Day 11: Shackles

Wednesdays are our day off the from the treatment centre (we attend Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 9:30 - 4:30). The day we are expected to have doctors appointments, sort out benefits, see probation officers, and otherwise do things to unpick the messes that addicts tend to have created around themselves. As part of the programme, we also have to attend three AA or NA (it's worth pointing out that, as far as I can see so far, out of our group of ten only me and one other are there 'simply' for alcohol - the rest are also addicted to cocaine, heroin and probably a whole pile of other things I haven't heard of) meetings a week - outside of the centre.

But I haven't been to a meeting today, just spent my time Dealing With It. Crossing things off my list and seeing one of my oldest friends who has helped out with some practical things I was worrying about. I'm realising that I've spent a lot of the last few years 'isolating' myself and handling everything alone: free (to drink, mainly). But real friends will be there for you and just make life more fun. Other people do unexpected things. By myself I just go round and round the same patterns thinking it's the best and only way to be.

People thinking about having a baby say they suddenly start noticing pregnant women and prams everywhere. In the same way, references to bloody rehab and alcoholics are cropping up all over the shop. Today I pressed play on my favourite podcast This American Life, hoping to be drawn into one of the tales ordinary people in exceptional circumstance that they do so well, but the first story of the episode was flipping well about a teenage girl sent to a drug treatment. YAWN. I didn't leave it playing for long enough to find out much more. I need to escape from this some of the time. (I'll listen to it later, I'm sure it's brilliant as ever).

One of the other ways we are expected to fill out days off (and evenings, weekends etc) is doing the 'work' we are set. My first task, due in next week, is to write... 'my LIFE STORY'. WHAT. "We expect about three or four pages of A4", the councellor said, looking at me sympathetically like she knew this was a lot to ask. (Another thing worth noting here is that, out of the ten of us, two don't have English as a first language and and three or four seem to have have pretty big problems with reading and writing).

Now, I thought, I have written journals obsessively for more than twenty years and have a degree in English (which included a dissertation of the diaries of literary women that got a first), have sheaves of rubbish semi-autobiographical short stories, caches of abandoned blogs, shoeboxes of letters and inboxes of emails: where do I start? Should I hand in a 60,000 word multi-perspectival Nabakov pastiche with an unreliable narrator? Or perhaps I should play around with the structure - write from the viewpoint of my unborn great-great-grandaughter in 2100 who, having retreated to a post-nuclear island, has found remnants of my Livejournal and is tracing back the reasons why she, too, is an alcoholic? Or should I just drop this box in the middle of the group therapy circle and say analyse this?
What I will no doubt do, however, is write five or six standard pages with just the right amount of subtle mentions of my father's mental illness or my own 'lack of self worth' to make them think they can really get somewhere with me, or that I can get somewhere with myself.

Does anyone get the feeling that my arrogance might be a 'block' to my 'recovery' (as well as my tendency to place any 'treatment' language in sarcastic quotation marks)?

OK, despite this facetiousness, I've had a pretty good day and am enthusiastic about the programme and think that it will work for me. Maybe it's the Campral, or maybe it's the amount of coca cola I've been drinking (a fucktonne) but I've certainly not wanted booze as much today.

I'm finding that the times of the day that used to be the worst for me: first thing in the morning (panic-waking at 5.30am, checking my phone and outbox to find out what the hell I did the night before, then later - throbbing hungover and guilty - trying to get to work, act straight) and late in the evening (when the solo drinking would tip over from liberating to desperately lonely) are now actually the best times. I am happy to wake fairly fresh and clean, remembering what I did; and in the evenings am almost proud to have got through the day without it. I know it's really really early days but there have been - fleeting - genuine moments of joy each day.



INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 78-93: The introduction of some highly confusing double/triple agents in some kind of international espionage (including I think a transvestite), "the screeming meemies" (a weaker version of the howling fantods) and a good description of a herd of stampeding feral hamsters ("tornadic, locomotival").