I Just Can't Stand It

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

It's just a paranoid 'what's happenin' behind the scenes' feeling. I take the other cues and jump to conclusions. I never said I was correct. I was expressing how I feel, how it seems 'to me' using aforementioned cues and clues.

~snip~

In my head, I already hear the cluck-clucking. But I don't care. I've said what I wanted to say. And that is done.

Yes, I am paranoid...but a part of that is because I'm pretty good at reading into things...like silences.

I can write an entire novel in my head about what people are thinking of me and how I'm being judged, etc., etc. The reality is that my "War and Peace" is actually a 4 word note that someone tried to pass to me in the 3rd grade and got confiscated by teacher instead who threw it out without reading it. When the entire class went silent, it was because the test on fractions had just been handed out and everyone got panicked, trying to figure out the correct result for the addition of 3/4 + 7/8.

I strongly suspect that this is what's happening with you as well, IM. Sometimes people are silent because there is nothing coherent left to say in face of tragedy.

I haven't been on the Cellar for some days lately; but I still found (and find) that I think of Brianna often. I let her down. We weren't BFF's, but we were both alcoholics. Alcoholics read another drunk's words or talk to another alcoholic and they just KNOW. The experience of feeling that horrible despair, facing those Four Horsemen and being unable to imagine life either with or without alcohol make us members of an exclusive group that instantly recognizes complete strangers if they are one of us.

Brianna's posts often worried me, but instead of reaching out to her, I figured she had people here who could be her friends IRL; she'd be OK, blah, blah. And I shrugged her off. I didn't extend myself to send her PM's until the very end when it was too late.

If blame should fall on anyone here, I should be among the first. I've been to those same awful places where Brianna fought her demons. I've fought many of those demons of my own. I attempted suicide at least 3 times when my drinking became completely out of control and I couldn't endure the horrid, souless life I was living for one more minute - never mind an hour and certainly not a day.

Brianna/Trilb posted toward the last that AA had let her down. I don't know about AA in Ohio, but on the Cellar, THIS AA member read those posts and thought "not my job." Wrong. We alcoholics keep our sobriety by giving it away. I didn't give Bri a damn thing other than a couple of PM's at the end that were too little, too late.

I allowed my pathetic memory of a couple of stupid tiffs she and I had a million years ago as an excuse. Now I wish I'd sent her so many PM's (whether she'd have been delighted to get them or disgusted) that she would have gotten enraged with me and stayed sober just to show me how little I actually know about anything.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.