At Least They're Committed

All right. I know the saying goes “We’re functional alcoholics,” but despite tying one on a couple of days a week and probably relying on British standards for healthy amounts of consumption some other days, I’m not a drunk. (She says as she sips on her second Vesper, a James Bond drink made for her by DS. Whoa! This is totally wicked!)

I am and always will be, however, a mess. I remember all too well wandering away when my boyfriend and his best friend were fighting about me in college, shuffling off without a coat and curling into fetal position on the stairs of the Catholic church in Trinidad. It was cold, I was shaking, and I was waiting for the warmth of hypothermia to blanket me and then death. Never came. After an hour (or shorter or longer), my head cleared and I walked back to my room. I was done with the both of them.

This post on Facebook triggered all this:

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers. ~M. Scott Peck

It’s how I’ve survived this long. I can’t count how many times I wandered off to “die” like a sick animal. I didn’t get to. I guess maybe in the end I didn’t want to. It’s a cop-out and there’s always something more interesting — if not better — to come. How many times, my sweet grandchildren, will you hit rock bottom? I can’t tell you how many times I have. But it makes me stronger, smarter and, heh, more interesting.

I’m no less of a mess than I was in the early ’80s when I was in college or, for that matter, in the mid ’60s when in a fit of angst and rage I tried to jump out of a moving vehicle. I do deal with it better, maybe. I lock myself away in my room or in my office when I’m infuriated and I regroup and I move on within the hour.

Maybe it’s us messes — the ones of us who hit the end of the rope who are “propelled by our discomfort,” who reach for something, anything . . . change, something to make things right — maybe we’re necessary evils and maybe the world should be grateful and maybe I should cut myself a little slack.