kitten and boo boo

I came across some old writing I did in February of this year right before I went to rehab again for the I don’t even know how many times. Reading this kinda broke my heart. It’s long, and it’s depressing but I’m sharing it because this blog isn’t just about Kyle’s issues it’s also about my struggles with mental health and addiction. Reading this my heart broke for the person who put these words to paper, who felt like they had to get this out. I don’t remember writing this but I probably did it in a drunken blackout. Which makes me even more sad, because if I can write decently blacked out imagine what I can do now. So here it is. Be kind and gentle with it please.

It is 2am and I’m chugging pure vodka, I take a drink every 20 minutes, if I don’t the sickness comes hard and fast and deadly. I have been drinking like this for a week, just home from a rehab and psych hospital after becoming suicidal. I have finally hit rock bottom. It’s been eight days since I got home. I am averaging 15 beers and a pint a day, it’s gotten to the point that if I don’t drink I will be very sick- it’s no longer about the buzz, the fun, this is not fun. This is my medicine, this is a physical necessity. In under twenty four hours I will call an ambulance to bring me to the hospital to try to detox. This detox will almost kill me- a week in the emergency department and three days in the locked unit trying to finally kill this demon. But right now it’s about the vodka, the not getting sick. I have only one focus right now, get more alcohol. That might mean having to drink mouthwash until the liquor store opens in the morning, but that’s not until 10am, and I know my body can not go that long without a drink. This final binge has brought me to my knees. I pray to god to get me through this, like I have every single other time I go on a binge. The problem is I’ve been on a binge for a good twenty years aside from a little sobriety here and there when I’ve landed in the hospital or a rehab or a program of some kind. I have been drinking for so long and so hard. Everything is too challenging without alcohol. Even the most basic things- taking a shower, taking out the trash, eating. I have stopped eating. I do not want the food to absorb the alcohol. Complete oblivion is the goal. Kill the thing inside that feels like it’s killing me, every hour, every minute, every second of every day. I don’t know how it got this bad, laying on a dirty mattress on the floor in a rooming house in a city rife with addiction, illness, and homelessness. My world has become very small, the mattress, the liquor store right next to my brownstone, the bottles and cans. There is nothing else, aside from Marlboro light 100s when I am able to walk down the 16 steps to the front porch. There is the bottles, the cans, the sheets covered in dried vomit and grime. There is the constant attempt to get enough money to make sure I have what I need every day. And that is it. Life has in a way come extremely simple. The liquor store is literally next to my building, a two minute walk is all it takes to get what I need. I am there every morning when they open and every night when they close. They also conveniently sell cigarettes so everything I need is always within reach. I wasn’t supposed to end up like this, but here we are. At four am I start to get really scared, it’s six more hours until the store opens and I’m out of booze. That means the sickness is near. Soon after my heart begins to race, the sweats start, but I’m cold even though I’m pouring sweat. My sweat has the horrible acrid smell of vodka. I have not eaten in eight days, I have not left the mattress on the floor except to buy more alcohol and cigarettes.

I must have passed out because I wake up and it’s light out, which means it’s daytime though I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep. It’s about 11am. I gather just my purse, phone and house keys. I stagger out to the front porch. I dial 911. They ask what my emergency is, my address, what I’m wearing. Within ten minutes the ambulance arrives, those 10 minutes are an eternity. I wait on the porch until they arrive. They arrive quickly, in the last year I’ve been in the hospital pretty much every month, either from alcohol related issues or suicidal ideation. I am ushered onto a stretcher. They take my blood sugar, my vitals. I keep my sunglasses on because it is way to fucking bright. When we arrive at the er the techs give a knowing look. I’m a frequent flier. They know me here. I’ve been coming to the same hospital for 16 years for these same things. It’s always the same. The EMTs give report, but it’s really just for posterity. The hospital staff know I’m here because I’m drunk and sick and want to die. While I lay in the ambulance bay waiting to be brought back I pray again. Please god, if this doesn’t kill me I’ll do it right this time, I’ll get a job, get my life together, get sober. I’ll do anything to not feel like this for the rest of my life. And that’s what I’m afraid of laying there in the bay, that this is my life now. Bottles and cans and hospitals and withdrawals and programs and just doing it over and over and over. I pray to god, begging with all my heart please let me get the help I need this time. Please god, you’ve kept me here this long for some reason I don’t understand, please give me one more chance.

After what seems like an eternity I am changed into paper scrubs and brought right back to the psych er unit. The nurses there know me well. They have seen me drunk and depressed and manic and suicidal and in psychosis. I’ve been being seen by them for 16 years. They do a quick safety check, take my silver cornichello necklace and stick me on a bed in the hallway. Immediately I express that I’ll be sick very very soon and I need Valium. The nurse tells me I’m not in withdrawal yet but I feel the sickness coming. I feel my hands and legs beginning to shake, the vomit building up in my throat. They tell me they’ll check my vitals regularly and if I need it they will medicate me but it’s not been long enough since my last drink yet. I do not know how I will do this. Over and over I beg, please, please just give me some fucking Valium. Please just make it better. That’s what it really comes down to- I just want to make it better. And I don’t know how to do that, so I drink to the point of near death, I cut and burn myself, I overdose on my meds. I have been trying to just make it better for as long as I can remember. It’s that simple, that basic- just make it ok. I don’t know why but just the basic act of existing is more than I am capable of handling. I’m 38, people my age have careers, kids, partners, lives. They may not be completely thrilled with their situation but they have some semblance of a life. I have a dirty mattress, bottles and cans. Cigarettes. I have lost three jobs in under a year due to intoxication at work. Aside from a few brief “relationships” I have not had a partner since my marriage fell apart 17 years ago after only two brief years together. Thank god I never had children. But when it comes down to brass tacks I have nothing.

I had so much promise- I was involved in dance and sports in highschool, on the debate team, in the French club. I went to a good university, I had a great and loving family who gave me everything I could possibly need or want and more. I was smart, I was pretty, I made friends easily and academics were a passion. But that is all a long time ago right now in that hospital bed. Right now my intelligence wont do a damn thing to help me. I’ve always thought I had an advantage being as smart and educated as I am lucky enough to be. Sometimes I wish I was stupider. I wish I wasn’t so well spoken and well read. What has it gotten me? All the education and opportunities I’ve pissed away don’t change the fact that right now in this moment I am severely addicted to alcohol and severely mentally ill. I’ll be honest, I’ve always rested on my laurels. My family and my almost obtained degree. Of course university was cut short in my first semester senior year due to alcoholism and completely unstable mental health but right now that’s neither here nor there. Right now I am no different from the mentally ill drunk face down in the gutter vomiting all over myself.

I make it one night in the psych ed before having to be taken back to medical. My labs are all off, nothing life threatening immediately but concerning. As I lay there in medical, being watched by a sitter because I’m a suicide risk I vomit, convulse and shit. Over and over. Eventually after some medication and fluids I return to psych where my future literally hangs in the balance. I end up spending exactly a week in the psych ed waiting for a bed on the adult inpatient unit. The withdrawal is so bad that I spend that week pretty much immobile in my bed, watching ghost hunting shows on the travel channel. The one comfort I have is that I have a tv in my little room, which I can watch from eight in the morning until 10 at night. Sleep does not come easy that week- nightmares and dreams of drinking so vivid that I literally wake wondering if they’re real. I tell the nurses and doctors that I’m sick, sicker with this than I have ever been. I’ve gone through withdrawals many times in my twenty year drinking career, but never like this. Even as I write this, being finally home from the hospital just a half a day I still feel shaky and unable to tolerate food. Eight pounds down in a week- usually I’d be thrilled, me of eating disorder history and generally poor body image but I’m scared.

Withdrawal sucks, it’s messy and inconvenient and very uncomfortable no matter what drug you’re coming off. But alcohol withdrawal can actually kill you- and even if it doesn’t kill you, you can seize and have a heart attack, suffer long term liver damage, cirrhosis. I’ve been through it before, more times than I’d like to admit but never like this. I never believed in the rock bottom theory- that I’d finally have that ah-ha moment where I fully realized and accepted that I couldn’t drink anymore, that I truly was beyond simple interventions. That I’d be fighting this for the rest of my life. But laying there in that bed, entire body convulsing, vomit down my chin and scrubs I realized that I don’t have another binge in me- the next binge would kill me. Without a doubt it was finally life or death. When you drink the way I do your body literally requires alcohol to function. And the more and longer you drink the more alcohol you need, and the more frequently you require it just to be able to get out of bed and go to the bathroom without going into seizures or withdrawals. Twenty years is a long time to live this way. We all know the show Intervention, they typically feature alcoholics who’ve been at it a few years, maybe even ten or so. I’ve never seen someone featured who drank as long and as hard as I did who made it.

I had my first drink my first week of college freshman year. And in an instant, once it metabolized in my blood stream I was in love. All of a sudden the anxiety and depression I’ve felt most of my life lifted off my shoulders. I could talk to guys, it loosened me up socially. I felt like I could finally breath. And I’ve been chasing that same feeling ever since. Most college students party- and at the school I went to it was a hard partying atmosphere, even by typical college standards. But I know, I’ve been an alcoholic since that first semester. It started drinking on the weekends at the frats and house parties, then starting mid week. By the end of my first semester I was drinking in the mornings before class and bringing Gatorade bottles half filled with vodka to lecture halls. My friends laughed it off, “oh,Kelly’s hard core”, “you’re such a lush”, “you can go harder than the frat guys”. Drinking at 8 in the morning is not normal for anyone, but especially a tiny 18 year old college freshman. I didn’t have my first drink until I got to UMASS. I didn’t hang out with the partying crowd in high school and had always been rather bookish, anxious and just wasn’t really exposed to it. My parents didn’t drink so no sneaking slugs from the liquor cabinet at home. But drinking that first semester seemed to open me up in a way that felt like nothing I’d ever experienced. It was easy enough to get even though I was underage. Older students would buy it for you if you threw them a few bucks, or anyone with a fake ID could too. It was at every party, in vast quantities. Limitless alcohol at every turn.

I don’t blame the party culture at UMASS for my alcoholism, it would have happened one way or another even if I went to a different school, stayed away from the parties and the drinking culture so common there at the time. I would have become an alcoholic regardless of a lot of factors. I do remember having a particular taste for gin and tonics as opposed to the more preferred jungle juice or Coronas. I, like most students going to the parties brought my drink in a nalgeen filled with my signiture gin, tonic and half a lime floating there like a life boat. Some people in the rooms say alcoholics are hard wired to end up that way- no matter the circumstances we would have eventually found alcohol and the temporary solace it initially offers. I believe that with all my heart now.

It’s funny, in rehab you run into a lot of trash can addicts- those who will use any kind of drug or drink to get the desired high. Drugs were never really a thing for me. Thank god at this point I’ve never done crack, PCP, hallucinogens. Like most college students I dabbled with cocaine and study pills like adderall, smoked a little weed, but they didn’t do it for me like alcohol did. Cocaine just made me have a runny nose, and the few times I tried opiates I didn’t like the high just leading to nodding off with my chin against my chest. I’ve never smoked meth, never really had an appetite for illegal drugs. Of course I’ve done my fair share of snorting various prescription drugs, but they never took hold over me, luckily. There’s something about that point in the night where you’ve had four or five and the body gets all warm, you feel dreamy and calm, and you have no idea when the blackout will come that night. But you know it’s coming and that’s the goal. Complete inhalation has always been my goal. Like I said, I wanted to kill all the things inside that I just couldn’t deal with sober.

My friends, therapists, various caseworkers and hospital professionals always ask the same question- why do you drink if you know it’s going to destroy everything, every time. That’s a question I still don’t know how to answer oddly enough. Drinking has led to the destruction of everything I’ve ever tried to accomplish, it took away anything I’d been able to achieve. School, friendships, a marriage, relationships with family, jobs. How much does a person need to loose before they finally decide they have no choice but to stop? Well, finding myself in that small dank rented room, mattress on the floor, room littered with empty cans and bottles I finally reached the crisis point, the breaking point, the fucking rock bottom.

On a Wednesday in the first week of Feburary 2026 in the early afternoon I called 911 for what I pray will be the last time to try, once more, one final time to get sober for good. My brother and father put up with twenty phone calls a day from the hospital phone listening me relay about my sickness and withdrawal that just wouldn’t end. They supported me as I sobbed into the phone about how I was all used up, how I couldn’t do this anymore- how I’d already told them more times in the past that I was ready to stop but this would finally be the time I got sober and started to actually work on putting my mental health back together for good.

As if alcoholism isn’t enough for someone to deal with I also have a slew of mental health diagnosis. I’ve been diagnosed Bipolar, chronic anxiety and depression disorders, ADHD. But the only diagnosis that really rings true and that I can agree on is the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Some of the criteria are self injurious behaviors, unstable sense of self and image, difficult relationships, frantic fear of perceived abandonment, impulsivity, persistent mood disruptions among others. I pretty much check al the boxes. BPD is not easy to treat, and I’ve been told by professionals symptoms can become more mild as a person with BPD ages but I’ve been formally diagnosed since the age of 22 and it hasn’t gotten any easier or better managed. I’ve had a few months here or there of stability but there’s been no significant or noted improvement.

How can I describe what it feels like to suffer with this? Everything is black and white, people are either good or bad, I’m never sure of my sense of self- I change clothing, hair, makeup styles frequently. I identify as one thing and then suddenly another. I live in fear of abandonment and of people disliking me (though I’ll admit at my worst I’m hardly very likable). I have short, impassioned relationships that always end in a messy dumpster fire. I cut and burn myself, leaving devastating scarring all over my body that I will have to live with for the rest of my life. I have had a problem with having impulsive dangerous sex with random people I’ve met on dating apps. I’ve lost more friends than I could count because of my dis-rearguard for how my actions effect those around and close to me. My former friends have ended up using drugs, drinking far more than they should and once even arrested due directly to my poor decisions and impulse control. I destroy everything in my path like Shiva when I’m in a particularly dis-regulated state. A person can only be expected to put up with so much bullshit before they have to walk away to save themselves and I don’t blame anyone from my torrid past for having to just throw in the towel and walk away.

Some people believe that those of us with BPD are intentionally manipulative- I’d argue that in most of the times I’ve been manipulative it was not a conscious thought out decision. I’ve usually been manipulative in a desperate attempt to avoid perceived abandonment or disdain. I don’t intentionally aim to manipulate those around me but it is the unfortunate end result. I try to be a good person, to be considerate and kind, to help when I can- but when everything feels like trying to stay afloat on a sinking ship things can get messy real quick.

It’s not even been 24 hours back home from this last horrible ordeal and it’s getting late in the night. That craving is kicking in- I have a load of trouble being able to just sit with myself without a drink. You’d think after the near fatal withdrawal I just experienced would be enough to scare me but a little part of me just wants that fucking drink. But I can’t have even one single drink. The withdrawal gets worse each time, but even that aside I still want it- bad. Without any money and an ineptitude at shop lifting I have no way to get it tonight, which is probably a good thing. But this is the insanity of addiction- you know where it will take you and you go back and back and back to it anyway. What logical person would do that? But that’s the thing about addiction- it defies logic at every turn. If I had even five dollars I’d go right out right now and get that drink. All I’d need is five stupid dollars. I got fired from my most recent job so I’m relying on disability benefits at the moment and will have no money for a few weeks. But that’s never stopped me before. I’ve never resorted to pan handling, but I have considered using my food stamps to buy vanilla extract when I had no money for alcohol. I’ve borrowed from kind friends. I blow through my benefits by the second week of the month every single time, and when I was working I had enough money but working right now is not really an option- I haven’t been able to manage to stay out of the hospital for more than a month at a time and I have to accept that right now I’m just too sick emotionally to hold down a job. But that nagging need for a drink is so strong. Just one drink would set me straight right now. It’s my singular obsession, find a way to get a few dollars and get that drink, get that bottle. Just get it in me by any means possible.

I am lying on the floor drinking pure vanilla extract- a way to use food stamps to get drunk. I have a handful of bottles to get me through until tomorrow. It tastes like drinking death .

I am very sick. I’ve only been home from the hospital for 2 days but here I am. I have resorted to drinking vanilla mouth wash because I have no money for booze. It’s similar to a vodka high but a little milder. I play “Angels in America” on repeat and pray my end is coming soon. This is the worst I’ve ever been, drinking vanilla extract because I don’t have money for actual booze. And it’s a Sunday anyway the stores are not open right now. When you get to the point of drinking mouthwash- vanilla extract, things have gotten bad. You are out of cash and resources and nothing can fucking save you at this point. I hate even writing under the influence of these substances but here we are. I am drinking vanilla extract, a desperate attempt to get fucked up and it works- it honestly works. My family wants to give up on me but they don’t know how- and I don’t blame them. I am a fucking atomic bomb, I destroy everything in my path.