My Body, Myself, and Mayday — Learning to Reconnect After Alcohol and Self-Neglect

The Body

I have treated my body as a thing — something that happens to travel through the world with me, rather than something I am. Sometimes I've been good to it: exercise, decent habits, the basics. But over the years, when depression took hold and alcohol became my go-to for difficult thoughts and life turned from normal to difficult, I stopped caring about it at all.

I wouldn't treat my belongings this badly. I drank too much. I didn't eat. I stopped exercising and ignored the warning signs and the pain that came with all of it.

And yet — I'm lucky. Despite doing almost nothing for it, my body still works. Thinning hair, a bit of flab here and there, one missing ball. That's the bill so far. I got the improbable, unearned lottery ticket of existing at all — being born is a longer shot than winning the biggest money jackpot on earth — and for a long stretch recently, I treated the prize like garbage. Winning that lottery doesn't guarantee happiness any more than the cash kind does. But it's still a strange thing, to hold something that improbable so carelessly.

Myself

But the body was never really the problem. "Myself" is something else — something that lives inside me somewhere, separate from the body it rides around in. And it's this part of me I have the most trouble loving and caring for. It's the part that's hardest to understand, let alone be kind to.

Mayday

There's a third part, and it's usually the troublemaker: the subconscious me. In the short run, I have little or no control over it. It runs on old habits, automated patterns, lust, reflex — and, underneath all of that, it's the part responsible for keeping me alive. It's been under construction since conception, and it's still being formed and tweaked today, whether I'm paying attention or not.

This is where I am right now — learning to make small, deliberate changes to that automatic self, using the conscious mind to guide the subconscious one toward something healthier. Not a dramatic turnaround. Just a slow correction, one small signal at a time. A mayday isn't a defeat — it's the moment you finally radio for help instead of going down quietly. That's where this is: less a rescue already completed, more a signal I've only just started sending.