WHAT THE TRUTH WILL COST YOU

The turbulence on the plane is setting off alarm bells throughout my already fried nervous system. I had woken up that morning with my first hangover in nearly a month, yet I'd somehow already forgotten about the vice-like grip of morning anxiety, the fuzzy replay of the events from the night before, and the hyper-vigilant disposal of the evidence that I had once again taken it too far.

The hiding. The secrets. The pretending. The lies.

The spinning, the aching, the vomit, the blood.

The blood on your hands.

The blood on the floor.

The shame. The shame. The shame.

My mother's voice re-emerged in my ear.

“You don’t have to do this forever, Christina.”

But I don’t know how to do all this without it.

I don’t know if I can stop.

It was the truth.

The same truth that began as a whisper two years prior when my daughter got sick, and one glass of wine turned into three and then four. A truth that got louder the deeper I got into my healing work and the safer I felt inside my skin.

And for me, drinking and the truth have always gone hand in hand because, for most of my life, it was the only way I could touch it.

When I reached a buzz that turned the volume down on my overstimulated ADHD brain just enough to manage the monotony and mental load of motherhood. When I drank enough to release the anger and rage I felt over something that had hurt me that I could never confront sober. When it numbed me, even temporarily, from the soul-crushing loneliness of feeling misunderstood so often by everyone around me.

For so long, drinking was the only thing that could cut through my dissociation to reconnect me back to my body.

It was my best friend, my most trusted confidant—the one thing I could always count on.

It wrapped its arms around me as I stood on the pulpit delivering my best friend's eulogy while the sound of my mother's manic sobs shook the entire church. It softened the blows of rejection every time I tried to share the truth about how I felt with someone, and they quite literally turned the boat around, stopped speaking to me, or left me alone in my pain.

It put enough distance between me and the revelation that my first husband and our entire marriage was a lie so that I could show up and function for my child. It lubricated the hopelessness I felt every time my mom went back into the hospital, or I went on another date that made me feel utterly alone in the world, or I peed on another stick that proved that my body was incapable of doing the one thing women’s bodies were created to do. It freed me from all the loss, grief, and trauma for one f*cking minute because no one should have to shoulder THAT much pain and suffering alone.

And for a really long time, it served me - my God, did it serve me.

It allowed me to touch the truth when living it was not an option.

It was an escape from a life built on a lie when that lie was the only place I had to go.

One of Buddhism's most famous teachings is the Parable of the Raft. It begins with a man walking through the woods who stumbles across a river. The side of the river on which he stands comes with great risk and uncertainty, and across the river is the safety he so desperately desires. So, the man gathers logs, trees, and branches to build himself a raft to cross the river safely.

The Buddha then asks, “What should the man now do?”

“He would drop the raft because he no longer needs it.”

“What he would not do, thinking about how useful it had been, is to load it on his shoulders and continue the journey with the raft on his back.”

Alcohol was the raft I had used to swim to the other side of the shore, where I finally found the safety and security I needed to face my past and heal.

Alcohol wasn’t “my thing”—my trauma was “my thing”—but I had to learn how to sit with the same stress, pain, and loss that was at one time so far beyond my body’s ability to cope that my brain quite literally checked out before I could set down my raft. I had to learn how to stay inside of my body and my memory no matter what fell out of the sky before I could even recognize that the same raft that had once saved my life had transformed into a 1000 lb boulder that was crushing me.

Once I realized that raft was no longer serving me, I tried to set it down, but I wasn’t willing to let go of all the people, places, and things that would wash away with it. Losses have always been a slippery slope for me, and loneliness even more so. Feeling abandoned was the ultimate slippery slope for me, so it's no surprise that trying to set down so much all at once triggered a tidal wave of loneliness and abandonment that brought all my wounded parts and past traumas to the surface.

My body remembered the hopelessness and powerlessness it experienced the last time it faced such loss, loneliness, and abandonment, which caused the wounded child inside of me to start screaming that the pain was too much—that we couldn’t do it alone—that we needed to pull the release valve to escape.

For weeks, I tried to convince my six-year-old self that we were safe now - that we weren’t being abandoned - that we could do this. But when my daughter with PANDAS started to flare five days into my sobriety, my entire nervous system collapsed.

There was no convincing my brain it was safe to trust my newly sober body while in hypervigilant overdrive trying to protect my daughter. I spent every waking hour of my first 30 days of sobriety fighting off intrusive thoughts, waves of dread, and feelings of impending doom that had taken hold of my mind.

My fight-or-flight response pumped so much cortisol throughout my veins that the only way I could metabolize the constant panic was to run and dance until every bone in my body throbbed and ached. I battled horrific insomnia for the first time in my life and trembled through what little sleep I did get.

I had battled anxiety and panic attacks in my twenties and again post-partum, but I had never really struggled with my mental health as a mother.

While the anxiety and panic attacks were debilitating, by far the hardest part of getting sober was not being able to show up for my daughters anywhere near the capacity I always had and the horrific shame and terror I felt not knowing if or when I would be able to again.

The confusion I saw in my daughter’s eyes as I struggled my first few weeks of sobriety sent me spiraling into flashbacks from when I was their age and left alone to make sense of why my mother kept getting “sick” and disappearing. I suddenly understood the horrific shame my mother felt every time she came down from a manic episode and had to face the fear and hurt in my eyes, knowing full well that she was incapable of making a promise that it would never happen again.

I thought about how she’d sob and plead and beg me to forgive her and how, by the time I was my daughter's age, I had already decided she was no longer safe and recoiled from her touch. I watched my daughters play from my bedroom window and wondered if I could have found the strength to pick up all my broken pieces if I had been locked up in a padded room alone.

I thought about how my mother suffered and battled to the bitter end to free me from the regret and remorse she carried her entire life because she could never forgive herself for her own mother’s suicide. I thought about how desperately she wanted me to understand and validate her pain and how I was never able to sit with it long enough to really “get it” because, deep down, I always believed it was my fault.

It has been excruciatingly painful to finally face the tragic reality that my mother fought her entire life to heal and never got better and that I never gave her the compassion she needed most from me while she was still alive.

But if sobriety has taught me anything, it is that it is never too late to make amends—and so my sobriety is my living amends to my mother, who only wanted one thing in this life.…

FOR ME TO BE FREE.

Today marks my 60th day of sobriety.

Sixty days of finally facing my own truth.

Sixty days of feeling the deepest pain and grief I have ever felt.

Sixty days of giving myself permission to fall apart.

Sixty days of surrender and asking for help.

Sixty days of letting go of so much I thought I couldn’t live without.

Sixty days of learning how to love the most broken and shameful parts of myself.

Sixty days of reminding myself every moment of every single day that this is what it costs to be free.

How blessed are we who get the chance to recover - to change - to get better?

How lucky are we that we get to be free?

I’m eternally grateful to all of those who have carried me through the last sixty days.

Grateful. Humbled. Thank you.