Blackout Queen to Teenage Dream.
Tags: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Sobriety, Change Your Life, Life Lessons

The more voids I felt, the more my mind disappeared.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Maybe that was what my blackouts were about. The more voids I had, the more my mind disappeared. I’m not sure of the science but I know that there was a correlation.

In 2006 I tried out for the Winthrop Cheerleading team and broke my arm during the tryout. There are parts of this story I reflect on fondly. Like, I didn’t go to the hospital until AFTER the try out was over because I wasn’t a weak ass. We had to stunt during the tryout, and I did so with one hand because I was a beast. The most important part of this entire memory, according to my ego, was that the squad that I coached beat the team that the coach of the Winthrop cheerleading team also coached. I remember him and his spiky hair being more arrogant than I cared for, and so my defeating him made me feel superior. Talk about an ego.

Back to the story.

After I made the squad, (obviously I did), I went to the hospital and got my first cast. I wasn’t foreign to pain, but I was foreign to the concept of prescription drugs on my own. Around this time I’d just started taking Ritalin and my pain medication seemed to be an excellent addition.

Do you know what was also a fine edition? Tequila.

And what else? Desperation.

There was a boy that I liked who very much did not want me beyond sex. Naturally, I thought that if I had more sex with him he would eventually come around. He did not. He came around to one of my friends instead.

And so, tequila and pain medication became the healers of my broken cheer heart.

They also were the recipe for my first blackout. Naturally, I have no idea what happened. What I was told was that I was throwing shoes and screaming at someone’s house. The next day, I went to take a final exam, left the exam midway to vomit, and passed with a B.

Now, this seems like a pretty typical American College tale. Heartbreak. Alcohol and drug abuse. Blackout. What is also typical is not the part that we talk about as much. We pretend like those experiences stay at University or stay in our youth. They don’t.

My first blackout experience was the catalyst for years of blacking out. There was a 5 or 6 year period that it didn’t matter how much I had to drink, and I was going to blackout. One beer. Two bottles of wine. One shot. Whatever the liquid, my brain was shutting off as soon as it touched my tongue. I didn’t know it wasn’t okay. I did know that I was the only one experiencing it. Or I thought I was the only one experiencing it. I’ve never really been one for discretion, but this I kept to myself the best I could.

I can’t tell you all the things I did in a blackout state. Obviously, because I can’t remember, but also because sometimes I was blacked out with people I don’t know. Your friends will tell you what you did. People you don’t know, won’t.

I do have some awful memories of being a twenty-something wasteland and I still wonder why my brain couldn’t have chosen to blackout during those moments. I can see myself vividly being taken home by a bartender when I first moved to Atlanta. He was a toxic piece of shit, and I wanted everything to do with him.

The first time I met him I thought he looked like the type of asshole I’d want to treat me poorly for the rest of my life.

I found him one Sunday afternoon off of work drinking at a bar and well… you can imagine. Or maybe you can’t. Me, three sheets two the wind, rubbed up on him like a cat in heat. Well, I tried. I couldn’t really stand. Or talk. But I did my best to make sure he knew I was ready if he was ready. Now, I don’t know why at this point in the story I can still remember anything. Is my memory accurate? Probably not. I’m sure my thinking I rubbed on him was perhaps, in all reality, my falling on the floor next to him.

But I still remember him taking me home.

I still remember throwing up in his bathtub.

I still remember taking a shower and shaving my legs and my pubic hair with his razor so that I could appear to be sexy.

I still remember leaving the residual hair and vomit in the bathtub.

I still remember vomiting again.

What happened next?

I passed out.

To find out the rest of this story & how I changed my life click here