The Roots Are Discovered

I've spent most of my life looking towards the future or living in the past, wondering what might have been or designing the next big thing.

Only to find once I'm there, at that point in the future, I'm already daydreaming how I want to feel the next trip.

Or replaying moments in my past to where they have lost all meaning like an overplayed radio song.

A huge piece of self-discovery around drinking is learning the underlying reason why you drink. The reason you started, and the reason you keep drinking

This is beyond the acute triggers that lead you to drink, or to that thought right before you take a drink, or even the positive intent behind drinking.

It's the deep-seeded, root-cause, your life depends on it, reason you drink.

I'm still working this through as my reason is still revealing itself like a hungry seductress .

I think one of the main reasons I kept drinking was I wanted to speed up time---get past all the day-to-day grind and to be free to be.

More often than not I would will myself "to just get through" a seemingly fun event, a weekend away, or a night out with friends begging for the day to end.

I'd be eager for the day to speed by like "time lapse" photography.

When I'd feel so uncomfortable in my own skin, it would feel like a hundred baby moths in my belly--the ones that populate the flour jars.

This may sound like anxiety, depression or chronic stress, but I wasn't nor ever have had any of these in a clinical sense.

I am not a Type A personality. I can make a mess and leave it for later. I'm not shy.

It felt like a vase that broke into a million shards, and no matter how many times you swept the floor every time you walk barefoot a piece finds its way into your skin.

Or a once prized and coveted antique clock that was forgotten in the over-stuffed and musty garage. The gold face dulled by years of dust

The feeling was so frequent, it was familiar and easy for me to suppress.

I know when it started. It was your typical coming of age story where girl-meets-boy then boy breaks girl's heart.

Alcohol helped with that. It warped time for me so I no longer had to squeeze me eye shut, click my Doc Martin's, and wish time away. I quit drinking over 2 years ago. Now life is more like stop motion photography. I almost always love being right there in the moment, freezing it, and feeling it.

And then there are days when I don't. And I want to daydream, and be alone.

It's in the moments of uncomfortableness when it takes days or weeks for the moths to settle, and I get impatient this feeling will never end that the roots are discovered.