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.
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.