Mirror, mirror

During the week, the days were broken up into more manageable pieces, hours at work sandwiched in between meetings, evenings spent in the warm grip of fellowship and recovery. But the weekends were a struggle.

For years it hadn’t been necessary to think of anything to do. All I needed was a drink. That was always excitement enough. And, Lord knows, it provided me with plenty of memorable activities, like waking up in jail or on a park bench, not entirely certain how I’d gotten there. Just taking a drink was a sure-fire way of killing some time – and, in the end, I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself or somebody else in the process.

So, the expanse of the weekend provided me with some challenges. How do I get from Saturday morning to Sunday night without taking a drink?

One of the difficulties was that sobriety had started to stir up a lot of feelings that had previously been jammed down flat like cardboard boxes on the bottom of a dumpster.  But, without alcohol to keep things compacted, memories began to surface and feelings, once misshapen, began to expand like the sponge capsules kids drop into a glass of water, slowly taking recognizable shape – a lion, a turtle, a long-necked giraffe.

As my past got clearer and clearer, and the choices I had made took on more definitive context, a tremendous wave of self-hate rose up internally, a monstrous sponge hippo, that was alarmingly intense. Without the windbreaks provided by my weekly activities -- the coming and going to work, the readings I would do each morning from recovery literature and the naps I would take each afternoon before making an evening meeting -- I felt powerless against the rising tide of negativity and self-hatred that made the weekends an emotional marathon.

Unable to think of anything constructive to do between meetings, I would pace around my apartment for hours at a time, going over and over the same negative thoughts and reaching the same negative conclusions every time. I lived in a small studio apartment, cage-like in many respects, and I can only imagine that someone looking in from the outside would have thought I looked like a lion at the zoo, pacing and pacing, shaking my unkempt yet (at that time) full head of hair, and growling at no one in particular. Occasionally, I would sit down and write in a diary or forage through the icebox for something to eat, but most of the time I was pacing, pacing.

On the wall of my apartment was a full-length mirror I had gotten from my grandmother’s house when she died. It was by far the nicest piece of furniture in my apartment, which was otherwise populated by a vinyl-covered easy chair and a saggy couch I had gotten off the street.

The mirror was a true antique, exquisitely constructed and framed, the glass thick and reflective. It hung from the wall, out of place in my apartment, yet a lingering testament to the craftsmanship of a bygone era. I could picture in my mind where it had hung in my grandmother’s house, in the guest room that my sister and I would sleep in when we stayed overnight, and I could remember playing peekaboo in front of it when I was a child.

On the wall in my apartment it was hard to avoid, and as I paced away each sober weekend, I would glance at it as I passed by on each lap around the tiny apartment, catching just a fleeting image of myself. On one go round, one weekend, I remember suddenly doing a double-take as I passed by the mirror, catching a glance at my reflection and, for a moment, not recognizing myself. I stopped, backed up, looked fully into the mirror. Who was this person? It was someone I didn’t know. I took a step closer to the mirror, then another, my eyes boring into the reflection in the glass. Before I knew it, I had come face to face with the mirror, my nose just inches from the glass, staring into my own eyes.

The anger, the frustration, and the self-hatred I felt inside seemed to bubble up all at once, spilling over in a frothy mess, and involuntarily, with a spasm of disgust I crashed my forehead into the mirror.

Thank God they knew how to make things in the old days. The glass never broke or cracked and beyond the headache that soon developed the only visible evidence of my outburst was a large red spot  -- later to turn a purplish-yellow – in the center of my forehead.

The bruise ultimately disappeared, but in the week or so that it stood front and center it served as a constant reminder of just how deeply the negative feelings about myself were rooted and provided the necessary motivation for me to begin looking more deeply into myself to better understand the kind of pain I was in and to search for a possible way out.

I still have some concerns when I look in the mirror, though mostly now it’s because of wrinkles. It’s taken years to develop a regular habit of taking inventory, yet such inventories have provided a means for keeping negative feelings about myself in check, to keep things emotionally manageable so that they don’t overflow with quite the same violent force.

The mirror survived – and today hangs in the apartment I share with my wife and kids. It’s still the nicest piece of furniture that I have, though I have acquired a far more comfortable couch and long ago returned the easy chair to the streets from whence it came. I have never since had the same kind of self-hatred that I felt that day and weekends are no longer a problem for me. In fact, it’s now the rest of the week that messes me up.