Drinking, Driving, and Overpacked Suitcases: What's The Word For That?

*Trigger warning-suicidal ideation

In early 2020 I was driving across the Tennessee River and considered taking a hard right turn, down into nothingness.

The specificity with which I considered the events playing out is what really scared me. I pictured my Toyota sedan midair, suspended briefly between here and there, a final image of chaos burned into my family’s psyche forever. I imagined the horrified onlookers trying to make sense of what they were seeing and my little sister picking up the phone to get the news that would haunt her for a lifetime. I wandered through this nightmare to the other side of the bridge and cried myself to sleep when I got home. Two weeks later I decided that I would never drink alcohol again and began the journey that would lead me here to you, alive to write this alternative ending.

When we talk about alcohol and the destruction it can cause in a life, we often focus on the tangible. We see the person, hands shaking, walking into a liquor store at eight in the morning to buy a bottle that will be drained by lunchtime. We look at a woman, void of her faculties, spinning into madness on a downtown street, and sigh, what a shame.

It’s easy for us to understand what hardcore addiction looks like. It’s the version of the story we’ve seen told in countless cautionary tales, the characters portrayed in movies, the reality television shows where heartbroken families plead with their daughter or sister or wife to choose life over death. We get that. We have a file for that.

What we’ve been missing for far too long is nuance. How do we measure the unseeable pain, the hidden cost of drinking as a survival tactic?

For me, alcohol fueled a slow descent into apathy. Slowly but steadily, the color drained from my world and the sky, the river, and the earth—a seamless blend of gray. The subtlety of my struggle made it nearly impossible for anyone around me to name it. My drunken outbursts labeled attention grabs, my impulsive behavior—selfish. Two things can be true at once. I was most certainly operating in service of self-preservation at all times, but it wasn’t as it seemed.

What was interpreted as egocentric was often masochistic—behavior fueled by shame and the belief that an unfiltered or honest version of myself would repel love, or, at the very least, would prove to be too much for anyone’s liking. It was this constant failure to launch, the never-revealing the full breadth of my existence, that kept me reaching for something I hoped might.

I’d be lying if I claimed to fully understand the mentality of that girl, the one who thought drunk would lead her to seen, but I have found a way of loving her, even forgiving her.

It’s what alcohol does to the mind and spirit that numbers and enzyme levels and statistics can’t quantify or offer black and white labels for. The dullness that begins to blanket one’s life after years of attempts to wash away the worst parts of themselves is hard to define. We don’t have language for that. We call it depression, sure, or anxiety, or PTSD—we want to give explanation to the sadness without talking about the sadness.

My sadness started when I was a child, before escaping into a bottle of white was an option on the table. I felt things. Big things. I noticed every time one of the grown-ups seemed to be hiding something or saying something without saying it. I absorbed energies from places I had no choice in going to. I observed the ways adults would perform happiness or contentment or comfort instead of acknowledging pain. I learned that there were some things we weren’t allowed to say, some things no one wanted to hear. There were bad things and there were good things, no one had the capacity for our bad things.

As I got older, accumulating bad things, I found it harder to keep them to myself than the adults who raised me. It felt impossible to walk around with all this heavy luggage but I’d been taught that it was all mine to carry. There was no where I could sit it down, no polite or natural way to unload some of my burden. With my hands and heart and brain and body and mouth full…I had to find a way to make space.

Alcohol and weed and some other drugs became a way to gain a little wiggle room.

For an hour, for a night, for a weekend—I could open the valve and release a bit of pressure. Momentary forgetfulness became the only tenable solution. If I couldn’t get rid of the shit, maybe I could avoid remembering it for a while. Sometimes, after a few drinks, the shit would come raging out of me and that felt good, too. The next morning, regretful and embarrassed, I’d shove the shit back where it belonged. It hadn’t been expelled, just rearranged.

The shit still existed.

Bad things don’t go away, they just find new corners to burrow into. Like a game of whack-a-mole, shoving pain into an overstuffed closet only ensures it’ll pop out of some other door, eventually.

Do we still call this addiction? Do we still reduce a person’s entirety of experience and longing and heavy luggage to the actions they take to survive it?

I am not surprised that my long-running production of everything’s fine ended with a serious consideration of plunging my car into the Tennessee River—it’s inhumane to expect a woman to continue on with that much weight. I’m also not surprised it took me as long as it did to come to the realization that drinking was making it all so much worse. We don’t have a word for that.

Alcohol is for everyone and only those with obvious and outwardly destructive relationships with it should refrain from imbibing—that’s what our culture would like us to accept. If you’re a sophisticated, ambitious, and modern woman looking to make her mark in the world then don’t get caught without your evergreen accessory. How are we supposed to recognize toxicity when it’s sold as freedom?

How are we supposed to keep the other women from driving off the bridges if we don’t see them at the liquor store when it opens in the morning? If their bad things are being lugged around in secret, too? When will we acknowledge that shame is the real generational curse, not alcoholism? When there is no language for a person whose drinking doesn’t fit into a category, no tidy box to place their pain, that person has no choice but to carry it with them.

Getting sober has opened the door to the place I can lay down some of my shit for good. Only in brutal awareness and raw clarity have I found some sustainable relief. The apathy that had me eyeing the hard edge of I-40 has been transformed into a desperate desire to understand myself, even if no one else plays along. I cannot go on living like an emotional nomad. I have to build a respectable home for these mementos and souvenirs that a girl simply cannot pack every time she leaves the house. I watched so many women before me struggle to zip-shut their overstuffed suitcases—it stops with me.

I’d like to think that every time I pull something wretched out of my bag, even if it only elicits shrieks of horror, it liberates something in my mother and hers before her. Every time I choose to show and tell instead of drink and bury—an angel gets her wings.

We should be asking what are you trying to free yourself of when you drink two bottles of sauvignon blanc not why can’t you stop?

Maybe we should ask what are you trying to lay down?