Leave the Light On

by Jennifer Storm

  I was making strides in therapy in that I was recognizing my relationship patterns and seeing them more clearly. I had broken up with Matt, but began immediately sleeping with another man in recovery. I always ran to the first person to pay me any attention. I knew it wasn’t right, but I kept doing it. My therapist was trying to show me how I was still trying to fill the void inside me with something—in this case with sex and men. I was getting the idea, but slowly, because it didn’t stop me from maintaining the relationship or the sexual activity. I was just so used to giving that part of myself over so freely that I thought it was normal, even though it didn’t feel normal while doing it. It felt familiar, a feeling I confused with being okay. I was lonely in State College, and even though I was making some new great friends in the twelve-step program, it was still hard.

  I was trying to connect with this new guy through sex, thinking that would bring us closer, but it proved to be wrong. I missed the people who really knew me, the ones I could call and not have to give a thirty-minute oral history of my life to before they would get what I was going through. I missed the connections I had with my old friends. At times I felt so alone, and it was hard to find people my own age who could relate to what I was going through. There are certainly not as many young people in the rooms of recovery as one would think, especially not many young females. Most of them, I guess, were still out exploring.

  I did make friends with some of the older people in the rooms. I had always related to people much older than I was, so it worked for me, despite all evidence to the contrary in my past life. However, a handful of people around my age attended the meetings, and we began to form a young people’s crew that was a lot of fun. We bonded quickly on the basis that we were all a little crazy, new to this whole recovery thing, lonely as hell, and craving friendship and attention. One other girl close to my age, Kate, was shorter than me and kind of socially awkward. She didn’t say much and seemed to take to me immediately because I was much more talkative and brazen. If we were back in high school, I would have described her as the outcast type. She had super-long red hair, but the entire section underneath was shaved, which gave her a punk look when she pulled her hair up. She was a local, having grown up in State College, and was new to recovery just like me. We started hanging out often, going to meetings, going out for coffee, walking aimlessly around downtown together to kill time, and going to movies when we could afford it. We became inseparable even though we didn’t have a whole lot in common. We shared a general loneliness and need for companionship that fueled our budding friendship. About five other young people slowly started joining us. We began to form this little gang, with our common denominator being that we hadn’t a clue yet who the hell we were as individuals. As a group, though, we were able to feel a little closer to coming to that understanding.

  Being with the group was fun. Every Friday night we would all hit a meeting together and then go to Denny’s and spend hours there smoking and drinking enough coffee to keep us awake for the entire weekend. After reluctantly heading to our homes in the wee hours, we would all wake up by nine the next morning and stumble into a gratitude meeting with more coffee in hand and a whole different type of “hangover” than we were used to.

  Another group of women, most of whom were lesbians, hung out together at the meetings. Immediately drawn to them, I began frequenting the meetings they went to and going out to eat with them too. A few weeks into getting to know them, I asked one of the women, Rose, an older, gentle woman in her early fifties with a spunky sense of humor, to be my sponsor. She agreed, and we began a great sponsor/sponsee relationship.

  She made me call her every day and meet her at meetings each week, which I did. I loved how crass she was, and we connected on that level right away. She would often laugh in meetings at inappropriate times, and we would sit and giggle like high school kids. She got my warped sense of humor.

  She was also patient with me, and when I would call her every day, sometimes with the same issue, she would guide me through the steps of recovery to help me understand how to resolve whatever it was. She encouraged me to read more and bought me my first daily devotional book that I loved immediately. It offered great lessons for each day of the year that clicked in my brain. Each morning, we would read our daily devotional and then talk about how it related to us. It helped us learn about each other. Rose was also just trying to come into her own sexuality, and I was drawn to her for that reason, too. I had yet to really sort out my sexual feelings toward women, even though I knew they still lingered within. I thought Rose could help me in that area too, and as we grew close, I began to confide in her about my feelings toward women.

  I discovered it was nice to have a solid routine and people whom I began to rely on seeing daily. Better yet, people began to rely on seeing me. If for some reason I didn’t show up at a meeting, my phone would ring and someone would be checking up on me to see that I was okay. The connection I was forming with these new friends gave me something I don’t think I had ever really had—accountability. It began to offer me a different kind of stability, and, although it felt incredibly odd at times, it offered me a solace and more of that hope stuff I had begun to rely on as much as air.

  As I was making these new friends, some of my old friends from the past began contacting me. I had tried to avoid them in the first couple of months while I focused on myself. It had been hammered into my head that old people, places, and things were to be avoided at all costs if I wanted to maintain my recovery. But I wasn’t quite ready to let them go yet. I had especially missed my best friend Kathy. I figured that since now I was settled in my own place, had a solid sponsor, and was beginning to have a nice foundation in recovery, it couldn’t hurt to reconnect with some old friends.

  9

  BEER PONG AND OTHER MISADVENTURES

  ONE NIGHT IN MY FIRST YEAR OF RECOVERY, A BUNCH of my high school friends came into town to visit me and some of our other friends who were now attending Penn State University. These were girls I had hung out with in high school who were a year younger than me—not the girls in my grade I did my hard-core drug partying with—but we did do a ton of drinking together. They were really sweet girls and very supportive of my recovery. We all went to a fraternity party and were having a blast as everyone began playing beer pong. Beer pong is much like ping pong, except you place several cups filled with beer at each end of a table. The goal is to get your ball into another’s cup, which that person then has to drink, all without using a paddle. It is one of those “get hammered in less than twenty minutes” games that occur in every frat house in town.

  I never dreamed of attempting to actually play, so I stood off to the side and watched until one of my friends kept bugging me to play. The last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to myself and to the fact that I was the only one in the room not drinking, so I kept blowing her off and trying to get her to shut up. But she was adamant, and the owner of the house said something like “Yeah, why not? Come on, I think I have something here you can use instead of beer.” He searched his nearly bare cabinet until his hand stumbled upon a big, round container of Lipton iced tea mix. Lucky me! He scraped the old tea mixture out of the tin can, mixed several cups of water with the iced tea mix, and set me up at the one end of the table. With all eyes on me, I wasn’t about to say no, so I reluctantly gave in. I didn’t want them to think I was a freak, and somehow I figured I could just blend into this fraternity life. So I took my position at the end of the table and began playing. With each toss of the ball, I felt excitement, like I was one of them. People were cheering me on and screaming my name and it felt exhilarating.

  As it turned out, I was not very good at iced tea pong, and the other guy kept bouncing his ball into my little cups of tea. Each time the ball fell into my cup, I had to pick it up and slam back my cup of tea. It was super-sweet since he’d mixed in way too much of the old tea, but I kept slamming back the sugary, sandy drink, trying to keep my face from showing that it ta
sted like shit. I just wanted them to like me, and for once I wanted to not feel like a total outcast in this world.

  After about twenty minutes of getting my ass kicked at this game and throwing back more cups of tea than I can remember, my stomach began to churn and a burp that had just a slight hint of vomit in it came bubbling up out of my throat. I realized quickly that I was about to get sick, threw my hand up over my mouth, and ran into the small bathroom in the hallway. I puked my brains out. Ice tea mix flew out of my throat like a rushing, fierce tide and sprayed the white toilet bowl like sand art. I was the only one in the room not drinking alcohol and still the first one to puke at the party—not much different from my old days of drinking. It was pathetic. As I sat there wiping my lips, I just had to laugh because here I was trying to be something I clearly was not anymore. And for what? Approval? Friendship? Acceptance? I should never have attempted to blend in. It all felt so stupid. This was not the place for me anymore, I realized. Just then I felt utter sadness in the pit of my stomach. “If this isn’t who I am anymore, then who the hell am I?” I wondered.

  A couple of days later, I talked about it in therapy and cried really hard because suddenly I didn’t know who I was supposed to be. Everything in my life had changed, everything I once knew was shifting, and I had no clue where I fit in anymore. I didn’t feel quite right with my old friends, and I was just learning how to feel comfortable with my new friends in recovery. Most importantly, I had no idea who I was.

  My therapist had warned me about hanging out with old friends, saying I was putting myself in dangerous situations that would eventually lead me to use again if I wasn’t careful. She was concerned about my need to keep my old friends. I knew she was right, but I wasn’t totally ready to give them up yet. After all, I was twenty-two years old; what the hell was I supposed to be doing? Rose echoed my therapist’s concerns, which gave me a double dose of guilt, but also helped to make me see that maybe once again my thinking was getting me into trouble. My therapist told me to make a list of all the things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve alcohol and to bring this list with me to our next session. Great—homework. That was something I definitely hadn’t thought I would be doing at twenty-two.

  But that weekend I had plans with my old high school friends again. We all decided to go to another party in town. My friends attempted to respect my recovery as best they could. They were protective of me because they knew everything I had been through, but they still wanted me to go out with them, so I did. Because I was doing so well in my recovery, none of us saw the harm in it. To them, I was still me, they wanted to hang out with me, and I wanted so badly to be around them as well. So I threw caution to the wind again and went.

  Most of the people at the parties we went to weren’t too fazed by my not drinking until they started getting loaded themselves. That is when all the questions and fascination would start. “Wow, you mean you don’t drink at all? Like never?” People would slur questions into my face as though they were holding the Spanish Inquisition. I know most of them were well-meaning, but probably couldn’t even imagine for a minute going out to a party or bar and not drinking, which was why they were fascinated with me. I was like a mythical creature they could not stop staring at, like a unicorn standing right there among them but with this strange power of not drinking. To others, though, I was the elephant in the room no one wanted to deal with. I symbolized what they could not achieve, and sometimes my presence brought out bitter resentment in people who didn’t want to face their own demons.

  On this night, the guy who was hosting the party wanted everyone to get in a circle and do a shot to him and his fraternity house. As everyone was moving into a circle, he was handing out shot glasses. I stepped back and tried as best I could to blend into the wallpaper behind me.

  Of course, he noticed me while he made his way around filling the glasses and called me over to join the circle. I politely shook my head and said, “No thanks. I don’t drink.” He persisted. “Come on, it’s just one shot, it won’t kill ya,” he said.

  “No, thank you. I am really okay. You go ahead,” I said, my voice shaking. I didn’t like all the attention that was squarely focused on me.

  My friends looked at me wide-eyed, and one mouthed, “I’m sorry.” But the host was not about to take no for an answer. He was a big dude and had been powerhouse drinking all night. “What the fuck do you mean, NO? This is my fucking house and my fucking party, and if I say you’re doing a shot, you’re doing a shot!”

  “Seriously, I don’t drink at all,” I managed to say as I began to get scared. His eyes were getting wild, and I knew he was hammered. “What do you mean you don’t drink? What the fuck is that? What are you doing at a frat party if you don’t drink?” He moved toward me with the bottle in his hand. I began backing up toward the wall until I was stuck in a corner of the room. I just kept saying, “I don’t drink,” and “Just leave me alone.” Then he lunged at me. His eyes were huge and filled with rage. As he screamed at me, drops of his alcohol-laced saliva hit my face. He kept berating me about not drinking, asking what kind of pussy I was that I didn’t drink, and how dare I disrespect his house and his fraternity by not doing a shot with him? I could feel the weight of his body thrust against mine, and the wall behind me hit my back. He smelled like a brewery, and I turned my head to avoid his stench. Fear nailed my feet to the floor, and I couldn’t move. He raised the bottle of booze and shook it. I was petrified it was going to spill out all over my head. I wished nothing more than for the wall behind me to open up and engulf me in the patterned wallpaper.

  My two guy friends quickly came to my rescue. As they started pulling him away from me, a huge fight broke out. As soon as there was an opening, I ran over to my girlfriends and we fled the house as fast as we could. On our heels were our guy friends yelling for us to get in the car. As my ass hit the leather of the backseat, I was shaking violently. I fell into my friend’s lap and burst into sobs. I had never had anyone treat me like that in recovery. I couldn’t understand why this guy had such a visceral reaction to me. My friends assured me that he just was an asshole, but that was the last time they called me when they came to visit and the last time I ever went out to a frat party, or anywhere else, with any of them again.

  10

  FREAK

  IN MY NEXT THERAPY SESSION, I SPOKE IN DEPTH WITH my therapist about the changes I was going to have to make in my life. I was so angry. I didn’t want to be different, and I didn’t want to be considered a freak, even if it was more in my head than in reality. She assured me I wasn’t a freak and that life would be challenging at times, because no one can avoid alcohol altogether; it is a part of life and all over the place—in restaurants, in homes, at work parties. I needed to find a way to coexist with alcohol but to avoid places where drinking alcohol was the main purpose. We talked about my motives and how I always have to look at the reasons I am doing things. Why did I want to go somewhere? What was my goal for being at that party? Was it to fit in? To feel cool? I really had to look at the fact that those weren’t acceptable reasons for me to put myself in harm’s way. Before I could attempt to be who I always thought I should be or what others wanted me to be, first I had to figure out who I was. I felt trapped and lost somewhere between the party girl I used to be, whom everyone knew, and this new girl in recovery who felt emotionally naked and confused all the time.

  I didn’t feel the desire to drink or use even when I was out with my friends. I didn’t feel pressured to drink. I thought those factors kept me immune to danger, or I did until the last party I went to with my old friends. I expressed to my therapist how incredibly scared I was that the bottle over my head was going to spill and the drops might have hit my lips or mouth. Would that have meant I had relapsed? My recovery was something I was beginning to treasure. Every time at a twelve-step meeting when I picked up a plastic chip for various lengths of time in recovery—sixty days, ninety days, 120 days—I felt proud, and I carried it around with me l
ike a badge of honor. I began to realize how very precious this new life was to me and that I didn’t want to tarnish it at all.

  She asked me to pull out my homework, which I had anguished over all week. The assignment was one of the hardest tasks I had been given while in recovery. It was a self-exploration assignment. It felt stupid to write down all the things I liked to do that didn’t involve alcohol. At first I sat there staring at the paper, and I felt as blank as the page. My head was empty as I tried to think of everything I liked to do before this recovery thing. I did everything high or with alcohol. There was rarely a time when I didn’t use to enhance an event or experience. I figured I would start small—movies, I love movies. So I wrote:

  1. Movies

  A memory of dropping acid before going to see The Hand That Rocks the Cradle came rushing back to mind. I remember I went to the bathroom right as I was peaking on my acid. I ended up in the stall for more than an hour, staring at the tiles on the walls as they slowly danced for me to the elevator music playing overhead. I missed half the movie.

  2. Bowling

  Okay, bowling. Bowling was cool, but there were always bars at the bowling alleys, and, seriously, my score always improved after three or four beers.

  Argh! Fuck, this was hard. I got frustrated as I realized that nothing I ever did was without alcohol or drugs. How was I supposed to even know what I liked when I was always fucked up? I crumbled up the piece of paper and threw it in the trash.

  I ended up with no list and instead shared my frustrations with my therapist. She said it was normal to feel the way I felt, but suggested I really had to work hard at discovering what I like now. So she posed these questions to me: