t get out of my head, that wouldn’t let me sleep. I had so many more reasons to drink now and felt so much more shame, and I didn’t care if I died from it. I just wanted it all to stop.

We all know addicts and alcoholics don’t plan to become addicted, we don’t ask for it, but something attracted us to pick up the first time. Usually, and definitely for me, it’s an escape hatch. That’s somewhat true for everyone who drinks. You want a respite from the stresses of life. A glass of Pinot relaxes you, a Long Island makes you dance more, a few Lagers give you mountains of courage and turns your voice into Sia under Saturday’s karaoke lights. You drink a few and twirl and talk and laugh, and if you have a few too many, you know it, and you regret it, and you don’t make that same mistake again. And for the rest of us, the ones with this secret obsession, a few too many doesn’t exist because there are never enough Margharita’s and the bartender always makes them too light. We do have regrets, but these regrets are fuel for the fire. Shame is what propels us, and our regret is not an oops, it’s another shameful secret that we have to swallow.

I drank for 11 years, trying to quit, to control it, to replace it. Eventually, I began drinking every day, hiding it from my husband, going to work smelling like a hangover. My first college roommate planted seeds, my therapists planted seeds, my constant hangovers and my husband’s comments planted seeds, but I ignored them all.

If we knew we had the physical predisposition to be alcoholic, and if we were able to fast forward our lives to see the turmoil, pain, and even death that would ensue as a result of our addictions and alcoholism, would we still choose to pick it up that very first time?

If that knowledge included the clarity we have once we get through to the other side, then no, we definitely wouldn’t. Unfortunately, there’s no way to get to the other side, to gain that clarity, if we don’t, first, go through it. This was something I fought tooth and nail to avoid.

When I got sober, my husband and I had already been married for 5 years. He was always putting off having children. I found out it was because of my drinking, and I thank God for that. Today, I have two truly amazing children who teach me more about what it means to be alive and to do good in this life than I could’ve ever imagined possible. I am 13 years sober, and they have never seen me drink.

“We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!” I’ve read many books to my children over the years, but those words from Michael Rosen’s “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” follow me everywhere. So simple, so true. We pick up because we don’t want to go through it. We don’t want to feel the awkwardness of being outcasted for saying no, the shyness and butterflies of socializing, and for many of us, we don’t want to feel the painful memories of traumatic experiences, depression, and loneliness. We think we can avoid going through it by numbing it or by disappearing completely with a more acceptable slower form of suicide. But the reality is we can’t run from this bear and avoid the obstacles in our paths. We have to go through all the “Swishy Swashy” and “Stumble trip” to find peace and safety at the center of our selves. An adult’s poem, “O Captain, My Captain!” was my north star growing up. Now, as an adult, after many years of going through it, a children’s book holds my simple mantra for my life.