Work Text:
“So I’m six months sober now. Or, well, in two days I’ll be six months sober. Officially.” Mickey clears his throat. Starting off in NA was always weird and awkward, especially with the whole “reintroduce yourself every time and proclaim to a room full of people how utterly fucked up you are” thing, but today was especially anxiety inducing. Or, well, anxiety wasn’t quite the right word. Dejected, maybe? No that’s not it. Mickey rubs a hand across his face. He’ll figure it out later.
“It’s uh…it’s weird. Still being here, at NA. I guess I thought by now I’d either be totally perfectly fine or OD’d in an alley somewhere.” He laughs without humor. “Sorry, not appropriate. I guess I just uh…I feel like I should be happier? Like I should be celebrating this milestone–six months yeah!!–but…I think I just feel worse?” Mickey sighs, leaning his elbows onto his knees. He takes in a deep breath.
“It’s like there’s been a knot in my stomach for…Jesus, as long as I’ve been alive I think. It just keeps twisting and winding in on itself until it's so heavy and tangled there’s no way to get rid of it. And at first it was just like family pressure, you know? With my dad, how he is, and his job and his expectations and…everything–it just didn’t help the knot. Just got tangled up in there. And then there was school and everything just like…expanded. Or, no, I guess it would be more appropriate for the metaphor to say it got more tangled, right? Either way, it all compounded in on itself and the knot just got tighter and tighter. And then when…when I was uh…I-uh-I was using, the knot would loosen, just for a little, just for a few hours… And it was heaven.
“The knot was never gone gone, just, like, less present I guess. Like I didn’t have to think about it for a while–like I didn’t have to think about anything. It was so easy to just let it happen–no noise, no feeling, no constant jabbering at myself to do this or that or whatever, just…nothing. For a while. And I miss it. I know, you’re not supposed to say that or whatever, you’re supposed to be like ‘no my life is so much better now that I’m clean!’ But honestly? It’s not. My life mostly sucks. I live in a shitty apartment that I can barely make rent on, I don’t have any family to go to, I don’t have a-a structure in my life without school, because like, as much pressure as it was, I had instructions. Someone to tell me what I was doing right and wrong, someone to assign a numeric value to the effort I put into something–to show me I was doing it right. But now I’m on my own.
“And I know, I have friends. Well, I have one friend–but they’re great! They just…they don’t understand what’s going on with me. What’s wrong with me. And–and most of that is definitely me, I’m not super great at sharing and I have no idea how to talk to someone about this horrifying…shameful thing I have constantly weighing down on me every second of the day. Because it is! Every waking moment is me fighting off the niggling little voice in my brain telling me that the knot could loosen again if I wanted it. And to shut that voice out I have to fill my brain with a million more voices on what I have to do instead–job, rent, laundry, groceries, is my metro pass expired, am I eating well enough, am I doing good enough, and on and on–and all of those voices just make the knot tighter and tighter which just makes the little voice louder and louder and I just… I’m caught in this never ending cycle.
“So that brings me to six months. I’ve fought off that stupid little voice for six months straight. I’ve reached a goal–half a year. I made it a whole half a year. …But the knot is still there. I’ve built myself up so high, 183 days up, that if… when I fall now…it’s going to be so much worse. It’s just like at school, or–or at home, or wherever–I have all this expectation placed on me, self inflicted or otherwise, and every day I don’t break it’s like…a timer clicking down. Or, no, more like another notch on the track of a rollercoaster. The higher you climb the further you fall, right? The anxiety just builds every day because I know, I know , I’m going to mess up eventually. And now that I’m six months I’ll just be letting people down more. Khalil, Joe…myself, I guess. If I relapse now it’s like all the work I did, all the work they did supporting me, was for nothing. It’s like every day I’m getting closer to the sun, and eventually the wax holding me together is gonna finally melt. They’ll all realize what a fuckup I am, that I can’t get better, that they wasted their time on me. Hah, and guess what? All those thoughts? They just make the knot tighter. And every time the knot gets tighter, that little voice gets louder, and I’m another step closer to fulfilling the goddamn self fulfilling prophecy.
“I just…I just want to be happy that I’ve made it this far. That maybe it means I can keep it up. …It’s just so goddamn hard.”
Mickey takes a shaky breath, ruminating on what he’s said. Damn, he never even talked this much in therapy, maybe NA was good for him. He lifts his face out of his fidgety hands, tugging at a strand of hair that’s gotten a bit too long. A sigh. “So, yeah. I guess that’s how I’ve been doing.” Mickey gives a tight lipped smile, finally looking up to the group leader.
His heart didn’t pound too fast here, his breathing wasn’t shallow like it got on bad nights. It was easy to talk in this room, with people who really understood what he meant. Maybe not perfectly, but they knew the feeling of wanting so desperately to be better. To keep making those steps forward all while wishing you could feel like you did back then just one more time. The faces around Mickey reflect back his anxiety, his dejection. They reflect back that weary hope as well. That maybe they could get better. Maybe this was a long journey and this was only the first step and it might never get easier, but what matters is they were willing to try. Mickey had to be willing to try–to commit himself fully to being better than he was yesterday.
Hesitant, he realizes. He was feeling hesitant.