Drinking At Dawn

Watching the sun rise has always been a terrible experience for me. Not just “terrible” in the sense of “really really bad” but also in the sense of “there is some actual terror present for me right now”.

I want to acknowledge that it certainly isn’t this way for everybody. There is a species of baffling, incomprehensible freaks who wake up before dawn spontaneously, greeting the sunrise with a soft smile and a hot cup of coffee or tea, grateful for the full day of meaningful connection and contribution ahead of them.

Those people are aliens as far as I’m concerned. For me, seeing the sun slither over the horizon means one of two things: I woke up way too early with a pop of panic or I didn’t actually sleep at all. Waking up at dawn doesn’t happen to me often anymore, but when it does happen it reminds me of the period of my life when waking up like that would happen quite a lot, back when drinking alcohol was the only consistently soothing thing in my life.

You see, alcohol wears off, unfortunately. When it does wear off then the anxiety and the anxious thoughts I’d been suppressing with alcohol came roaring back too, usually worse and more intense than before. When I was lucky enough to be able to pass out from drinking there would still be a time a few hours afterwards when the alcohol would wear off enough for the anxiety to wake me up. If it was early enough in the night then I could probably then drink enough to put myself down again, but if it was anywhere near sunrise then the old circadian rhythms kicked in and I’d get to start my day with an ever-worsening hangover.

Hangovers were common, but those hangovers were the worst - the kind where I was still half drunk and had to start trying to fulfill my commitments while the alcohol wore off, the pleasant fuzziness turning into an aching fuzziness and a headache and a stomachache and an overwhelming sense of dread about how bad I felt and how as time went by I’d be guaranteed to keep feeling worse and worse and worse.

I found that one quick trick for dealing with those hangovers was to simply not stop drinking, to wake up and roll over and take another deep pull from the bottle, delaying and deferring the hangover for as long as I could. This worked for a while, but it really made my tolerance kick in to high gear, so eventually it became the case that no amount of alcohol could actually knock me out. I wound up spending my nights trying and failing to drink myself to sleep.

That was how the final, brutal phase of my alcoholism began, stumbling into a state of anxiety so intense that no amount of alcohol could put me to rest. Sleep slipped completely out of my control, along with almost everything else about my life. Nights became a thing that brought a different kind of relief - not true rest, but a sort of suspension of the awareness of the passage of time, a feeling of stepping outside of normal social reality with all of its pressures and pains. 10:00PM looked the same outside as 4:00AM, and as long as the sun stayed down then they felt the same too. Nighttime generally meant that everybody else was asleep, and if they were asleep then they couldn’t be expecting anything of me. I can’t know myself as a disappointing source of pain for people if those people are unconscious. During that time I can drink as much as I want, since for at least the next few hours I have no obligations to fail.

The coming of dawn, of course, would shatter that temporary fantasy. The chirping of birds, the bluish tinge that appears around the corners of the curtains, the car doors slamming as early risers drove off to report for work - it all would signal to me that my wretched reverie was once again at an end. People would be waking up, some people would be thinking about me, some people would be looking for me. I didn’t want anybody to see me like this. If I knew myself better than anyone else did, and if I recoiled from myself with disgust, then everyone else would inevitably recoil from me too, and they would injure me as they left. But you can’t reject me if I disappear.

As I write this I’ve been sober for almost four and a half years; I’ve spent thousands of hours talking about experiences and feelings like the ones I’ve described here, and thousands more listening to other people describe comparable experiences and feelings of their own. It has been an extraordinary journey of self-integration - I have worked hard on developing love and compassion for the terrified parts of me that I tried and failed to drown in alcohol for such a long time. I’ve come a long way, far enough that I can at least serve as a source of healing and growth for others who relate to me and who ask me to share what I’ve learned over the years. The pain and shame and outright terror that I’ve felt have become something I can talk about freely, without feeling like there’s something wrong with me on account of my having had those experiences. In fact, the feelings and experiences that I thought would drive people away from me have actually brought people closer.

The one dark experience that I haven’t been able to transform has been the experience of waking up with a jolt in the very early morning, hearing and seeing the signs of a new day starting and having it all impact me like a punch. My life is better now, more stable, more supported; I can acknowledge the pain and disappointment I cause and even maybe set it right. I know myself as more than just a source of pain and disappointment - indeed, pain and disappointment no longer the words that define me. I can define myself with whatever words I want. But those moments, first thing in the morning, of pure disorientation - that split second of awareness before I remember where I am and what I’ve chosen to become - those moments are still there, always available for me, the living ghost of a time long past, a reminder of what life could be like again.

I’ve learned that I can live with those moments, at least as long as I have a foundation of support in my life. But those moments aren’t something I’ve tackled directly. I figure the best way to bring transformation to something is to start talking about it.