I normally wouldn’t be so down about a breakup, but well, I was set on marrying you, my fiancé. All of my family problems and my stupid drinking messed me up. I should’ve spent more time with you, and confided in you, instead of spending so much time hanging around and confiding in my friends. I regretted my behavior night after night.
The problem was that I could not fully open up about the abuse my stepdad inflicted upon me when I was younger. When my brother moved in with me, I had all these memories of abuse from seventeen years ago that I had long forgotten about come back. My mom was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and was homeless for eight years after enduring my stepdad’s sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. She is in denial that he was ever a bad parent.
He did irreversible damage to my hero, my mom, who tried to get him out of debt by joining the military. He physically abused me and my brother, despite my brother only being a toddler. I despised him and did everything I could to forget about him, and it all came rushing back. So I drank very heavily to forget these memories that I could not forget. My increased drinking led me to drink a whole bottle of vodka in ten or fifteen minutes. I blacked out for ten hours and woke up in the hospital. My internal organs were shutting down, and the doctors said it was a miracle that I didn’t have brain damage. In other words, I should be dead.
After this, I fell into a depression. I also needed some friends. My friends were trash, and the new ones I found were worse than the ones I had. My fiancé thought I cheated on her with my friend’s wife, and I honestly did not. So she cheated on me right before Christmas, not even six months after I almost died, and got pregnant. I fell into an even deeper depression because of that.
I was a complete mess, but I was set on marrying her, and I tried to make things work. After eight months she told me that she was glad that I was not the father of her child because I would make a shitty dad. After trying so hard to just make everything work, hearing that comment completely crushed me. I fell even further into this bottomless depression that kept on getting deeper. I felt like she didn’t want me around, and her comment proved it. I worked part-time and went to college full-time during this whole time period. I began to drink twice as much as I had before, and during this year I would have weeks at a time where I was always drunk.
After a horrible year or more of drinking, I decided to quit cold turkey, and constantly had cold sweats at work along with other withdrawal symptoms. Quickly, I learned that I was having withdrawals from alcohol, and I suffered through them for about two weeks or more. I had developed a ton of awful habits from just being a depressed alcoholic failure, and I slowly fixed them one by one. It was just one day at a time trying to do better than the last. My hard work eventually paid off, because I am doing way better now than I was just a few years ago.
That was the only girl I ever truly loved and fully gave myself to. I blamed myself for everything, and I let my experience with her destroy all of my future relationships, and even some of my friendships. I was awful to be around. I was angry or depressed everyday. I just wanted to lock myself in my room and never come out, and when I did come out of my room, I drank a ton of alcohol.
My life improved after I made some gradual changes, and now I rarely drink, if ever at all. I am doing a lot better, and I am no longer constantly depressed. I really wanted to share this here anonymously so someone can read my story and benefit from it. To see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. In other words, it does get better. Thank you for your time.
image- R. Mitra