No ground to run to

I feel like some small ground-dwelling creature, like a field mouse who knows that they have no ground to run to.  Like I woke up in an endless concrete landscape, far away from the comforting underground refuges of my homefield.  My additions provided me with cover, the knowledge that at the end of a bad day, if I could just numbly plow through it, I could take refuge in the oblivion of substance abuse.  I could wrap myself in thick layers of emotional gauze and drift the nights away into sleep.  Like listening to the bomb go off, somewhere distant, cradled in an impenetrable concrete womb, deep inside the earth.

And now, I know that I can never go underground again.  I cannot let myself.  Because I am an alcoholic.  I am an addict.  And the longer I stay underground, the more my eyesight will adjust to the darkness of my rathole, the more terrified I will become of the blinding light of the hot sun and the chaotic ambience of life above ground.  I will see birds of prey in every passing cloud, even though they are far more rare than my terror would allow me to believe.

I am not a rodent.  I am a fucking person.  And I deserve to stand upright, proud, and fearless before the daylight.  And part of me believes I will get there.  But part of me thinks that my fear will always reign over me, that I will always crave the comfort of being buried alive under the weight of my own disease, leading to the cold comfort of my own death, the absence of my own fear.

But the more I stand in the light, the more I expose my jugular, the more I come to understand that my fears are not aligned with the dangers of living.  I know this in my head, already.  But I need to feel it in my body.  I wish that I could just fast forward this process of acclimation, to already feel comfortable in my own skin without doing the hard work of slowly building internal reassurance that not every interaction with a person requires a fight or flight response.  But I do not want to give up this time.  I do not want to dig my own grave anymore.  Because I am starting to believe that my addiction is a disease of the mind, body, and soul, not just another defect I need to be ashamed of.  And that means that facing my alcoholism each day does not need to be a constant reminder of how fucked up and worthless I really am.  It can be a condition, an ailment that I need to treat.  It can be something that is not me, that does not reflect on me.  The only thing that reflects on me is whether I am willing to take my disease seriously, to take my mental health seriously.

I very much hope that AA can help with that.  If I try to do this on my own, I am worried that the eddies and currents of my toxic internal monologue will eventually suck me down into the deep darkness for good.  I need to make sure I am reaching out to people who can throw me a rope and pull me out of myself.  To me, that is what I am coming to understand AA means by a higher power.  It just means we cannot do this shit all on our own.  And I am starting to think that I can live with that.