Faithful To A Lie

Faithful to a Lie: An Anonymous Account of Alcoholism and Its Effects

By

Varo Borja

As sure as night is dark and day is light, I keep you on my mind both day and night, and happiness I know proves that it’s right. Because you’re mine, I walk the line. – Johnny Cash

Alcoholism is an often misunderstood and mistreated illness, involving the suffering of not only the afflicted person, but the destruction of ties both familial and professional. Everyone around the alcoholic suffers to some extent, and is affected and sickened by a terminal disease without a cure. If someone is sick with virtually any other terminal disease, there is much suffering, but there is also much goodwill expressed towards the sufferer and the family of the afflicted. With alcoholism this is almost never the case. The alcoholic tears himself and his family down, running through the lives of people like a train gone haywire. There is financial ruin as well as emotional and spiritual devastation, and alcoholism doesn’t stop there. Alcoholism is a family disease and can be passed down to the sufferer’s children and grandchildren. One may ask, is there any solution to this type of devastation? From my own experience the answer is yes. My recovery from alcoholism has entailed much sacrifice and hardship, but contrary to common knowledge it has not been a matter of willpower; rather it has been an exercise in surrender that has included much joy and the development of friendships that have been life-saving and unconditional.

My exposure to alcohol as a child was somewhat limited. My father drank, and drank heavily, but almost never around my brother and me. He gave me my first sip of beer when I was eight years old. I still remember what the can looked like, the setting (a crisp autumn day, much like this one), and the taste. I didn’t care for it at the time, but I remember feeling grown up and a part of what was happening around me: two grown men being cool and getting drunk. My first real drunk was at age 16. My buddy Scratch and I lifted a half of a fifth of Everclear from a high school party and rushed back to his house, nervous and expectant with the teenage giddiness accompanied with breaking the rules. We mixed the stuff with several different types of Kool-Aid and drank it down for one single purpose: to get drunk. Scratch ended up getting sick and passing out after one cupful. I drank mine, the rest of his, and the rest of the bottle. I remember feeling much like a newborn baby must feel: carefree, alive, and nurtured by the nectar of the gods. My drinking took on much greater proportions from that point. I graduated from High School with barely a B average, but I earned an A in the ability to drink more than any of my friends or acquaintances.

After graduation, all my friends and I packed in our cars and drove to Myrtle Beach for a week of drunken orgies and no parental guidance. I bottomed out in my girlfriend’s hotel room; I was drunk on cheap liquor, naked except for a pair of boxer briefs and passed out in her bed with a five-day growth of beard in the midst of her polite society friends. She broke up with me not long after that, and I went on another vacation: to the nut ward. I had my first case of delirium tremens there, I tried to climb the fence a day later, and I was diagnosed not only with alcoholism, but with bipolar disorder. I was very belligerent and the staff doctor put me on high doses of Thorazine and Benzotropine, a drug that counteracts the horrendous side effects of the chemical straightjacket, Thorazine. When I would misbehave, the staff would take away my Benzotropine and my joints would lock up, making me unable to sit or stand up straight and consigning me to a constricted type of movement known as the “Thorazine shuffle”. I was introduced to another type of treatment in this facility that didn’t involve the use of chemicals and that would aid me, up until this day, in my continued progress towards a better life: Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to my first AA meeting so doped up on Thorazine that I couldn’t sit up straight, so I just looked at the floor and took in the smells and sounds of the place: Skin Bracer aftershave, rot-gut coffee, prayer, and laughter. The meeting made an impression on me, but not enough to alter the course of my life at that early juncture.

Four months after leaving my first treatment center I enrolled in classes at ASU. I did my best to go to class for the first month and to control, with daily exertions of willpower, my drinking, but soon I succumbed to the pleasures of the dorm and started making daily trips to the local package store instead of to my classes. I landed on the rocks two months later and had to take a medical withdrawal from school and go back to the same treatment center I had been in the year before. Another bout with delirium tremens was in store for me, along with several nights in the hole (the isolation room) and more mood stabilizing drugs. I was reintroduced to Alcoholics Anonymous in the facility and this time it took, at least for a little while. Over the next few years I was to put together some significant periods of sobriety, but the relapses in between did much damage to myself, to my family, and to the ones I loved.

The effects of my drinking were both numerous and horrid. My drinking aggravated my bi-polar illness, making work difficult and school impossible. I accumulated a list of more than fifty employers in the span of ten years, with experiences ranging all the way from installing foam insulation in newly-built Wal-Mart stores, to driving an express route delivering packages, to hanging sheet rock and various other construction trades. Drinking at first had been a type of social lubricant, but my relationships with women suffered greatly and I became a selfish abuser. I had sworn as a child to never strike a woman in anger, but by the time I was 19 I had broken a girl’s nose and caused her to fall down a flight of stairs; the fall made her break her leg as well. I had more one night sexual encounters than I cared to remember or could remember, due to my blackout type of drinking; the relationships that did last were fraught with emotional, verbal, and sometimes physical abuse. Relations with my family suffered greatly as well, and my mother kicked me out of her house more than once, telling me bluntly to never return. One of the worst feelings that I’ve ever experienced is seeing not only my mother, but my father crying, desperately pleading with me to change my behavior and stop hurting my family, as well as myself. My friendships were strained because the boys who I had grown up drinking with settled down, and started careers and families. My high school friends like Scratch went off to college at universities like UNC and NC State. They earned degrees and became offended when I would call them at 3 in the morning, drunk and belligerent with Hank Jr. blasting in the background, waking their wives and children, and trying to relive our days of glory when they had to be at work four hours later. I even tried to go back to college, but I went on a prodigious bender and the doors of opportunity closed on me once again with a clang. The referee of life had counted to two several times in my drinking career, but I always managed to rebound off the canvas with my intelligence and willpower, only to be pummeled again on the ropes by the 400 lb. juggernauts Jim Beam and George Dickel.

Through the years I managed to put together three significant periods of sobriety, which were very rewarding while they lasted, but all three ended in dismal failure. My first significant period of sobriety was from early 1994 to late 1996. During this time I became quite respected in the AA community and developed a relationship with an AA sponsor that was both rewarding and based on unconditional love. His name was Jerry, and he was a young man like me. We spent many hours together sharing and encouraging each other, but in the end we both left Alcoholics Anonymous to join religious congregations. I ended up relapsing due to my inability to be honest with my fellow parishioners and the lack of identification, or camaraderie that I felt there. Jerry is still sober to this day, but when I see him our conversations are brief and full of platitudes and empty pleasantries. My second substantial period of sobriety was from early 1998 to the first month of the year 2000. During this time I developed another friendship with an AA sponsor named Dick, and was surrounded by a group of young men and women who made me feel both whole and loved. We had many days of joy and shared pain together, and I grew by leaps and bounds in both an emotional and social sense, but I failed to expand upon my spiritual life and ended up relapsing after I’d met a drug-using girl and gone home with her. My last unsuccessful period of sobriety was from late 2000 to mid 2003. During this period I rekindled the relationships with my former AA friends, and began using Dick as my AA sponsor again. I worked through the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous this time, but I failed in the end to fully grasp the first step of the twelve: we admitted we were powerless over alcohol. This fatal flaw in the foundation that I had built brought the whole structure crashing down on my head in June of 2003. For the next two months I knew nothing but a living hell; I experienced a quality of pain through my drinking and the drug crystal methamphetamine that I had never known to belong to mortal man, and after losing absolutely everything worthwhile in my short life, including my sanity, I surrendered.

My last, and hopefully terminal period of sobriety started on August 12, 2003 in the midst of personal chaos and financial ruin. I sobered up, first in jail, and then in a local hospital and renewed my commitment to recovery with a willingness I had never before been able to muster. The quality of my surrender was golden this time; I had absolutely no reservations about my ability to control my use and abuse of alcohol through my own willpower. I struggled for a year to maintain employment, but I didn't struggle with the fact that I needed to take direction both from a Higher Power and from a recovery sponsor. The next two years were full of trials and hardships, but I managed to go back to school, renew and rebuild lost relationships, and most importantly maintain an attitude of compliant willingness. The last year has been very rewarding, and I have attained some measure of success; school, friendships, a relationship with a woman, and family ties are all growing stronger and more fulfilling every day. I have more friendships today than I can keep up with, and most of them are based on a mutually affirming and sincere desire to grow spiritually.

In conclusion, it has occurred to me recently that I was always very tough on myself for my lack of faithfulness to God, to the women I was involved with, to my family, and to my many employers. I had always considered myself to be a person lacking in fidelity to anyone or anything, but this is only a half-truth. I was abjectly faithful to the bottle that beat me mercilessly and also to the fight to overcome the allure that whiskey and the lifestyle associated with it held for me. I bloodied myself against the brick wall imposed upon me by my disease and by my own stubborn willfulness, instead of surrendering the fight and taking the directions given to me, which were to step around the wall. I have always been a very willful person; I managed to stay alive for over ten years in a world that gave me odds on living no more than three. Several doctors and psychiatrists gave up on me over the years, consigning me to the heap of negative statistics associated with alcoholics and drug addicts. However, there were some who remained faithful to me through all the disasters and drug treatments: namely God, my closest AA friends, and my AA sponsors. God didn’t give up on me because it isn’t in his nature to throw away His children; he can’t dispose of those he has bought with His own blood, sweat, and suffering. AA members and sponsors are much like God in that they invest years of patient assistance to those who suffer from the disease of alcoholism. However, unlike God, AA members are mortal and have limitations on their ability to persevere with the worst of the cases presented to them. There were a handful of loyal persons who didn’t give up on me though, and it is for them as well as a loving God that I will be eternally grateful and do my best to express that gratitude through a life lived not only in compliant humility, but active service to those who want a way out of lives lived in faithfulness to a lie.