Leave the Light On

by Jennifer Storm

  That was typical of our friendship—we were always hammered and always making asses out of ourselves. We spent countless hours in front of the mirror at home making sure each strand of hair was in place and our makeup was done to perfection, and we were always dressed to the nines; but no matter how hard we tried to keep it together, every night we would end up total messes—drunk and falling around, getting as dirty as kindergartners on a playground at recess. The next day we would call one another and compare beer-induced wounds. Kathy was fond of wearing skirts with stockings and would always wind up with a big blowout in her knee from stumbling to the ground. We would often sit in the car outside nightclubs burning a big bowl before entering the club. When we got out of the car, I would look over and she would be gone. I would hear giggling coming from her side of the car and stumble over only to find her lying on the ground after busting her ass on the way out of the vehicle.

  She was a riot, and I loved hanging out with her. She was crazy, and she didn’t hold back at all. She loved her booze and loved her pot, which gave us incredible but shaky common ground to stand on. Kathy never did coke and wasn’t into that scene at all, so that was where we differed a lot. I never told her about how much coke I did. Even when I was high around her, she never knew because she was always just as fucked up on beer or pot. At the nightclubs we went to, I sneaked off and did lines of coke off the toilet in the bathroom and then rejoined Kathy at the bar just in time to slam back another lemon drop, her favorite shot. She was never the wiser, and after she left the bar to head home at closing time, I left to hang out with a different crowd. While Kathy got up to go to work the next day, I was still out partying and blowing off work.

  I tried to maintain my friendship with her after I moved to State College. She came to see me in the hospital before I left for rehab, and I knew she couldn’t put words together to explain how weird she felt as she saw my bandages on my wrists, but she never judged me. She just wished me luck and said, “Do whatever you gotta do to get better, kid.”

  I would see Kathy on my frequent weekend trips to Allentown, but things were weird because she was still out partying. Although I would meet up with her at the local hangouts, it just didn’t quite fit me anymore. I really tried to go to bars and pretend I was having fun with everyone. I would have moments of good conversation or a couple good laughs, but they were always followed by my friends reaching the point of intoxication, and then something in the room would change for me. It was as though with each shot and beer they drank, my friends’ souls and spirits would slowly leave their bodies. They would appear strange to me, slurring their speech and saying random things that made no sense, yet they expected that I would laugh or respond. But I just couldn’t “get it up” for them to laugh on cue. There was no verbal connection whatsoever. I was left feeling blank and hollowed in their presence.

  The worst was when people would stumble up to me and ramble on and on about how proud they were of me for being able to be there and not drink. In their own drunken stupors, they would gush over me about how noble and amazing it was that I wasn’t drinking. It always made me feel completely uncomfortable and speechless. I usually just nodded, gave a big smile, and said, “Thanks,” while I was screaming inside.

  That happens still to this day every time I attempt to masquerade out in the land of drunks, which I have done less and less as the years of recovery have piled up in my life. But when I do, it always strikes me as the most hypocritical of all compliments.

  Sometimes I wanted to blend in so badly, to just be what the world defines as “normal,” that I did some stupid shit that could have gotten me in serious trouble.

  3

  NO RELATIONSHIPS

  I WALKED INTO THE KITCHEN TO THE GLORIOUS SMELL of coffee, which is one of my favorite smells in the world. As I slowly poured the dark energy into my mug, I felt Matthew’s hands slip around my waist and my body immediately stiffened. He grabbed me close to his body and nuzzled his face into the nape of my neck. My entire insides recoiled as every fiber of my being rejected his touch. I remained stiff and muttered, “Good morning,” as I swiftly slipped out of his grasp and moved around the breakfast bar onto the stool facing him.

  I stared blankly down at my coffee. I was so incredibly confused by what I was doing with him. I was trying to fill that infamous void—the one I used to pour drugs and alcohol into—with people, more specifically, with Matthew. It was becoming clear to me that we were both just kind of using each other to avoid dealing with reality in its entirety. That had seemed okay while I was in treatment, because I had already given up so much and our relationship served as a nice distraction. We barely knew each other; we’d only had glimmers of stolen conversations while in rehab together. I didn’t know his middle name, what his childhood was like, who his family was, where he went to school. All I knew was that he was going through a similar situation to mine, and we both craved love and attention as though it were air. It felt good to have someone adore me the way he claimed he did. He really acted as though he loved me, even though he barely knew me.

  When Matthew got out of rehab, he went directly home instead of going to a halfway house like I did, so he was used to being back in the world and working. He wrote me these long, impassioned letters while I was in the halfway house; it was like he was a soldier off at war and I was his great love. He would send me photos of himself, which his father would take for him, holding up handwritten signs that read, “I miss you and I love you.” At the time, I would clutch them to my chest and feed off the energy of the love he sent me.

  But now, looking at him from across the kitchen table, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t love him; I barely knew him. For that matter, I barely knew or loved myself.

  Counselors in rehab and anyone else who has more than a year of solid recovery will tell you to avoid getting into a relationship within the first year of recovery, because it only serves to distract you and in many ways replaces the alcohol and drugs. At the time it didn’t make sense to me, because the sensation of someone paying me attention outweighed any new information or personal growth I had experienced in rehab. He was good-looking and kind, and my self-esteem was, as usual, in the toilet and solely reliant upon the attention of others. So dating someone in rehab made sense and was a good idea in my problematic way of thinking.

  As the cobwebs slowly began to clear in my brain, the idea of a year’s abstinence was starting to make a little sense to me. It is easy to hide behind something else, even when you are not using. It is easy to get lost in a relationship, or the idea of one at least, which keeps the mind in denial of all the reasons why it is not a good idea to be in one. As an addict, I looked for anything and everything outside of myself to fill that void I had inside. Men had always been one of those things I had turned to in order to avoid dealing with myself. But the longer I worked a program of recovery and began to explore my past in therapy sessions and group sessions, the more it was starting to make sense to me that I had never really known love, and in many ways love and sex were just vices I used to escape, like alcohol and drugs.

  I was beginning to understand that my views on sex and love were just as skewed as all my other views. I was beginning to understand that anyone who would run to a guy in rehab whom she didn’t know just because he told her she was pretty was messed up. I sneaked around at night against the rules in rehab to steal quick kisses with some guy I had just met, all because he paid me attention. And that attention was another drug for me—one that I was just learning could be as destructive as using, if I let it. It was becoming clear to me that I had never had a healthy intimate relationship in my life, and my obsession and feelings for Matt were just emotional baggage that I hadn’t yet checked in recovery.

  We tried to have sex a couple of times, but sex without being drunk or high was incredibly awkward for me. In fact, sex at all was like a foreign concept. I had no idea what real intimacy was because I had never really had sex without being high, and most of my
sexual endeavors just left me feeling dirty, used, and empty. After all, my first sexual experience was a rape—a drunken rape. It was no wonder I was a mess in this area.

  This only fueled the extreme confusion I already felt regarding sex and my sexuality. From a very early age, kindergarten in fact, I can tell you whom my first crushes were on—girls. I had always had feelings toward girls and never knew it wasn’t okay until people in positions of authority so studiously began pointing it out to me when I would express my innocent crushes. I was teased in school as a young girl for making it known that I had feelings toward another girl. I didn’t like the taunting. I didn’t want to be labeled a freak or abnormal, so I began to fake it.

  I had fleeting moments of intimacy that were blurred by total drunkenness, so I was really lost. To avoid dealing with all the uncomfortable feelings that came along with it, I found myself emotionally detaching during sex. I would lay there while he was inside me, moaning on cue, trying to do and say all the things that I thought should be said during sex: “Oh yeah, come on, baby.” But I was as flat as an iron. If he tried to look into my eyes, all he would see was a distant, empty void where I imagined true emotions and intimacy should be. Instead of being present, I was off in my safe place of detachment. I would just mentally float away and create visual places where I was free or safe. Sometimes I would be swimming in the ocean and feeling the sunshine on my face. Other times I would be flying high above the clouds and feeling light as a feather, where no one could hurt me. There I didn’t have to deal with the fact that someone was invading me and that I didn’t enjoy it the way I was told I was supposed to.

  Instead, I floated while Matt fucked, as I had always done during sex.

  I learned later in therapy that this is a common phenomenon for women who have been sexually assaulted. With my introduction to sex coming in the form of an assault, everything afterward was a mess. How can anyone really expect a person not to be confused? Love and sex got all intermingled and twisted in my head and intrinsically became one for me. I thought sex was supposed to be this uncomfortable obligation I had to offer up to men to gain acceptance and love. I was extremely promiscuous growing up—not because I liked sex, or guys for that matter, but because I thought that was how one obtained love and acceptance. That was what I knew. That was what I had learned. No one taught me differently.

  This is where many people get confused about young girls and their behaviors. Often folks just shake their judgmental heads briskly back and forth in disgust at the displays of many misguided young females. What people don’t understand or realize is that the majority of the times you see a young girl acting in the manners I did—dressing provocatively, flirting like crazy with any boy that moves—these are clear warning signs or indicators that she was probably at some point sexually abused. She isn’t a slut or a whore or another label society would immediately assign out of assumption. She is most likely scared, confused, hurting, and deeply, deeply violated in some way, and she is acting out in the only way she knows how. Young people do not usually verbalize their feelings. I never had the ability to articulate my feelings, but boy, if people had just paid close enough attention to my actions long enough, they would have seen I was really screaming out for help.

  I was so screwed up in my head that I used sex as a way to gain attention. The terrible thing was that I never wanted to actually engage in sexual activity. I just wanted someone to pay attention to me, to hold me, to tell me I was pretty and worthy, even to just see me. Sex came as part of this deal with most men, because, let’s face it, if they think they can get it, they will try. Sex was uncomfortable for me, and most times I hated every second of it, but during those moments at least I wasn’t alone. Someone was paying attention to me, and in my mind, I guess, loving me. My idea of love was royally screwed up also.

  The love I got from my parents had been dysfunctional. My mother would say she loved me while telling me what a bad person I was. And my father, well, he always told me he loved me, but he was rarely around when I needed him. The love I sought from men was unhealthy and was not love at all, but abuse, lust, sex, and pain. I wouldn’t have known what true, unconditional love was if it had come up and slapped me in the face, so how exactly was I supposed to love Matthew? How was I supposed to give him something I didn’t possess myself? How was I supposed to love him unconditionally when all the love I had ever received or given was filled with expectations and conditions, whether they were spelled out or in my head?

  I didn’t know how to tell him I just wanted to be his friend. I couldn’t find the words to tell him that, while this was a nice distraction for a while, I was just not into it. I was barely in touch with my own feelings, so how was I to try and explain to him what they were? I never had the ability to communicate my true feelings to people, especially if they were going to be potentially hurt or would hold me accountable in some way. I was incredibly codependent in this way. I would set my feelings or my needs aside, always for the sake of another. I did this even when I wasn’t getting anything positive out of a relationship. I didn’t know how to break this cycle just yet.

  But I knew enough to recognize that this relationship with Matt was potentially as damaging as my substance abuse. I just wasn’t quite sure yet how to open my mouth up and allow truth to flow out of it without fearing the outcomes, the rejection, the pain, the guilt. I still wasn’t sure how to put myself and my needs first. So I just sipped my coffee as he swooped down and gave me a quick peck on the cheek before he and his father went off to work. I stiffened, and he left the house with no clue that I was sickened to my core.

  Whenever he would try to talk to me about “us,” I would just smile and say everything was okay. Matt and I would often go to meetings together, and I could tell from the vibe we got from many people in the rooms that our relationship wasn’t looked upon fondly. After all, we were each supposed to be focused on ourselves, but it was apparent that we were only focusing on each other.

  My father and stepmother weren’t thrilled that I was living with a guy at that time either, but they managed to be okay with it because I was sleeping in a separate room. I think in many ways they were just so happy I was not home while trying to learn to maintain my recovery. We all knew my chances for recovery would have been slim at home. They encouraged me every day to find an apartment or place of my own. I needed to do the next right thing and take care of myself. It was becoming clearer that I was going to have to step up to the plate and take a swing—one that would unfortunately hit right in Matt’s heart.

  4

  BAD COFFEE AND HARD CHAIRS

  NAVIGATING THIS NEW STATE OF RECOVERY WAS SCARY and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, so I hung on tightly to a famous slogan in twelve-step fellowships: “Take it one day at a time.” Twelve-step slogans are the best because they just bring things home in a simple way, like “Keep it simple, stupid,” or “Progress, not perfection.” Some of them saved my life and sanity in the first couple of years I was in recovery.

  I didn’t have a job at first; I thought it would be best to just take it easy for a while. Everything was so strange for me. The world around me felt very large, so I kept my reality based in the rooms of recovery. I worked the Twelve Steps daily by writing, going to meetings, praying at night, and doing a daily inventory of my actions. Each night I would sit down and assess my day and ask myself certain questions: Did I harm anyone today? Was I honest in my encounters with others? Was I true to myself? Were there any verbal amends I needed to make to anyone? This assessment was a great tool we used in rehab to help keep ourselves accountable in our recovery. After all, I am human and this was a whole new way of life, so making mistakes was common, but it was what I did with those errors in judgment that mattered. Did I learn from the mistake? Did I try to make things right? These were the thoughts that flooded my mind at night before I said my prayers and went to sleep. It certainly made hitting the pillow and drifting off to sleep much easier to do.

>   I made sure I hit a meeting every day. It was my only connection to people, because usually I stayed in the house watching Oprah, smoking cigarettes, and eating everything I could get my hands on. Matt’s father was very much a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, and we lived in a rural area that was not conducive to my vegetarian lifestyle. So I found myself eating junk food—chips, cookies, macaroni and cheese from the box—all food with little nutritional value. Mostly I was eating out of boredom and loneliness.

  The meetings I attended were a great way for me to process all the change I was experiencing, and I began to meet new people. There are different types of twelve-step meetings, such as discussion meetings, in which everyone just openly shares; reading meetings, in which the focus is on a passage in a recovery-related book; and speaker meetings, in which a person with more than one year in recovery openly shares about his or her past and how things are now. My first meeting in State College was a Sunday discussion group that met at 3:00 p.m. at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Most of the meetings I ended up attending were held there. St. Andrew’s was set in the heart of downtown. It was a nice change from the rural area where I was living.

  The church was located across the street from a large football field that belonged to the local high school. I would pull up out back and park to find several of my fellow addicts milling about and smoking and chatting. I always came to the meetings early to help set up, make coffee, and arrange recovery literature on the tables. It gave me more to do and an opportunity to meet with others before the meetings. It is suggested in recovery to always arrive fifteen minutes prior to a meeting and stay fifteen minutes afterward to meet-and-greet others. That time is often referred to as the “meeting before and after the meeting,” time set aside to get to know one another and discuss not so much our recovery or addiction, but the more personal details of our lives.