The Great Escape

One of the reasons I self-medicated was to get away from myself. Way before my first drink I found ways to escape myself. I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I got along with the majority of people but couldn’t get along with myself.

From early childhood the first way I was able to escape reality was through television. A child of the 70s I would engross myself with reruns on the tube. From All in the Family to Mary Tyler Moore I would get lost in the story being told on television. I once heard a person in recovery say television is a great drug because if we don’t like something (i.e. – something doesn’t make you feel good; causes stress) we can just change the channel. By changing the channel to something I like I get immediate gratification. Are you a channel flipper? Maybe your problem is that you’re never satisfied. Or maybe you just have ADHD  ;-) But I digress. I would even take on the persona of some of the characters I liked best (sometimes I still do) acting like them and often quoting them in everyday situations.

When I got to be a tween I found an even better way to lose myself. I caught the acting bug and joined a little theatre youth group. Now, I could become a totally different person. I was a pretty good actor which would serve me well when my addiction progressed as I perfected the art of lying. I even considered pursuing an acting career but fear held me back. Fear would hold me back from a number of things throughout my lifetime. I would blame others for this fear resulting in a “me against the world” attitude which would not serve me well. Page 62 of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous said it best, “Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt”. Acting also helped me fine tune the different masks I would wear to fit in. I had a different mask for parents (acting the way I perceived they wanted me to act), a mask for friends and a mask for teachers, etc. As my addiction grew and I began to hang out with different crowds I had a different mask for each of those as well.

After living a life of escape for so long I was already an alcoholic by the time I purposely took that first drink. As Bill Wilson put it, after taking my first drink, “I had arrived”. Alcohol was the solution to my feelings of inadequacy. I was finally comfortable in my own skin and could take on the world. Alcohol took me out my intellect and drugged my emotions and that was the person the rest of the world came to know. As my disease progressed my “isms” did too so that by the time I entered recovery I was so far removed from that person I was uncomfortable being that I didn’t know who I was. My masks no long worked and I had to get rid of them. I had to look into myself and make the changes necessary to like, and later love, myself.

Just under five years into my recovery my father passed away. Thanks to sobriety I was able to forge a new loving relationship with him and he had become one of my best friends. I didn’t self-medicate to deal with this loss which I will be forever grateful of. Following the death of my dad I would go to work then come home and just start watching TV and reading books. My girlfriend kept pointing out that I wasn’t acting like myself but I denied this. After several months I had, for lack of a better description, a moment of clarity. I realized my girlfriend was right and I was once again using TV to escape. This time I was using it as an escape from my depression. I had never been depressed sober and had gone into denial about it. I was once again reminded that I don’t have a drugging or drinking disease but a thinking disease and must be ever vigilant against it.

Dave the Dude