How can I just know? How can my body just know when A is drunk again? It’s like my mind completely switches in on itself. My emotions go from happy and care free to sad and frustrated and stuck. Am I so attuned to behaviour like that, exhibited from my own father in childhood that now I don’t even have to see A drunk to know he is. To know that he has relapsed. That what is coming next is the slurred voice, the repeated conversations, the accidentally but nearly always breaking cutlery, the mess, the smell, the everyone else being on edge because we all don’t know how to respond, we are all uncomfortable.
How I can just sense and smell and see it? How my mind seems to not fit together so well when someone is drunk around me, I mean it’s not just drunk, it’spassing outat 11 am and the lack of any conversation, it’sgetting pissed off at the news when it doesn’t really matter and it’smybown personal worry. The anxiety, the destruction, the sadness gets into my pores, it makes me feel on edge and I’m unsure of how to handle it. And I do know that I can control how I react, I do know I can leave the room and leave the house and sit in my room by myself but I don’t want to do that. I want to feel safe and comfortable, like any human would.
And don’t get me wrong I do know that I am better than this, more in control of this but my body and mind seem to alter almost effortlessly into the chaos. They sit to just swiftly turn into madness and it’s so hard to get me to fight even harder than I normally do to not go down that route. When this happens, I miss people more, I miss feeling safe, I miss feeling anything but estranged from myself. I lose motivation to eat properly and excersise and I want and or need to be out of the house all of the time to a cost to myself and my structure and tiredness. I lose a bit of me.
I don’t emtirely know how to get it back. Untill the drunkness stops again. I feel like crying more when A is drunk but I’m unable to cry. It all get stored up in one little ball of negative energy until pow, I blow up. All of me blows up in my silly face, knowing that I was unable to handle it again.
A isn’t violent to me, not like dad but he creates an atmosphere, a feeling that no one wants to be around. He swears at himself and argues with himself and the others more. He won’t accept no. A drifts into this Jekyll and Hyde state and I am never sure which one he is in. He is manipulative and lies, so that no one questions his drinking but we all know. Come on, how can we not. When you talk his eyes don’t focus, he sweats and smells of alcohol and B.O. and he is not a pleasure to be around.
I hide. That is all I can do for the moment. Do exactly as I did when I was a child. I hide and hope and pray that tomorrow will be a better day an un drunk day. I know that for the next 3 days I’m busy again and so I am already in bed, the house deadly silent but I’m unsure if that worries me more. I’ve been sleeping less well since Saturday, since Sunday I noticed the tiny changes but I haven’t been sleeping well. Terrible nightmare are coming back more vigorously than before.
Thank you but no thank you, I don’t want this.
It was a good 5 days, we were being sociable. We were having conversations not repeated a thousand times – I thought I could actually live here for a while longer – not have to find somewhere else to live. S said I seemed lighter, happier. And maybe I was. Maybe that’s the whole sensory thing she was talking about – this. How I react or act when this happens. The slight changes which apparently turn my world upside down, inside out so effortlessly.
Katie's blog on life 