All Roads Lead To Sammi
Sometimes I get so flooded with thoughts of her it takes my breath away. I start to hyperventilate, can’t stop the tears, and can’t stop the images from flashing across my mind. Some of them are memories which aren’t as haunting as the images that aren’t memories. They are these ideas in my head of what she looks like now. Where she spends her time. Who she’s around. What kind of drug she moved on to now. She always looks like shit. Decrepit. Hair loss, yellow skin, bulging eyes, broken nails, smoking a cigarette with people who keep her chained to the bottom of her misery. Some people would call this a panic attack. And no doubt if I went to a PCP or a psychiatrist, they would likely prescribe me Hydroxyzine to manage these “episodes.” Or if they were really shitty at their job, which I’m beginning to think most are, they’d prescribe me a benzodiazepine. I’ve been down that road in my 20’s. I was on Celexa, Trazodone, and Lorazepam PRN several times for three years-I started taking them all at the same time each year-in September or October I’d start feeling “depressed.” My sleep was screwed up. My anxiety was sky high. I had heart palpitations often. Each year, by February to mid March, these symptoms subsided and I’d stop taking the medications. And after the third time, I never felt the need to take them again. The nurse practitioner told me it seemed like I had seasonal affective disorder. My inner voice was laughing at her.
The flooded thoughts started yesterday. For some reason it occurred to me that my apartment here in Kissimmee is the only place I’ve ever had that hasn’t been tainted with memories of Sammi physically being here. It’s memory-free. And yet I’ve only been here three months and she is haunting me. I see different versions of her story play out every day at work. In the hospital I see people who come in intoxicated, in active withdrawal, homeless, jobless, no family, no car, no transportation, in denial, minimizing their use, lying about their last drink-there’s only so many different outcomes a person can have when it comes to addiction right? I don’t think about her when I’m sitting with these patients. Never. But when they are walking out those double doors with what little belongings they have left to their name, I see her walking out that door just like she did so many other times at so many other hospitals. I would assume a lot of them end up dead. Or in jail. Or moving on to opiates. Or having their kids taken away. Or driving their car into a tree because they were too fucked up to realize where the road was. I’d like to think that I’m just “planting seeds” as-I think-my mom used to say. That something I say to these patients will be helpful or resonate with them at some point on their journey. Who knows. Did anything I ever say to Sammi ever resonate with her? Did the time I spent trying to bake her weed brownies so she’d at least try to get high before getting drunk do anything?
In Al-Anon they taught me about the “3 C’s.” It’s a little mantra they have to ground themselves when people who have an alcoholic loved one start to feel responsibility for their loved one’s choices or life. “I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it.” If you can take a step back-which sometimes feels like trying to get out of quicksand-and really ask yourself those three questions and give an honest answer, then it’s a helpful mantra. For me, it hasn’t worked. I don’t speak in Al-Anon. I get so hysterical I doubt other members would even be able to understand my words. And all I really want to say is “all the time I wonder if she’s dead.” You’re supposed to focus on your feelings and not the alcoholic’s choices or life or feelings. Easy enough right? Fuck that. The truth is my feelings are 100% wrapped up in the choices she’s making right now that I don’t even know about. I don’t know where she is or if she’s safe. That affects every bit of how I feel in this moment right now. And I’ve been in the mental health game for several years. I know all the shit I would ask me if I were a patient: are these thoughts serving any purpose? What kind of thoughts can you replace those with? What are some grounding techniques you’ve tried in the past that would be helpful for you to stay focused in the present? What if you wrote a letter to her and didn’t send it?
Blah. Blah. Blah.
No, these thoughts aren’t serving a purpose. I could instead replace those thoughts with “she’s a grown ass woman and she is choosing to put alcohol above everything else in her life every single day just like she’s done for 14 years. I could do visualization techniques and think of the beach and use my five senses to put myself there. I’ve written tons of letters to her that never got sent and some that did.
The fact is that she’s my sister and no matter how hard I try to hate her to make it easier, I still worry about her and care about her. And if she called me tomorrow and said she was in rehab or sober-I don’t know if I could not participate in that like I’ve done before. The reality is that she has been absolutely awful. To my mother. To my dad. To every one of my siblings. To me. I don’t know how many holidays were ruined by her. Even when she wasn’t physically in the room. It was always about her. And not in a good way. In an exhausting, sleep disturbing, nauseating, and emotionally draining kind of way. I think last Christmas was the first holiday where she didn’t completely suck up all of the energy in the room. Imagine that. First holiday in like 14 years. I think writing is the only thing that helps. It gets it out of my head where it’s all jumbled and where she’s tied to a million other things. It helps separate some of the bull shit and pain. I think it makes me a bit more logical and less emotional to have it right in front of my face.
She probably would have loved my dogs though. Probably would have loved my huge couch that I bought. Probably would have laughed at what a hippie I’ve turned into, but would have been excited to eat some vegan food. She used to love food. When she was getting sober and not just binge-eating it and throwing it up. She’d probably be amazed at our sisters and brother-how absolutely amazing the three of them have turned out. Successful, driven, hard-working, beyond intelligent. She probably would have wanted to visit me often to go on rides at Universal or go to Sea World.
These are all of the things I think she would have loved to do had she not been drinking her life away. Sometimes I just get so angry that all the roads lead back to her. To what could have been. It’s nauseating and so devastating and an impossible fucking situation that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
