Dear Christie,

I doubt you remember me. Saturday night, at the strip club? You were working and there was one guy there, unkempt and alone, throwing money away like a drunken sailor? Yeah, that was me.

I'm writing this into the ether because I'm not going to see you again, but I needed to express my gratitude to you. You helped me to realize exactly what has been killing me, pressing upon me, making me crazy. I'm lonely. I'm starved for attention. I'm desperate to feel as if somebody gives a rat's ass about me, and so desperate I'm willing to pay you to fake that kind of interest in a slovenly moron such as myself.

It's not a sexual thing, and I hope you know that. I mean, I happen to think that you are probably the most beautiful girl to say more than 2 words to me. If I were a better, richer, more handsome man, I might be slightly closer to your league, but... I know that I'm not. And really, I didn't even want to fantasize that you had some sort of sexual interest in me. If you did, I don't know if I could have handled it.

And that's why when I paid for the half-hour lap-dance, we ended up sitting around talking. We mostly talked about you, about dance, about how you were saving up money to start your own dance studio. You're so young, only 21 years old, but I was incredibly impressed by your determination and smitten by your youthful optimism. I don't do optimism any more, and my determination has really not gotten me all that much. So I was just keen to piggyback off your dreams and admire your work-ethic.

You gave me hope. I don't have much of it, these days. Mostly I feel empty, and angry, and alone. And even now, I don't have much hope for myself. I'm going to go on living, but it's going to be a brutish, ugly and unpleasant life, in which nothing good is going to happen to me.

But, I think, good things are going to happen to you. You're going to save up the last of the money you need for the studio, and then you'll open it and begin teaching. It'll be tough for a while, but you'll be pursuing your dream. You'll finally be able to date and of course you're going to land somebody beautiful and brainy, a doctor or something like that, and he'll make you feel alive and happy in ways you don't yet know. Maybe you'll have kids; and you'll be a wonderful mother and have wonderful children.

I envy you, but mostly I'm just happy to know that you exist. You're everything that I want, all the optimism and determination and beauty and hard-work. There are none of those things in my life, none that aren't qualified in some way by bitterness and cynicism and numb. So getting to spend that tiny amount of time with you, talking, made me feel better because even though my life is never going to feel that good... I'm glad it does for someone else.

I Don't Even Know What to Say

I don't even know what to say. I wish I knew how I could describe this to you.

It's torture. Literal torture. Since I was 13, I have been depressed. Life drains of any pleasure, any meaning, any purpose. I go numb inside, completely numb. I can't feel any good, and maybe worse, I can't even feel the sorrow and pain that I know I feel. There's just a blank. Iggy Pop described it in a Canadian television interview, how the numb is the reason behind his music, his antics on stage. A desperate need to feel.

That's always been the most accurate description of my depression. I'm desperate for feeling, for emotion, for whatever is inside to manifest itself because I can't make it.

And that's how I started drinking.

I was sad, I knew I was sad, but I didn't feel sad, couldn't feel sad, couldn't feel anything. So I had a drink. And then another one. And I drank until I was drunk and then mercifully, blissfully, the tears would come. There would be catharsis. I could get out the immense weight I was carrying around and just cry.

But I'm an alcoholic. So what was, yes, a rather sad and sick coping mechanism for the depression, took on a life of its own. Because I wasn't, am not, numb to only sadness. It's all emotion, all feeling. And over a period of time I found out that the alcohol would help those problems too. I would drink, and it was like the moment when Dorothy's house lands in Oz, everything goes technicolor, life seems like genuine life.

It didn't work for very long. I always needed more booze, more extreme emotions. More extreme everything, really, because it's only in the extremes that I can feel anything, even if it's the negative emotions. Homeostasis is terrible because... well, it's stasis. Static.

It's like being on the ocean in a dead calm: no wind, no engine, nothing to get you to port. You know you're going to die, but it'll be a long, slow death: dehydration, starvation, exposure. Even if you're saved from those extremes, you'll try to drink too much water too quickly, give yourself water poisoning. Or you'll eat too much too quickly, send your body into shock.

That's what it's like. So it feels like I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't. The one medicine that cured one illness is something that could equally (though more dramatically) kill me.

Then I discovered Cymbalta. It worked. It worked where no other medication had worked before. I could tell it was different because I had side-effects: terrible nausea, an almost complete inability to stay awake about 5-6 hours after taking it.

Life wasn't colorful on Cymbalta, like it was on the booze and the drugs, but it seemed like I could live like that, it seemed that I could make a go of it. All was not lost. I got sober about the same time, and that gave me hope because it felt like I wouldn't have to drink any more. There was a group, a fellowship of people, centered around spirituality (one of my long-term fascinations) and living that spirituality and they had all drunk as much as I had (or more), done all the drugs I had (or more).

When you first met me, you thought I was happy. I thought I was happy. I wasn't. Because while the Cymbalta made a difference, I went at recovery from alcoholism with the extremity I've brought to bear on everything. I went to 45 meetings in 17 days, when I first started. They recommend 90 in 90 days; at my rate it would have been 270 in 90 days. I read everything, studied everything, did everything they said that I should do.

When you first met me, I had put 30,000 miles on my car in a year ferrying drunks to detoxs, addicts to rehabs, the two to meetings and then home again. I gave money to the groups when I had no job and not a cent to my name (I stole my parents' loose change, occasionally a twenty from their wallets) and the rest I gave to people who needed it more than I did.

I did it because I didn't feel anything. Didn't feel a thing when I prayed. Didn't notice that meetings made me calmer or more centered, as the others did. And, especially when I moved here, I didn't fit in. I didn't like sports. I didn't listen to the right kinds of music. I didn't know the right people, or the right places. My drinking and drugging career had taken place over a thousand miles away, so my frame of reference was totally off. I was alone, and that loneliness was killing me, so I tried to kill it with the thing that killed the desire for drink. It didn't work.

I stayed sober but my life did not, otherwise, improve (and not from a lack of trying). I was still living with my parents. I had no money, and for a long time I had no job. When I got a job, it was part-time; after that I couldn't find a full-time job. I had nothing except a course of action: to pursue sobriety into the gates of hell.

Over time, I became resentful of the people whose lives improved. People with less sobriety-time than myself, people who lied, gossiped, cheated, stole, disdained the weird: they all found girlfriends, jobs, friends, lives worth living. It wasn't that their lives improved, it was that I was trying so damned hard to give my all to being good, and there was no reward in it. My own life was still crummy, no matter how polished my virtue.

And then I met you. And it was like coming home again after a very long, very miserable excursion into Godforsaken lands. I know, I know: hyperbole. But it was. I had met somebody I could be completely relaxed around, somebody around whom I could be myself. And I fell in love with you, for you. I fell for the way you got angry. I fell for the way you remind me, constantly, of everything. I fell for the way you dance and sing - naked, before bed. I fell for your no-nonsense approach to everybody. I fell for your grammar, your vocabulary, your horrific taste in music. I fell for you entirely.

It wasn't enough. Or rather, though you were the single best thing to come into my life, it didn't make everything better, nor did I expect it to do so. I found a full-time job, and thought maybe that would help. It didn't. You know: I couldn't stand the working environment, the regulations, the co-workers with their pop-psychology answers and complete inexperience with the clients. How can someone work in mental health and not bother to learn about mental health conditions? How can you treat addiction by telling people to stay away from all drugs and alcohol - when they live in the ghetto and face it every day?

I hated the shifts. I hated them because I couldn't see you, couldn't come home to cook you dinner and ask about your day. It was as if I was living with a room-mate that I rarely saw and who was my wife. I couldn't have a work-life and a home-life: everything revolved around work. And I couldn't quit because I couldn't find another job.

So I decided to go back to school. First to get a degree in social work; then to get a degree in law. I was excited to go back to school. I was going to do it entirely different, this time. I was going to study and work hard, rather than relying on my wits and my abnormally good memory. And I was going to get great grades, build a wonderful resumé, land a brilliant job doing exactly the kind of work I wanted to do...

You know the rest. I went at school with a fury, but didn't do nearly as well as I had hoped. Meantime, AA slipped away. No meetings. No sponsees. No connection to the rooms. I didn't make any friends in law school, either, because of all the drinking, and because, well, I don't make friends easily. So ever so slowly, over time, I became more and more isolated - even from you.

Then the depression began again. My meds stopped working as well as they should have done. Insomnia started, and got worse. After a while I asked you for xanax, because I was desperate to sleep. But once I had some xanax, the addiction began again. I was drinking shortly thereafter.

The hard part? This all happened before. Depression; drinking; the woman I loved giving me the boot. 5 years of sobriety, and I'm right back where I started - and not from a lack of trying. So I don't really see the purpose any more. I mean: of living. I feel like I'm pretty much doomed to repeat the same horrific pattern, over and over. It's a pattern I can't break, because the causes (depression, addiction) are outside of my control. I can't out-think my own mind. At some point in the future whatever new meds I'm on will also begin to wear off. It'll start all over again, and without my noticing it. I'll be desperate to sleep or desperate to feel something because I've gone numb, and I'll start using or drinking all over again.

And it'll hurt people. I mean, that's just it: what hurts more than anything else is the simple fact that I can't promise you this won't happen again. You said that I need to re-establish trust: I can't. I can't, and don't, even trust myself. I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want to hurt my family, and I can't stop myself from these things.

I love you so, so much. I want more than anything else in the world to be with you again. But you deserve better, you deserve someone you can trust. Being with me, loving me, can only lead to further hurtful situations. I don't want that for you.

It hurts too much.

"I Don't Believe in Relapse"

Yesterday, at the first AA meeting I had been to in a very long time, someone said that they don't believe in relapse. Try as I might, I couldn't hear that without responding to it. I rambled, when I spoke: incoherent, messy use of metaphor and allegory, not quite comprehensible.

What I should have said was this:

"It doesn't matter whether you believe in relapse or not, because relapse believes in you.

Saying that you don't believe in alcoholic relapse is like saying that you have hayfever but don't believe in sneezing, or you believe in whooping cough but don't believe in coughing, or you believe in polio but you don't believe in paralysis. It's ridiculous. I have a disease, according to the American Medical Association, and the primary feature of that disease is chronic relapse.

If you mean 'I don't believe in letting myself relapse,' meaning that you'll do everything in your power to prevent such an eventuality, that's great - but it's not your call. If it were within your power to prevent a relapse, you wouldn't be here, sitting in a church basement with a bunch of strangers. You're here precisely because it isn't within your power to prevent a relapse; you're here because you need the help of somebody or something else for that.

I don't remember why I relapsed this last time. I don't remember the chain of events that led me to taking pills, and from the pills to the booze, and from both to the hospital. But then again, I don't need to know the chain of events: it's all rather simple. I did it because I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict; I did it because relapsing is what alcoholics and drug addicts do best. And every time I do it, I get more efficient, I get better at eliminating steps from the first drink or pill to the hospital, jail, or death.

This thing we've got, this peculiar mental twist, is like coming upon something coiled on the ground in the night. It could be a deadly snake, waiting to strike, or it could be just a length of rope. You can't be sure what it is, but you know that if you want to get home, you've got to walk past it.

If you make up your mind that it's a snake and that you'll be killed if you try to get past it, you'll avoid it and you'll never get home. You'll turn around and try to walk the other way. If you make up your mind it's a coil of rope, you'll try to walk past it but not without doubts, fears that you are wrong. So you'll try to get past it, but the fear of dying will mean you can't get around it, you'll get unnerved and give up your plan.

But there is a solution.

You can wait until dawn, and the light."