Hey guys I'm talking about booze again BOOZE YEAH!

I hate it when drinking is described as a way to "remove oneself from reality." For me, drinking never consciously felt like an escape--never once a way to avoid or to disconnect. If anything, my drinking felt like a total thrust into something fuller, deeper and more textured: a sort of careless splashing around in a huge vat of unsorted emotions, ebbing at a spasmodic pace. When I drank, I felt like it gave me full admittance into human interaction--a sudden, disarming ability to actually communicate, and to do so freely and authentically. It gave me license to become emotional, to discuss old topics of hurt or rejection and to respond to those old experiences hyperbolically. To get unapologetically lost in them. The next morning I would have forgotten the disclosures I made the night before, but with the steady wave of uneasiness I would still have the personal acknowledgement that I had gone there, however sloppy the attempt. Drowning in dopamine, feeling possible, wanting everyone around at once, talking, moving, whatever--if anything my reality seemed amped up, not watered down.

It's been a month since I had a drink. I found out that I had almost drank my pancreas into oblivion and that any future drink I have could potentially kill me. Not kidding. Did you know you can drink yourself to diabetes? it is true. My panic attacks weren't psychological--it was my blood sugar dipping so dangerously low my body was going into shock. And I knew I was at the helm, I knew the drinking was the cause, but still I put my body through it, again and again. I wanted the fully fleshed, dynamic, beat driven reality, even if I was making the beat with my head against the wall. I wanted to feel able to connect, the warm flush I got when we got through the pitcher and down to business, the truth just freely wheeling itself about the table with abandon. I would pay the price in the morning, over and over again. But that drunken reality turned out to be incapable of surviving dawn, the connections that felt so authentic and infinite wilting by morning into awkward and uneasy. There was nothing translatable in the actions I made during drunken attempts at life to daily, sustainable living. I could not work. I could pay my bills. I could not have an honest, sober conversation without a wave of panic. I could not plan and I would not have survived.

I will always romanticize booze. I will always think of it as something fabulous and promising--something with a real power unlike anything else I had ever gotten into my mouth. To strip one of insecurities, to bolster confidence and flood one with chemicals of pleasure is quite an elixer, and I will never think of it as anything other than magical. I will probably always want to walk through the wine aisle, read the labels of the Cabernets and the Pinots, tasting in my head exactly how they'd swell on my tongue in between puffs of a fag. I will probably always catch the waft from a nearby glass of whiskey and try to imagine if it was Kentucky or Tennessee, quickly play through my head what expression I would have spread across my face is I got down a glass of my own. I fucking love alcohol, and I probably always will. But the party is over. The party has been over for a while. I've just been refusing to leave, minesweeping unmanned dixie cups of beer, trying to squeeze a mumbling conversation out of the dude half-awake on the couch.

I'm lucky I almost killed myself, because there wasn't anything that was going to stop me except a direct, and fully understood threat to my life. If I drink again, my pancreas could blow. It seriously could just fucking blow. I know now that not having your health is not being fully alive. You cannot care about others when you feel your body everyday, yelling at you, putting you in perpetual pain. You cannot make good decisions, you cannot have a regular daily life. Nothing is worth your health, and I know that now that I'm getting mine back. I'm lucky I finally got a diagnosis. I was not being crazy, it was not in my head. I knew that on some level, but since nobody seemed to offer me any sort of further information I was left to draw my own conclusions. It feels terrifying that your youthful missteps can forever imbue you with disease. I don't want to be sick any more. I printed out some old photographs today to bring with me to Korea, but I don't think I'll bring any of the ones with me in the frame with me. I look so haggard, my eyes perpetually soggy and my facial expressions always twisted into some poor imitation of a happy person. I wonder how I was able to get by like that for so long, without anybody expressing much concern. I guess I was more convincing than it seems to me now.

I leave for Chicago in the morning, and it's crushing. I didn't see anyone before I left but my mother. Tomorrow she'll drop me off at a hotel where I'll spend my last 3 days alone trying to finish up paperwork and get my head together for the three year exodus. I can't afford to get too emotional about it, as I'm fully aware of how much living abroad takes out of you emotionally and physically. I'm preparing myself for feeling a long-term, tangible loneliness that for once in my life I cannot chase away with whiskey. I may make friends, I may not. You never know with these things. I may enjoy it, I may not.

I wish I could have seen someone. Anyone. The way I've gone about this has left me feeling disarmed and unprepared, trying to manage my body and get healthy while working out logistics zapped me of the energy I would have rather spent on making sure I said goodbye right, and to the right people. At the end of the day though, I guess it doesn't really matter. Things end, people leave and they never come back whether you say goodbye or not.

If you love me, that's your fault.