A Radical Act of Survival and Self-Acceptance: Embracing The Alcoholic Label
sobriety empowered me to seek neutrality, acceptance, and serenity. i stopped comparing myself to others, judging my thoughts and resisting my feelings.
by Jessica Hoppe.
My grandfather drank until the day he died. Though there aren’t many facts confirming the actual cause of death, when asked everyone in my family says, “Diabetes.” No one would dare mention that he would not, could not, stop drinking.
My mother was one of those people, although her memories of him are few. Violent alcohol-fueled fights between him and her mother, days of abandonment, his absence resolved by scouring the local bars. The barmen and town drunks knew my mother well. They wished someone like her would come looking for them.
“I love that man. Don’t ask me why,” she sobbed the day we received the news from Honduras of his passing.
I was six years old when I met him. It was the first time I remember visiting New York City. We drove from the suburbs of New Jersey to the Bronx where he had a place near Tremont Avenue and filed into the hallway of his railroad apartment, standing awkwardly in an assembly line before him—my mother upfront and father behind us—each parent securing the perimeter.
“Estás gorda, Chili,” my grandfather said, unable to make eye contact with my mother, Cilia, who seemed warmed by the sound of his nickname for her though pricked by his insult. Like him, she’d always struggled with her weight. He was red-faced and bloated and nearly identical to my uncle, which made sense because they were both named, Jamie. I wondered why the son had died first, and why the father hadn’t come to the funeral. “Estas son tus hijas?” he said, touching my face with scorched, trembling hands that appeared to be covered in moss. I was terrified but I knew what this meant to my mother, so I hid my fear and repulsion.
He offered to buy us ice cream so we followed him to a bodega where he strolled knowingly to the far cooler after instructing us to pick a popsicle from the display under the register. “Quédense ahí. No me sigan” he said commanding us not to follow him. He and the cashier greeted each other like brothers as he wrapped my grandfather’s glass bottle in a brown paper bag, rolled the top down into a collar and handed it over with the imprint of condensation revealing a gleaming gold label underneath. He was met by more friends just outside the shop and stood on the corner with them all afternoon. He never returned to the apartment to chat with my parents or get to know me and my sisters. The next time I saw him it was from a hospital bed. It wouldn’t be until I was thirty-four that I found out alcoholism was the only thing we had in common.
I am nearly 4 years sober and a woman of color who identifies as an alcoholic. Coming from a family that continues to hide our secrets in the shadows of our toxic origins and a community for which addiction and alcoholism are still regarded as a moral failing, this is a radical act of survival and self-acceptance.
As unrealistic as it may sound, I had no idea I was an alcoholic. What was clear to me was that I had problems that drove me to drink—relationships, money, and heaps of unresolved trauma. I believed fixing the tangible issues would temper my drinking and soothe my suffering. It never occurred to me that resolving those would be impossible unless I was of sound mind and body. I couldn’t stop someone else from hurting me until I stopped doing it first.
Before I learned how to save myself, a stranger did so—perhaps this is the grace we all need. While this woman was enjoying a summer evening sitting on the steps of the Whitney Museum, she saw me fall out of a cab, tumble onto the street and attempt to cross the West Side Highway in a blackout. When she contacted me a week later to explain, I had no memory of the incident. To this day, I still don’t. While I never questioned her account, I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to face the consequences of my actions. My instinct had always been to hide what caused me fear or shame but now I knew this information wasn’t safe inside my sick and dangerously secretive mind.
Careful not to examine the wires of my self-sabotage alone, I carried the message like a timebomb to my therapist and later, my family. The night I divulged my secret to them, my mother was inconsolable. “You didn’t learn it from me,” she said, failing to consider her own father’s addiction. I tried to assuage their fears by sharing my therapist’s recommendation to go to AA where I could begin my program with 90 days of abstention. “I’m gonna do it and see how I feel,” I pledged.
I immersed myself in every aspect of sobriety—cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, clean diet, frequent exercise, no sex or relationships for a year (which became more than 2), and daily group therapy in AA. Sobriety empowered me to seek neutrality, acceptance, and serenity. I stopped comparing myself to others, judging my thoughts and resisting my feelings.
Instead, I learned it was possible, no matter the conditions, to interrupt the emotion enveloping me and examine the evidence behind my train of thought. Not to immediately transfer my feelings from negative back to positive but to accept them— much like riding a wave by floating on your back. Without fighting the current of life’s challenges, I was able to attune to the reality of my present circumstances. With that presence of mind, I could accept ‘life on life’s terms’ without turning to a mood or mind-altering substance in order to cope.
When my grandfather died, learning about our family history with addiction felt revelatory. “How does it feel to have had an alcoholic father and now an alcoholic daughter?” I asked my mother.
“Qué? What do you mean, Jessy? I don’t see you that way. And my father drank but he always worked y siempre bien vestido, well-dressed, like you.”
I understood my mother’s confusion because as much as I had hidden my drinking, I now hide what it takes for me to stay sober. I worry more about not making others feel awkward or concerned for me—appearing transcendent rather than being honest. I realized how little we know about alcoholism, yet how much is assumed about the alcoholic. To my mother, it was inconceivable that her precious progeny had somehow gotten fucked up. This was not how she raised me.
“Don’t say that about yourself,” she said.
“But I am, Mami, I’m an alcoholic,” I replied, pressing my chest to hers drawing forth the tears of generations from our eyes—she, in mourning, I, here, baptized.
There are secret doors separating my mother and my grandfather that will never be unlocked—harm I could never understand, wounds that I cannot heal. Although I’ve spent my life trying because I wanted more of her. I wanted all of her. I didn’t want a damaged mother. A woman who never felt the love of her father.
“He chose his friends over me, he’d rather drink with them,” she cried as we drove back home after our first visit to the Bronx. “Pero cuando me necesita, así me reconoce.” When he needs me, he’ll call, she predicted, and he did. When he got sick. He called.
I cannot change my mother’s memory of that afternoon. But my understanding has shifted. I know my grandfather never chose alcohol over her. I know the moment he saw her, he believed he needed a drink. I know this is the kind of self-medication we’re taught and some of us are more susceptible than others. A luck of the draw. I know we carry generations of pain and because we don’t tend to this sorrow—because we don’t know how—we continue to hurt others. But there is no one my grandfather harmed more than himself.
Alcohol didn’t rob my mother of her father’s love, and being an alcoholic was not what made him unlovable. But it did keep them apart. What she misunderstood about his disease, and what he kept hidden for fear his daughter would not be able to understand, what he may not have understood himself—this lack of awareness was an unbridgeable chasm between them.
Dysfunction persists through silence and silence is facilitated by shame. The isolating symptoms of addiction inevitably lead to a cycle of demoralizing behavior—a perpetual state of humiliation. It is my mission to break out of that. Shedding the label will not set me free. I must reclaim it.
We don’t get to choose the legacies we inherit but we can decide what we make of them. The task I have set for myself is to find a solution to our familial affliction. Fulfilling my duty as a granddaughter gives me something, I believed I’d been denied—through compassion I have the chance to know him, intimately. I’m able to honor my grandfather and protect future generations. I get to tell my mother, “I know he loved you.”
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Jessica Hoppe is a New York based-writer and creator of @nuevayorka. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Paper magazine and elsewhere. She is currently writing her first book of essays on the first-gen experience in America.