Dear Vix,
I’m writing this because if I don’t get it out of my head, I think it’ll finally break me. I’ve been running this race for 30 years now. Three decades of waking up after a night of drinking and drugs with the same heavy pit in my stomach, wondering how I let another day slip through my fingers.
I used to think I was just a guy who liked a good time. Then, I thought booze helped me define myself. Later, I was a guy with a problem. Now, I feel like the problem is just who I am. I’ve seen the inside of more basement AA meetings and expensive, spa-like rehab clinics than I care to count. I’ve made promises to my mother, my kids and my reflection until the words lost all their meaning. The hardest part isn’t the physical craving anymore – it’s the exhaustion.
When you’ve been at war with yourself for 30 years, you start to wonder if there’s even a “you” left to save. I’m 50 now and I don’t know where that young, hopeful boy I used to be has gone. By now, the joke really is wearing thin. People tell you it’s never too late, but they don’t tell you how heavy the wreckage is that you have to drag behind you. I see the product of what I am, every single day in the mirror. I’m in between jobs – again. Divorced. Living in my mum’s spare room. Some days I don’t even get out of bed, and if I do, it’s only long enough to make it to the nearest pub, where I’m the man at the heart of a bar, leading everyone on.
I’m losing hope now. Every time I get a week or a month of clarity, the same old shadow just waits around the corner, patient and familiar. It’s a lonely kind of tired. You stop asking for help because you’re embarrassed to be the same broken record, and you start to believe the lie that this is just your finish line. I don't have a neat ending for this. I’m just a man who’s tired of fighting a ghost that has my own face.
A man who’s still trying to find his way home
Dear Lost Boy,
That’s not the name you’ve given yourself, but that’s the name that feels like it fits. You might be 50, and not 15, but there’s a part of you that is still hurting – a part of you, deep inside – that I imagine has been hurting and scared for as long as you can remember. A part of you that was once wounded and has never fully healed. A part of you that has stayed hidden and tucked away, for fear of being exposed and experiencing even greater hurt.
Fast forward to these later life years, though, and no amount of hiding can protect that soft, wounded boy who lurks inside you forever. The signs are all around you: the way you feel scared and stressed and overwhelmed and tired; so goddamn tired of fighting every single day to try to summon up the strength to keep going: to get up, to get dressed, to go to work, to function. It sounds exhausting and hard, and I understand that every day feels like a battle not just to move forward – but to survive.
None of this is your fault. Addiction is a disease – we all know this, by now. And it should be treated with the seriousness you’d treat cancer or a heart attack. I would always urge people with your condition to seek professional help (from AA and NA or other recovery groups, from your GP, from local community addiction centres, from the NHS).
Some of my closest friends who have struggled with addiction for years tell me that they believe you have to surrender. Admit you are powerless – fully powerless. But they also say they find it hard to hear of people, like you, who have tried groups like AA many times, but have clearly “not got it”. They say to keep coming back. One friend told me she didn’t “get” AA – but it “got” her, in the end.
But I also believe that some of the malaise you’re feeling is because you keep trying to ignore that hurt boy inside you. You weigh him down with drink and drugs to try and keep him quiet, but he is demanding your attention. He wants to be listened to. And it’s finally time to listen to him.
So, why don’t you talk to him – to that abandoned, desperate boy in need of recognition and comfort – in your quieter and more reflective moments? Why don’t you give him a voice and see what it is he is trying to tell you – what he needs? Write it down if that feels easier to access. See how you go with some free-writing. And if you don’t want to do this alone, you can do it with a trained professional or a sponsor. As they say in AA: it doesn’t really matter how many times you’ve tried it before, all you need to do is keep coming back.
You’re not alone with this, no matter how much you might feel it. I want to take a moment to just pause at the edges of your letter and look at who you have around you: you mention your mum, who I’m guessing you have a fairly close relationship with, as you’re living with her in her spare room. You have kids – a reason to keep going, even if it feels like there’s little else.
I don’t want you to overload yourself and think that recovery is an “impossible” end goal at the top of a faraway mountain that feels utterly unattainable. They call it “rock bottom” for a reason, and it sounds like yours is here. But if you’re at the bottom, then take heart: because the only way from here is up again.
All I want you to do is to pull on your resolve and do it one more time (and then another and another). Get out of bed, every single day. I don’t need you to excel, I just want you to keep going. To try again. To hold your head high. To seek professional help again (and as many times as it takes after that). To keep fighting – and to listen to the boy. To treat him with the love and compassion you’d give your kids. He deserves that compassion and understanding and that fight – and so do you.
To seek help for drink and drug addiction, try contacting Mind UK or Frank or read more here.
Do you have a problem you would like to raise anonymously with Dear Vix? Issues with love, relationships, family and work? Email dearvix@independent.co.uk
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