Child of the Bottle

  One of the greatest ways of supporting isolationism is by idolizing it.   How does an individual cope with the stress of being taken out of one environment and put into a new, completely different one? For me, it wasn’t too difficult: I developed an overactive imagination that became my reality. The move from living with my mother to moving in with my grandparents could have been entitled “A Tale of Two Cities” in which there were very few comparisons between the two. From an unstructured environment where I could play out late and the parties never seemed to stop, to an environment bereft of any emotional expression; unless they were in the forms of outbursts by my grandmother or various racist rans by my grandfather (we lived in a small town where any non-white family was scared away by waking up to burning crosses in their yards in the middle of the night). Of the two, I attached myself to the emotional outbursts and left the racism to my grandfather. It was there...

  The seed planted in the desert may grow, but you may not like what it grows into.   Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it? Some dreams feel like life and life sometimes feels like a dream. Some of my earliest memories are skewed, just like everyone else. But I do remember never having an actual sense of safety. There was always something in the air that permeated underlying tension. Almost as if people were always arguing out of sight and in other rooms. As memory started taking hold, that “sense” turned into concrete experiences. From as far back as I can remember, there was always some form of drug/drugs in any household I lived in. Until I was 9, I remember living with my mother, who found herself in and out of relationships. It was then that I first caught a glimpse of how to perceive relational cycles. In the case of my mother: attract people, pull them in, make them need her, then push them away until they never came back. Rinse and repeat.   I could see this pr...

 My name is Damien, and I am an alcoholic.  See! That wasn't too hard, was it? Not too long ago, I knew I had issues with drinking, but enjoyed it so much that it didn't see myself as having problems. I wasn't always this way. I used to be able to function by only drinking 3-5 times a week. It got much worse during Covid, though. At times, I was drinking myself into a stupor, passing out, then waking up and doing it all over again.  But where did this all come from? How did it go that far? Was I just born this way? Was I another one of Frankenstein's monsters that nourished with alcohol? When talking about something that is so deeply ingrained into one's system, it is sometimes good to go into their history and the influences It had on the individual.  September 27th, 1975: Let the good times roll!!! I was born at 5:10pm in the evening. I was told that my grandfather was a manager of the local drive-in theater and that he announced my birth over the intercom system....