Demon Slaying

A trace of blood is a patchy veneer,

That is laced on the stagnant water,

The smell is a crime on the still, tepid air,

The scavenging crows give no quarter.

The world has turned cold,

And the voices of old,

Have come home from the darkened sea.

And their music is fear,

In my terrified ear,

As this hell descends upon me.

I run for the door,

Feeling judged ever more,

As those spirits of darkness abound.

And the raven’s black gore,

Drips with glee to my floor,

And I slip in this war,

To the ground.

I scramble my wits,

In a handful of bits,

And I breathe and I gather my steel.

My rapier must strike,

To my left, and my right,

To bring this here ghost to my heel.

But there can be no cut,

As I thrust to his gut,

And my blade is turned like a wheel.

My sword is no more,

Merely dust on the floor,

As his sick will is turned on my steel.

I am left without weapon,

Nor a sure foot to step on,

And my spirit bereft of belief,

And the demon I feared,

Has approached, and then neared,

And my flesh is now meat for his teeth.

I can hear the dead drowning,

In his mouth, and his frowning,

Is creating the hell I must suffer,

And his face is a twisted,

Corrupt and clench-fisted,

Disease that gets sicker and rougher.

Yet I feel there must be,

Some divine victory,

As the evil embraces my soul,

And the love that abides,

A great force from inside,

Comes to aid, and my arm sees it’s goal.

There is screaming and dying,

A life that is flying,

From the demon as he comes for my grace,

And my sword arm is swift,

With a sickening gift,

And the wrongness is gone from this place.

For there can be no fear,

When the darkness draws near,

If you stand true and do not give ground,

For when all things are weighted,

There is nothing more fated,

Than a man with his faith newly found.

A Normal Lyfe

The sun is shining brightly today. I had a coffee outside with some friends in AA. We spoke about normal things – what we had been up to, how we are feeling, and what the rest of this glorious, sunny weekend holds for us. We spoke of what our respective work lives are like and just chatted about the usual stuff.

As I cycled back to my house it occurred to me how grateful I am for the fellowship I had experienced this morning. I was feeling good and my sense of recovery and peace was at the fore. As usual, I started to analyse these feelings and realised how lucky I am to be in AA.

In a relatively short space of time, with the help of my fellow alcoholics, and the twelve steps, I have come to be profoundly grateful for the mundane things in life. I have a roof over my head, food in my belly, a career and a growing bond with my daughter – things that most people would take for granted. For me these things are an obvious blessing now, having been through the horrendous rigours of years of drinking. I feel now that, if anything I can have a far greater appreciation of my ‘normal’ life than I may have had if I hadn’t been an alcoholic. This is a far cry from the fantasising man, who yearned for the grandiose, far-fetched successes, and unwarranted accolades and gifts of life; and who eventually came to AA with nothing but fear and a wretched sense of hopelessness. I am happy to just have the basics in life, to feel at peace some of the time; to have a decent place to live and a job to go to; to have a life that is moving forward, and to sit with my friends in the sun chatting about nothing very much.

I have learned through these incredible people and the programme of living that they have shown me that happiness must come from within – from the knowledge that I am of use, and that I may be able to help someone; from accepting that I am who, and where I am, and thereby being at peace with those things. I have little, if any control over other people and the world around me, and it is far easier and painless to just enjoy the simple things I ignored whilst in drink, and let go of the ideas of the Holy Grail and Golden Fleece. 

From Within, Or Without?

I believe I am better today because I have God in my life. When I was drinking I was full of fear, frustration, anger and loneliness. I believe I drank to extreme because I was looking for a way to connect with people and to alleviate my fear. After a while this self-medicating stopped working and instead of alleviating my symptoms, it exacerbated them powerfully. Some people in AA taught me to find a way of being willing to believe in a concept of God. I do not know what this God concept is. I just opened myself to the idea of a power greater than myself. I started to pray daily, and with time, my prayers became steadily more earnest. This earnestness in prayer is directly proportional to the benefits I receive in the way I feel generally. I cannot explain how this works or describe my concept of God. I know only that if I pray daily and earnestly, I no longer feel fear, anger, loneliness or frustration in the same spirit crushing way I did when I was an atheist and drinker.

This is a simple and fundamental part of my daily routine and action, and I still wonder at it’s mechanism. It is, if anything, more a mystery to me now than when I was ill. The difference now, is that I do not feel the need to explain, debate or analyse it. It is sufficient to feel the results of it and to be profoundly grateful for the relief from those hideous symptoms I have described.

I can be at comparative ease knowing that if I do the right things - simple things on a daily basis - I will be okay. I will not have to be scared or confused, and I can live in gratitude and acceptance, at least to the extent to which a person should feel he can reasonably expect, and often far beyond that.

My Alcoholism

As far back as I can remember I have been afraid. I cannot pinpoint a catalyst, continuing experience, or traumatic event for this fear, rather I believe it to be born of an innate hypersensitivity that makes me feel raw to all the stimuli in my life. I believe that I was born with this sensitivity as it has, as far as I can tell, always resided within me, and from the surface to the core of my character. In other words, it is a conscious quality that I can constantly experience, and it runs throughout my personality all the way through to my sub-conscious. I run on fear. It is a defining quality of my self.

As a young boy I can remember being afraid of everything. I was afraid of people, and of being alone; afraid of new things and old; afraid of day and night; afraid of everything, and of nothing; a crippling, constant and therefore deniable fear. I say deniable because if you have always known something since the day you were born, it is seemingly normal. I assumed, especially in my younger years, that everyone felt the same way as I did. That you too went around dealing with insurmountable emotional challenges on an hourly basis as well. That it was normal to be scared of the house I lived in, talking to another human being, or having an incomprehension of any kind of long term peace. Of course I am learning (better late than never) that this is not a normal way to perceive life, and could even be described as a grave disability.

This all-pervading fear has governed and shaped my development from day one. It has been instrumental in making me frightened of everything as a child, angry as a young adult, and desperate in my recent years.

At about the age of thirteen, I discovered drinking. What relief! What a blessing! What an amazing and beautiful thing to feel free at last. This was the medicine I had needed all this time. A tonic, a treasure, a path to normality! I seized this chance for peace with both hands and gripped like an infant to it's mother. With a few glasses of this stuff, the fear was gone. Not only that but a total reversal of my feelings came with it. I was confident, funny, cool, sexy. And it wasn't just me that noticed this; others did too. I remember vividly people I respected and lauded telling me what an incredible person I was at parties and other times too. The effect was so powerful that it lasted into my sober hours although God knows there were to be few enough of those over the next twenty years.

After I left school I became a brash, confident and gregarious man of some considerable popularity (and not inconsiderable anger, which was overshadowed by my new found positivity). I was the life and soul. I was told by people I admired how amazing I was and how people lit up when I entered a room. My ego soared, but the fear was still in me, deep down, and I needed alcohol to keep it at bay and so I drank as often as I could, and to shocking excess without exception. This worked amazingly well for me for some years to come. Work hard, play hard. Always the last man standing. I didn't care about sleep or keeping the admittedly poor jobs I gained, and why should I? I was happy. I had a party to go to every few days and was never sober long enough to let my real feelings take hold. Of course I didn't realise this at the time; I just thought I was enjoying my younger years. I thought I was cool and that I was taking life by it's balls and shaking every last drop of good experience out of it. The reality is actually very different. My bright outlook and supposedly healthy appetite for life would not have lasted a day had I stayed sober long enough to deal with the real person inside me. It would have come crashing down around me and I would have been right back where I started. 
                  

Towards the end of my twenties, things began to change. You can only run away from yourself for so long before you catch up with yourself, and eventually the fear and hypersensitivity began to manifest in me once again. Ordinary, everyday experiences would terrify or bewilder me, and it became apparent to others that my drinking was unhealthy. This was not something I was completely blind to, but it was easily explained away and excused by the undeniable history of alcohol being my friend, and of course, my fear would dictate that I could easily believe any excuse, regardless of how insane, to have another drink. This was not so bad at first, but my illness very quickly exacerbated and I became a thief, an unpleasant and offensive drunk, and an inveterate liar when drinking. Even this shameful behaviour, I could surprisingly easily ignore or excuse. It had become simply impossible to even imagine a few days without a drink, and a lifetime of sobriety so inconceivable that I would have believed that I was an astronaut or the heavyweight champion of the world, before the notion of abstinence made any sense to me whatsoever.

I could not sit with any amount of pain, no matter how mundane the cause, without a drink. If I was down, I drank. If I was up, I drank. If I was bored, I drank. There was always an excuse because I hated myself, and inside I cursed myself because I started realising what a coward I was, and how weak. This self hatred was sub-conscious at first and remained that way until very recently. It stopped me from achieving anything from the great opportunities for happiness that I had garnered. I failed spectacularly at my career, and my relationships, despite considering myself to be a smart, hard working, talented nurse, and a loving, compassionate and considerate man. I now know that I am all those things, but my deep seated self loathing had dictated that I get very drunk at precisely the moment that it was imperative that I didn't, and ruin everything that was most important to me. Self sabotage they call it, and looking back, I can see an exceptional talent for deliberately getting wasted over a period of days exactly when I should have made a special effort to be sober. It is these kind of insights that I am now using to recover and, strange as it may seem, they always come as a complete shock. I am often confounded now, by the realisation that I was deliberately hurting myself terribly for years.

My alcoholism is born of fear; and fear, of selfishness.  I am sure you are aware that 'selfishness' is a term with very negative connotations, but I do not want to talk about it in those terms. I believe that selfishness is inherent in all of us, and the prime motivator in our existence, whether we like it or not. It is a basic facet of humanity and neither here nor there. But it is a vicious cross to bear when taken to the extremes that I took it to. I have learnt since going to AA that my life was run on self and that on a fundamental level, I was obsessed by my self to such an extent that I could not be caring of others in the way a normal, emotionally balanced individual would. I believe that this fear based selfishness had left me spiritually bereft. If spirituality is a way of living that is concerned with the happiness and health of others, a giving of the spirit, which I believe it is, then I must have run out of spirituality quite quickly once I got to the point that I could think only of drinking to help myself. It has taken me a while to get to grips with this idea, as I came into AA an atheist, and the nature of my illness dictates that I am too afraid to let go of the idea that I can still have a drink. This idea is still with me and I believe it always will be, but I am learning how to treat it. It is a daily treatment that includes lots of prayer and meditation, and being of use to other people, and particularly alcoholics. There are a lot of contradictions in this programme; for example, the idea is to be rid of my self and hand it over to my higher power, but the only reason I practice the programme is to help myself, and I have already touched on the nature of selfishness, so it doesn't quite make sense sometimes. I have wrangled with these questions of sense for some time, and have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter whether it makes perfect sense on paper and that not all my questions can be answered to my satisfaction. It only matters that if I meditate to stay calm, ask in prayer for my fear to be taken away, and for God to keep me sober, and for someone whom I may help to be put in my path, then I do not need to drink. I hope the days of constantly needing answers to questions that don't really matter are behind me now.

I have spoken a lot about fear and sensitivity. For me being over sensitive is not always a bad thing. It can be very useful when others close to me are in pain, because I can help, understand and empathise on a much closer level to them due to my sensitivity. It is only a burden when something is causing ME pain. Letting go of my self through the techniques in the last paragraph helps to minimise my own pain. The fear is still there, and only prayer gives me any respite from it, but I see that as the same as taking Paracetamol. It is an easy solution and one which works all of the time, and doesn't cause me to be abusive to the people I love, or make me piss my bed, or give me a hangover.

I spend most of my time in an OK place now, so long as I stick to my programme and stay away from drink. One thing I do know for sure is that if I ignore or slack on my programme, I will definitely drink again, and sooner rather than later. The last time I drank, I had to spend a week getting over it. I was in constant terror (not an exaggeration), I had no sleep, aural hallucinations and a sense of wretchedness and anguish that I would not wish on my most hated enemy. If I'd had no knowledge of sobriety and AA, and that it would pass, I would not have wanted to live. It would not have taken me long to end things. I am a very lucky man to have AA, and a couple of close friends who tolerated my drinking and listened to me and understood somehow. Believe me when I say that the vast majority of the people who arrive at the place that I have visited with alcohol will die miserably from it, first painfully losing all the joy in their lives bit by bit. I say a prayer of thanks for my salvation every day.