You Deserve It

Some people out there use alcohol and other drugs like a nice sort of vacation getaway, a way to make an otherwise-ok mental existence temporarily more interesting. These are the kind of people who accidentally forget to finish their drinks, the kind who leave a third of a beer at the bar, the people who pour half a glass of wine down the sink.

The rest of us use our drug(s) of choice as an escape, a reliable relief from a mental existence that under uninfluenced circumstances is borderline intolerable.

Sometimes the line between fun and relief can be quite blurry, given alcohol’s close associations with images of relaxation - wine in the bath, margaritas at the beach, beer at the game, shots at the party. It’s woven its way into our messages and stories about self-care - it’s five-o’clock somewhere (or it’s wine-o’clock now), so go ahead and live a little. You work hard and deal with a lot, and you deserve it.

That message of deserving alcohol was a part of what kept me drunk for a long time, and it’s something I struggled with a lot in my earlier sobriety. A lot of the time it was’t an issue since my self-esteem was in the toilet and I would often assert that I didn’t deserve anything, which wasn’t true but met some need of mine for power and security. When I did feel okay about myself, the thought did pop up from time to time: why don’t I deserve to have the same fun that everyone else has with alcohol? Why do I have to miss out?

Of course, being an alcoholic, “fun” with alcohol would get very chaotic very quickly, and I would have no guarantee of when I would stop drinking and what would happen while I was drunk. Drinking would mean a whole lot of consequences that I couldn’t predict, almost certainly bad - I never once woke up from a bender with better relationships and more money - and ultimately had to ask if I thought I deserved those consequences too. Did I deserve another huge hangover? More withdrawals? More anger and confusion and pain in my life and in the lives of those connected to me?

Over time, the advantages of sobriety started to add up - I could start to assert that I deserved to know myself as stable and reliable and connected to the people around me, that I deserved to have enough money to feel secure, that I deserved to sleep through the night and wake up clear-headed without wondering what the hell happened last night.

As things proceeded even further, the very language of “deserving” started to look differently to me - my drunk life had seen me swing through many extremes of what I thought I deserved, oscillating rapidly between grandiosity and self-loathing before my self-esteem finally settled all the way down at the bottom. My life was dominated by a voice that told me that I wasn’t enough, that I would never be enough, and that everything bad that happened in my life was proof of that - I drank to get away from that voice, to turn it off for a little while, and when I finally stopped drinking I thought that would mean surrendering to it completely. Instead, sobriety has given me the opportunity to get beyond that voice entirely, to find a new way of meeting my needs that doesn’t involve beating myself up and sitting in cruel judgement of who I am and what I’ve done. It doesn’t mean stasis, but it does mean acceptance, and even peace. I don’t have that kind of serenity always, but when I do it makes it all worth it - including all of the torment I went through to get here.