Visiting Hours — Surviving the Narrative, Not the Addiction

The pressure of keeping up my internal dream got harder and harder to carry, and slowly, so slow like a growing tree, it turned into something I wasn't able to hold. My search for support left me empty, my work was gone, my family lived on the other side of the planet, a whole night in time difference, they were hard to reach. It was a lonely place where I was.

I found my internal support and it was a bottle of wine in the evening. It gave me a relief, a break from the feeling of failure, and I could breathe. I was the heartbeat of the household, cooking dinners, walking my lovely kids to school, doing homework, packing lunches and my biggest mistake, to keep the peace. Keeping the peace was what I had been doing for a decade, not saying no, not putting myself first and pretending, lying to myself, that I could manage it.

That's the whole truth of it, and it's taken me a long time to be able to say it plainly. I was made to believe that there was something wrong with me, that my feelings were not valid. That I should just try a bit harder, it was just a thought, It was just in my head. And this is what I did, and all I could do at this time.

My body knew differently, in a different voice, but this voice I didn't listen to. I didn't listen because I didn't know I was spoken to. Or maybe I did listen, and misunderstood the message, what it tried to tell me was in a foreign language I didn't understand back then, I just picked up on the feeling it left me with. This feeling wasn't pleasant, it was a feeling about something that wasn't right. And my toolbox was poorly equipped, it only had a bottle of wine in it. Sometimes it was ok, and other times it wasn’t. To see this with the distance of time and hard-won wisdom, that is truly hard.

I understand why it looked erratic from the outside, because I was worse in social settings, I found it difficult to pretend I was OK, so I drank to fit in, to be the great guy I had always been. The guy I was told I was, and scared of being the new me, the broken useless man, which I was told I was other times. I can't argue with what it looked like. But I know what it actually was, because I was the one living inside it — and I wasn't abusive, I wasn't neglectful — the only person I let down was myself. It was drowning while being watched. I reached for the only anesthetic strong enough to let me keep breathing through losing myself. You don't reach for something that is numbing, addictive and leaves you sick, just because you don't care. You reach for it because you feel trapped, and there is nowhere left to go. I was playing a game of Snakes and Ladders, where the longer I played, the more snakes I found.

---

And then the spectators arrived. The monkeys had seen me—they had been to the zoo. I had been on display, it was carefully planned, they were called in to watch. Even my own friends and siblings thought it was a vivid display of a good show. I was the one, when the show was over, to handle the shame, the grief and hangover alone.

This story doesn't end here, but there is an intermission instead, a time where some of this faded into the background. The zoo had closed down. So far in my life this was a time of promise, of hope and progress. Meeting new people, expanding my inner circle. They saw me differently, a whole person, someone with passion and guts. We had a wedding, it was a new beginning with a family of 5. My parents as witness, my son as priest and my daughter as flower girl, and my new son giving his mum away. It was like a children's role play, perfectly perfect.

But behind the curtains there was work being done, slowly and methodically, that I was not aware of. I got a sniff of it from time to time — friends that didn't meet my gaze, odd greetings, children that couldn't come on a play date. Somewhere in there I got glimpses of a clown. Not a kind one — a smile with blueberry jam smeared where a child's mouth should be, like something from a forest gone wrong. I had to blink. I told myself to just soldier on, push through, I had made it after all. Just work harder.

There was a fury growing, that I hadn't crumpled and disappeared. The fury couldn't reach me directly, so the people closest to me — my parents, my partner, my children — became the only way to slip poison into me. I wasn't immune, I was weak after decades of this, I was an easy prey when you knew how to hunt.

My children were told that I drank wine because I didn't care about them, at the same time as we were openly talking to them about how we were working on quitting alcohol. So the trap was easy to set.

I think about what it does to a child to be told that. Not just that their dad was struggling — that his struggling was proof he loved them less. That's not a story about my drinking anymore. That's a story that asks a child to choose which half of themselves to believe.

There were warnings—groundwork for a failure that hadn't happened yet. I would let them down. I didn't care. That was the story being told before I had even failed. But I had the tickets. I had bought them. They never got used—not because I didn't buy them, but because the story had already decided I had to fail. I had empty bottles and a head full of self-doubt. It didn't happen in small increments. It came all at once — a shift, a vision — like a kick to someone already on the ground.

Here's the trap I was actually in, underneath all of it: to stop drinking, I needed a nervous system that felt safe enough to do it. And I didn't have one. Not while I was actively losing my kids, in real time, with no way to stop it. So the thing I needed to do to get them back was the thing I couldn't do while I was losing them. Drink to survive the loss. Lose them because I drink. Around and around.

In desperation I let them go. It was a pain I wasn't prepared for, because my version of letting them go was very different to my ex-wife's plan. A plan shared with my children even before I knew about it. I was brought face first back in trauma. It hit me so hard that I fell and kept falling. It got dark, the forest again covered the sky, and I passed out.

---

I don't have a clean way to end this yet. I know I own my part of it — the drinking was mine, the choice to reach for it was mine, and I'm not writing this to hand that off to someone else. But I also know the story that got told about why I was drinking wasn't the true one. And somewhere between those two facts is where I'm still standing, trying to work out what to do with both of them at once.

When the house was empty, and I had woken up to a reality that my nightmares had fully played out, the exact nightmares I had been losing myself over for decades. I had hit the bottom, I had flatlined, and I could stop drinking. I actually could. And I did.

I don't need to drink any more, but I need a quiet room when my heart is pounding. I need to get out of bed at 4 in the morning to stop thinking about my children, I need to find my inner child and hold its hand. Grab him so hard, press him to my chest, and sob, I see you. I have realised that people, even the ones that are the closest to me, don't understand the state that this has left me in. I have to accept that they will not understand, not fully anyway, and what it takes for them to understand is something I wish for nobody to experience.

It is for me to carry this, I know that now. I write to try to heal, let my body know it can rest, the fight is over. I try to convince my body it's safe now; that's not easy; I think it's stopped listening. I will have to wait for it to pick up, to listen, to accept that it’s safe.

The way home will be hard, and I will continue to do the best I can, which I always have. And I will be there for all my children, my parents, and the woman we celebrated in our fairytale wedding. Just the way I am, just me. I will be authentic, strong when I can and weak when I must. I love more than my heart can hold.

And maybe — at last — I will learn to be there for me too.