JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

We give writing workshops at the Ayala Museum. The workshops consist of three two-hour sessions of lectures, exercises, and group discussions held over three weeks. The most recent workshop, on The Personal Essay, concluded last week. The next one, Writing Boot Camp, will start on 3 September 2015. For more information or to make a reservation, email Marj Villaflores, villaflores.md@ayalafoundation.org.

This month we are featuring, with their permission, essays by the participants. The last batch was half-standup comedy, half-trauma ward. We encouraged everyone to get over their fear of exposure, embarrassment and “What will people think?” Here are some of the results.

* * * * *

Christmas Morning in Lincoln Heights Jail Drunk Tank, 1952

The Rock Bottom Story
by Cristina de la Paz

I’ve been trying to write a book for some time. I’d like to call it an autobiography of sorts. It doesn’t have quite the right beginning since I can’t really tell where everything starts. I could just start from the middle but where is the middle? As for the end. . .there are many ends, I just don’t know when and where to stop.

This is my story. Not a chronological series of events from the day I was born to the day I die, but a collection of moments in between that would make for a really good story. The kind of story that folks would think was based on a movie and not the other way around, like a life-imitating-art kind of scenario. I heard stories like those where I ended up, and I thought the same exact thing: “Boy, that sure sounds like a plot for a movie.” But then I get to my story and all film comparisons go flying out the window.

I’ve been trying to tell a story about how my life turned to absolute hell. That moment where I crashed, burned, hit rock bottom and dragged myself, bloodied and torn through a wasteland of drama and disillusion. Where does one start with such a tale? The beginning is a blur, the middle a sea of confusion and the end—well, the end is where I am.

So I guess I start at the end.

I have been off booze and drugs for a year and a few months. It would have been three years and a few months had it not been for an errant Negroni during a trip to the US, but that’s a moot point. Really. I had gone a long way to get to that point in California and, after I finished that drink I realized I made a mistake and swore it won’t ever happen again, and it hasn’t.

I don’t want it to happen again since the counting of days to 365 is painstaking when it comes to sobriety. One day at a time, they say, but those 24 hours are excruciating. And those 60 minutes? Brutal. Some days sobriety was a crutch, some days it was the word of God, and other days I just couldn’t be bothered.

I had days where I didn’t see the point in all of it. Not having a drink, and at times, not having that cheeky line. I wasn’t a criminal. I didn’t do bad things when I was drunk or high. I was just a fun-loving gal who got talkative and funnier when dosed up. Why couldn’t I be that way again?

Thing about it was, I wasn’t messing up other people’s lives. I was messing my own life up and it had become habit. A habit that many people have developed and honed just as much as I did. The stories I heard in rehab were the movie-plot type of experience but others were as simple as losing a loved one and not being able to cope with the loss. The booze became a means to an end. End this pain, end this loss, end this crap. And it was a good method, I won’t lie.

It was so good that I preferred it to the everyday living. I couldn’t go for 24 hours without a drink. Even if it was just a lousy bottle of Carlsberg, it was still that warm, familiar blanket sheltering me from the reality I didn’t want to deal with. The reality of leaving London for good; the memories of why I had to leave and the shame that had made me leave in the first place.

Rock bottom isn’t one place. It’s many. It’s the start of a fall and the whole weightless voyage down an abyss. A fall where you replay all the bad things over and over again and tell yourself, “I don’t want this anymore”:

I don’t want to pay hundreds of pounds to attend a TV show convention to spend all the time in the hotel bar and piss off the only sober celebrity there, especially if he plays an affable demon on a popular sci-fi show. I don’t want to end up in A&E’s and get sectioned off in NHS-funded mental hospitals because of a bad dose of cocaine. I don’t want to have it on file that my blood has ever been positive for cocaine. I don’t want the shame and fear I feel every time I remember I was drunk enough to let a total stranger hold me down and choke me on the side of a street because I thought we had a romantic connection. I don’t want to sit in a cold hotel room, cutting myself with a knife, drinking copious amounts of wine and snorting coke whilst waiting for New Year to come and feigning joy with friends because it was the only way to deal. And I don’t ever want to come to that point where drinking myself dead was the only solution to life.

I don’t want any of that anymore.

Falling was one thing. Picking myself up was another. This story or book or whatever it may be is my story. It’s mine. It’s my rock bottom. A lot of people have them, most have gone through them and lived to tell the tale; a number don’t get to; many don’t ever get the chance of seeing it and bless them. It’s a tough story to get through, especially when it comes to hashing out memories of rock bottom. But the thing is, what doesn’t kill you. . .doesn’t kill you.

And here I am. I’m not dead.