“Tell Me Twice”
All stories are shared with permission from the subject
Identifying features are blacked out for confidentiality
The most profound messages are just noise when you don’t listen to them.
This is the story of psychological pain drowned in alcohol.
Never being the one to let the world dictate his future, he would push through his trials. White-knuckling and head down, he plowed his way through school, to find himself deploying with the Army. Never to shy away, he greeted the adventure with a smile and humor, never shirking at the burden placed on his young adult shoulders.
Packing for a yearlong deployment away from everything you know is daunting. He would pack his uniform, gear, and his weapon. The heaviest time, however, would be the pain of his upbringing that he dragged with him.
Soldier’s carry a lot, but the weight of years of sadness can bring any Soldier to their knees.
“And that’s why I drank” He told me when we talked about his recovery from alcohol. “It made the pain go away”
”Every time I drank, I did it with the intention of getting drunk, because that was the only time it was finally gone”
On the outside, He would continue to present his typical self: Happy, funny, and confident. However, the weight he continued to drag around would haunt him.
When we are hurting, its human nature to seek relief. But when we don’t have people we can trust, be it through our upbringing or our actions, we turn to the quickest alternatives.
The problem with alcohol is that it works (In the short term). The problem with alcohol, is that I’d does not work (in the long term).
Life loses meaning when it is fused with alcohol. The physiological impact of the depressant combined with the psychological influence of cognitive dissonance, rapidly changes our world to one that loses it’s beauty. The world is almost black and white.
That’s the phenomena of hiding from our demons. It’s almost counterintuitive. When we avoid physical pain, we are safe – we can grow. However, The more we avoid emotional pain, the weaker our minds become, we shrink.
He would Soldier on, as he always has. The deployment ended and he would move into the next phase of life, but not by choice.
Fatherhood came out of nowhere. “I don’t even remember really making love to her”, as a child was conceived while drunk. “But I will step up and be a father”.
Like most of us, we all look for a partner that we can rely on. Falling in and out of love is one of the most challenging experiences we have on this earth. The heartbreak of relationships ending, make the relationship with the bottle look that much more appealing. At the very least, the drink would always be there. “I couldn’t take the heartbreak. I couldn’t take the pain anymore.” The more he suffered, the more he drank. The more he drank, the more he damaged his relationships.
This would continue, until the universe sent him a second message. “You’re not going to believe it, but I have a son.” “It’s whack though, because I don’t feel afraid. Because, in a weird way, I feel like the universe is tying to speak to me, trying to stop me from doing something terrible”
“So I just quit drinking”
People who quit an addictive behavior cold turkey can only do it with their willpower. At some point, something in their lives is much more important that hiding from pain and drowning in drugs or alcohol.
“It’s wild, I feel like I have a story now. I want to go into the world and help people out.”
We all have pain, and we have all been hurt. But we have the power to forgive.
“That’s what I have done.” He said.
“I have forgiven the people that hurt me and I genuinely want them to be happy.”
That is when everything changed. “That’s when the pain went away”.
I think we can all relate to him on what he experienced.
Every person in this world wants to be loved unconditionally. We all have been betrayed. And we all do things to avoid pain.
Whether it is drinking, drugs, sex, lying, isolating, fighting, or (any behavior here), we all do things because underneath it all, we are deeply hurting. And we all choose to avoid the reality that, at some point, we must accept our experiences, and make an effective choice on how to move forward.
“Listen to the promptings of the world” He said. “Because I wonder where I would be if I listened the first time.”
All stories are shared with permission from the subject
Identifying features are blacked out for confidentiality