Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
I am 19. I try to open my eyes but they feel like they have lead weights on them. When I do finally haul them open I have a moment of absolute confusion. My brain can’t make sense of what I’m looking at. I feel fuzzy, the edges of the room around me softly blurred. I hear a voice asking me if I know where I am and somehow I do. ‘I’m in hospital’, I reply, then the darkness swallows me whole again. I am in hospital because I fell down the stairs. I fell down the stairs because I was drunk.
I could have stopped drinking then, but I didn’t.
I am 22. In my own bed, alone. I feel completely poisoned by the effects of the night before. My mouth is like sandpaper and I can still taste cheap white wine. My stomach roils and an ever increasingly insistent headache is marching through my skull. And worse, I know something’s really wrong. I know I did something last night. It takes a while for the memories to come and explain the paralysing sense of dread I have all over me. A conversation with a colleague, saying something insulting about his girlfriend. Saying ha ha I’m only joking but somehow registering even through my drunken haze that he was not laughing. Not even close. And then dancing, feeling free and beautiful but looking anything but, with an audience of the partners of my law firm, looking on with a mixture of concern and distaste. I want to put the covers over my head and stay for ever. But I have to get up and go to work.
I could have stopped drinking then, but I didn’t.
I am 26. I’m sitting on the hard and dirty ground by a bus stop in South East London, curled up with my head on my knees. My mind is doing everything it can to hide from what has just happened to me. Building walls it will take over a decade to even begin to dismantle. Still drunk and stumbling as I get on the bus, the evidence of my inebriation bolstering the internal voice, which is saying ‘your fault, your fault, your fault’ over and over again, Handmaid’s Tale style. I get home and crawl into bed, overwhelmed with gratitude for the promise of temporary oblivion. The next day I go out in my lunch hour, alone, and buy the morning after pill. I don’t mention what happened to another soul until two years later.
I could have stopped drinking then, but I didn’t.
I am 30. Waking up on the second day of my 31st year of life. I am in a rented holiday house on the Cumbrian coast. My boyfriend, who would become my husband, is next to me and all my very best friends are in the rooms around us. The house bears witness to a truly awesome party. Bottles, glasses, dirty plates, all manner of fancy dress paraphernalia. overflowing ashtrays and discarded CDs litter every possible surface. My bedroom floor is covered in cards, presents and wrapping paper. But I am not feeling loved and grateful. I am so paralysed by anxiety, sickness and a deep shapeless sadness that I can hardly move. Later my friends leave and my parents arrive to spend the final night at the house with us. I want to crawl into my mum’s arms and weep like a toddler, but I don’t. That evening we go and walk round a National Trust garden which is filled with multicoloured lights. It is something simple, pure and beautiful and I feel like I don’t deserve it.
I could have stopped drinking then, but I didn’t.
I am 35. Newly engaged and waking up after the wedding of one of my very best friends. Not a partner in crime though, not someone who drinks like me. A work friend, someone who knows and likes sober me. I stumble to the bathroom through a hungover fog and physically recoil to see a patch of bright red vomit on the bathroom floor. It doesn’t even occur to me to wonder if my fiancé was responsible for it, even though I have absolutely no memory of being sick myself. I know. As I fall to my knees and begin to clean it up, tears of self pity forming in my eyes, the few memories available to me of the night before start to crawl back. I feel sickness rising again and want to somehow sink through the floor and disappear. The shame is suffocating. We leave without saying goodbye to the newly weds and I have to ask my fiancé to stop the car from me to be sick before we’ve even left the grounds of the wedding venue.
I could have stopped drinking then, but I didn’t.
I am still 35. I know I need to stop drinking. I am lying in a freshly decorated bedroom, the finishing touches less than 24 hours old. I should be at work but I had to call in sick. I’m married but not pregnant. Again. I’m deeply in grief from an early miscarriage and in the first day of another unwanted period. Another month to wait. Another week of feeling like I’m going through the miscarriage all over again. Lonely in my marriage although the ink is barely dry on my marriage certificate. Sick, again. Poisoned, again. So, so tired. And I know I need to stop drinking.
I could have stopped drinking then, but I didn’t.
I am 40. I feel the familiar stickiness in my eyes of having slept in my contact lenses. My body aches from sleeping on the sofa. I look down and simultaneously feel the heat of shame and the cold of fear to see a half empty wine glass, smudged with fingerprints, on the floor next to me. This is the thing. The thing I said I would never do. Sit downstairs alone, drinking at 2am, while my daughters slept above me. I rush to hide the evidence but I know I’ll never be able to hide this from myself. After a few fitful hours sleep in bed I am woken by my nine month old daughter. She‘s hungry and I’ve forgotten to get her expressed milk out of the freezer. While I feed her, the guilt twisting up my insides so much it’s almost physically painful, I cry silently, because I don’t want my husband to wake up.
This was how I celebrated my 40th birthday. And this was when I stopped drinking.
Today I am 43. My life is not perfect. But I was woken up today by that same daughter, now four, climbing into my bed, squeezing herself between me and her six year old sister while our cat let us fight over who got to pet him first. Gone are the drink problem, the lonely marriage, the guilt, the shame, the poison, the anxiety, the regret, the fear, the ever increasing sense that I was wasting my life.
In their place I have myself back. I have trust, I have peace, I have gratitude.
I have that more than anything. I have so much gratitude for finally walking through the door to sobriety, which was calling me for so long, and for what I found on the other side.
I know the door seems terrifying when you don’t know what’s behind it. But don’t miss another opportunity to walk through. Trust me, trust everyone who is shouting back from the other side. You have nothing to fear. I don’t waste time with regret but I do wonder sometimes what my life would have looked like if I’d gone through sooner. It is my mission with my writing to help create a world where one day people feel able to go through sooner.
Because what lies on the other side is good, and true, and beautiful. And you all deserve to get there as soon as you can.
Lots of love
Julia xx
