Withdrawal

Your feet feel asleep. Dead. It’s so hard to walk when you can’t feel your feet, like you’re walking on faith, hoping that your feet instinctively know what to do even though you feel like you’re walking on stumps. Doing this in four inch heels is a goddamn obstacle course through a maze of cubicles.

Your hand shakes no matter how hard you try to hold it steady. Your handwriting is dreadful when you’re like this, and it looked “serial killer” to begin with.

But really it’s the vibrating. Your entire body is humming, vibrating—no, pulsating really, and each body part is doing so at a different rhythm. It’s like each individual part of you is manic at the same time, but separately. Your body no longer belongs to you.

This is what withdrawal is like, and it now happens to me the day after I drink too much. The other day I drank a lot (which my swollen ankles were quick to remind me of), 8 glasses of wine instead of my allotted 3-4.

I felt it all day the next day. 

First off, you shit differently. It’s green. And not cute green like a baby, but “oh my god, how did that come from a human being” green. As if that weren’t enough, you can’t shit it out all it once. No, it takes you six times a day to get all that disturbing projectile green alien shit out of your system.

Withdrawal can get kind of brutal. And by “kind of brutal,” I mean, completely humbling. It puts you in your place so hard.

You can’t walk properly. Instead you look like some kind of dumbass puppet who just learned how to walk that morning.

Your kneecaps vibrate uncontrollably when you're like this. You drop things because you lose control of your hands. There's random twitching, like you're an old, broken down person. You have to hold your coffee mug with two hands. 

You absolutely can't stand completely still. You have to lean against things to keep yourself from falling down, especially if your dumb ass decided to wear heels that day. You have to play dumb at Thanksgiving when your perfect father asks you why your hand is shaking.

Your mouth is permanently in a state of yeast infection from the sugar in all the alcohol you've imbibed recently. You can feel the different texture in your mouth along your teeth line, fitted perfectly to your teeth. 

This all is nothing compared to how withdrawal was when I was detoxing from 10 glasses of wine a day. Withdrawal incapacitated me for hours at a time. I could barely walk down the hall to the restroom, let alone walk up or down stairs.

At that time, I kept Kahlua in a thermos in my car when I went to work. Not so I could drink during work, but to keep the withdrawal tremors at bay, This was back in April and May, when it was already hot in Houston and therefore the contents of my thermos was warm and thus completely disgusting. But I had to drink something alcoholic at my lunch break to keep from being a complete spaz. It was terrible; I never want to go through that again. I felt like a stranger inside my own body.

The point is that you spend most of the day wishing you hadn't had so much to drink the night before. And feeling like a huge jackass.

Yet you do it again and again.