Years lost to rainclouds

I shouldn’t really be blogging this week as I’ve got exams on Thursday and Friday, but to be honest, I’ve had enough of revision for one night.

On the 13th, assuming I manage the (slightly ominous) task ahead of me, I’ll have handed in everything I need to enter my final year of medical school. This time of year always makes me pensieve, as it feels like much more of an end to a year, than 31st December does, after so many years in education; it signifies yet another year gone, more hurdles passed, and another step closer to being a doctor, which has been my dream since childhood, and was the single thing that kept me going for a long time.

Sometimes I feel like the issues I’ve accumulated over time from my dad’s drinking have been such a defining characteristic of these years as they’ve been there, growing beside me, since I was just entering my teens. My funny relationship with alcohol has hung over my time in medical school since the very first day, when I was given some tutorial case about alcoholism to present to a group, and afterwards, went to the city train station, and wondered if there was anywhere I could go to escape, anywhere at all, from drinking, and realising that there wasn’t. There’s nowhere it doesn’t reach. There is nothing it does not touch. On that day, I stopped myself crying, went back to my accommodation, and went out on the first medical student social, and got drunker than I’d ever been. It didn’t help. I’ve struggled my way through parties and as the ‘sober one’, looked after more than my fair share of inebriated friends. I’ve cleaned up vomit and been reminded of doing the same for my dad. I’ve sat in hospital rooms while people got their stomachs pumped, and been reminded of long nights there as a young teenager, waiting for him to sober up. I’ve drank to forget, and hated myself the next morning. I’ve watched other people drinking, and been afraid of the changes coming over them. I’ve chosen placements that would bring me into as much contact as possible with substance misuse to drive it out of my system, and despite being ironically good at talking to these patients, ended up losing another year to depression, because of it.

At the moment, I drink very rarely, and even then, it’s often a fine line between having a lovely evening, and completely collapsing inwards, hating that I am drawn to the looseness it gives me, and wondering if I’m one glass closer to developing a dependancy. My biggest fear is that I might go down the same route and cause as much havoc with unhealthy drinking that my dad did. Feeling controlled by depression was bad enough, but being in the thrall of alcohol would be more than I could handle. I’m both afraid of it, and drawn to it. Since I was diagnosed with depression, I’ve hardly touched alcohol, and even then, it’s been a rare glass of wine, and that’s mostly been because at times, I feel like reaching for the gin and seeing, just seeing, if it would make things hurt that little bit less, if it would make me forget, and that attitude at the back of my mind scares me senseless. Sometimes, when I’m not sleeping, and really feeling low, drinking until I drift off feels like a good option, an easy way to make it through a few more hours. Although I’ve never acted on any of that, just knowing that my brain is wired like that, is horrible.

I was back in counselling yesterday and didn’t really say much – all I’ve literally been doing for the last month is studying, and after having a few days feeling almost-if-not-quite-next-to-normal, I didn’t want to wreck that just before these huge exams I’ve got coming up. I’m still crap at being counselled – I never know how to start, or what to say, or how to turn what I have in my head, to words on a page, or words spoken aloud. It’s supposed to get easier, but it never does. I know that at some point I’m going to have to have a fairly major ‘alcoholism’ discussion in counselling, and I’m dreading it. It makes me feel physically sick. It’s probably the one thing I find hardest to talk about, but I also know that if I don’t manage to push myself through therapy properly, I’m just going to lose more years to this. I don’t want to feel trapped by it anymore. I don’t want to feel defined by it anymore. I feel so broken by it, so incapable of managing it. I want to keep the past behind me and not have to keep running just to keep infront of it all the time. That conversation is coming, and I need to be prepared.