A shell of my former self

While I sincerely hope this blog helps someone, I'm writing it, first and foremost, for myself. When I first began dealing with my son's substance disorder, I could barely say the word "addiction." Saying the word out loud made it true. Sometime early on, I was driving around town finishing up some Christmas shopping, and I felt like an overfilled water balloon, my composure barely containing the volcano of emotions under the surface. It was as if the slightest pinprick, in the form of a misspoken word, or even a look, might brush up against the membrane and pop it, causing a tsunami of emotions to gush out. The pinprick came in the form of a phone call from my sister. As soon as I heard her voice, I pulled into a dark parking lot and spent the next hour or so sobbing and choking out fear, sorrow, panic, dread, and confusion while she patiently tried to piece it all together and offer comfort. I think I felt safe enough to release all those swirling and churning waters now that there was a vessel large enough to hold them. My sister and I are very close and hearing her voice when I'm barely holding it together often breaches the dam. Or at least it used to.

Another time during that same year, while talking to my best friend who has the same tear-inducing, safe-vessel effect on me as my sister, I literally could not say the word "heroin." I wept and shared my complete despair with her until she said the word for me, and I just nodded. Ten years later, and ten years further into the house of mirrors that is addiction, I almost never experience that unleashing of emotion, at least in the form of tears, and heroin still scares the shit out of me, but I can say the word as easily as I can say meatloaf. Almost. I am a shell of my former self.

I don't tell very many people about my son's struggles with drugs for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I want to respect his privacy, and I am a private person by nature anyway. But when I do talk about it to my close friends and family, I almost never cry anymore. I recount stories about incidents that are far scarier and more serious; they make the incidents from ten years ago seem trivial by comparison and I sound like I'm reporting the weather. I wonder what they think.

I still feel. I just don't cry. I try to explain my seemingly soul-less delivery, but even that sounds hollow and empty. I'm informed enough to know that this is probably a combination of necessary self-protection, post-traumatic numbing, and fatigue/burn-out, and I'm glad that while I still have intense emotions around this situation, I don't fall apart and wonder how I'll get up in the morning. Still, I miss the honest and real sharing of what I am feeling.

This blog is an attempt to reclaim my former self. Well, at least part of myself. The one that feels, but not the one that curls into a fetal position and pulls her shirt up over her face to remember that she's still breathing.