After that night, I didn’t have a drink or a date for six months. My relationship with alcohol had died a hard death. Simultaneously, I finally realized that no man was going to make me happy, and any man worthwhile, I wasn’t ready for.
I don’t know if it’s that I’m stronger than some other people with addictions, than other people who can’t give up their crutches. I don’t know if I am just lucky, that I was born with the foresight to see all I was losing. I don’t know if I had finally become so ashamed of myself that I had no choice but to change.
I could have gone either way. I could have easily continued down a path where I let the fire inside go out. I could have been lost, as Ayn Rand says, “in hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.” I know I was one kiss, one drink, one mistake away from losing everything, forever.
The strange thing is that I don’t wish that I had never fallen so deep into men or alcohol. Yes, I have been bent and broken, but into better shape. The irony of life is that your greatest pains become your strengths if you want them to.
In the dark parts of my memories, there’s artwork. If the heartbreak hadn’t been so heavy, I wouldn’t have written that short story the day he didn’t want to see me. That short story wouldn’t have turned into a book. That book wouldn’t have lead to this book. I didn’t know it, but opportunity had disguised itself as misfortune. My antagonists were my heroes, I just couldn’t recognize them in their costumes. I’ve manipulated to live and breath on these pages. They gave me gifts greater than I’d ever known.
Without the alcoholism, I would never know the clarity of sobriety. I needed that dark to appreciate the light, to see that darkness illuminated everywhere, to realize they didn’t exist without one another. That’s the symbiotic beauty of this charming world; I didn't know good until I'd lost myself in bad.
So when the darkness comes, let it inside you.
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