The Fly on the Wall Down the Hall Is Driving Me Crazy - page4

Although the excitement of the wedding and finding a house and getting to know my new sons distracted me from the need to drink for a while, my need to drink didn't just disappear. Eventually the pain of abstinence began to escalate. My stress level was high, my tolerance for kid noise very low. My hypersensitivity seemed to lower its boom all at once, and again I turned to that substance I had always been able to trust for relief, alcohol. I told myself it was my reward for being what I considered stepfather of the year. And reward it was. The relief of having a few beers once in a while was so immense that I told myself I could handle drinking now and total abstinence wasn't necessary. Nothing wrong with drinking in moderation.

It became harder and harder to stop when I drank and the consequences were becoming more and more painful. Every time my drinking created problems I would promise my family it would never happen again--I really did mean it--and for a while I would keep my promise. But I had never really learned to function productively without alcohol, and I didn't know how to start. I could go several days, sometimes several weeks, without drinking and then, after accumulating so many layers of stress, I would head for a binge.

My drinking as well as my ADHD were making it difficult to make a living. When I was sober, my hypersensitivity interfered with my ability to keep a job; and when I was drinking, my drinking interfered with my ability to keep a job. I tried factory work. At the can company, noise deflection was a prerequisite for work with cans, cans, and more cans rattling, clanging, banging. (From this moment forward, I vowed to turn over a new leaf. No more cans of beer for me. No sir, just bottles.) I was able to tolerate it by drinking on the job, but needless to say, the job didn't last long.

I tried working for a roofing company; I can't clearly remember what happened to that job. And then finally my dream job came along. I was now going to be a truck drivin' man. I was moving furniture over the road from point A to point Z and loving it. I loved it for about two weeks. My employer, as weird as it seemed at the time, did not see the logic in the beer-stocked cooler that accompanied me on all my trips. He didn't quite buy my idea that beer actually made me a better driver.

Merlene was no longer believing in my promises to quit. She thought I was an alcoholic! I could see how much pain I was causing her. After months and months of drinking, having problems, and swearing off of it, I came face to face with the startling realization that times with my best buddy, alcohol, were about over. The pain of my drinking was about as bad as the pain of not drinking and I couldn't live in between anymore.

They told me at the AA meetings that since I had made a commitment to sobriety, my life would be better than it ever had been. After some early physical discomfort, this seemed to be true. But then it happened. Not all at once, kind of gradually. I fought it with all my strength, but eventually I had to face reality: the fly on the wall down the hall was back and now it was wearing boots.
       Overload had returned in full force after a long sleep beneath the covers of alcoholic chemistry. Traffic was louder, voices more invasive, everything more confusing. My stress tolerance was decreasing, my concentration sank to an all-time low, and I was forgetting in seconds all the bits and pieces of information I was expected to remember. I was feeling high levels of stress for no apparent reason. I found myself yelling, slamming doors (my specialty), and resenting telephones and doorbells.

Sensitivity to my environment was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, caring and empathy grew out of my heightened awareness of others. But on the other hand, when the volume went up, all I could think of was self-preservation. With every part of me I wanted to push the mess of my world aside and run. I wanted to escape from responsibility, feeling, and especially from giving anything emotionally to anyone else. I tended to retreat into isolation. I would go off by myself without telling anyone what was going on with me. I couldn't tell anyone; I didn't know.

Isolating myself from family often created more problems than it solved. My sobriety was allowing me to see how important my wife and stepchildren were to me. But the children were hearing-impaired and tended to turn up the volume of the environment when I needed it turned down. To stay in the same room with them when I was feeling overwhelmed by my environment, especially if they were talking or playing music, was quite an undertaking. But I knew I couldn't always expect others to adjust to my needs, and I couldn't live in isolation.

Shopping malls were the bane of my existence. On numerous excursions I must have appeared to onlookers as a man possessed by demons as the crowds and cacophony squeezed me out any available exit. Without alcohol to wash away the sharpness of life there seemed no escape from the battering world. If this is sobriety, I thought in despair, who needs it?

Overwhelmed by overload again, though, I knew I had only two options: return to alcohol or find a way to handle my problem. I knew it was not a real choice. Drinking again would take away everything I cared about. The price was too high. So I hung on, and little by little I learned what reduced my overload symptoms and what aggravated them. Through trials and many errors I found that excessive caffeine, too much sugar, hunger, and crowds aggravated my overload network. By eliminating or moderating these things and other stressful situations, I was able to reduce my sensitivity.

I learned the importance of getting plenty of rest, eating regular meals, exercising daily, and scheduling my activities to eliminate as much pressure as possible. I learned to isolate and insulate myself from traffic noise, crowds, power drills and jackhammers, and people eating potato chips or crunching apples. I learned to ask for what I needed from my family and we learned to compromise. What it boiled down to was that anything I could do to improve my internal biochemistry or smooth out or soften my environment reduced the symptoms of my overload.
       I was taking care of the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder I didn't know I had while telling myself I was protecting myself from the abstinence-based symptoms of my addiction. But regardless of what I called these symptoms, I was learning ways to reduce the severity of them, enabling me to live more comfortably and productively. I was even able to go to college and graduate.
       Not that there weren't problems. Of course there were! I was a recovering alcoholic with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. While I knew very well I was a recovering alcoholic, I was not aware that I had ADHD. But what I did to support my recovery from addiction helped me cope with my ADHD.

My old faithful motto, fake it until you make it, helped me survive. Over the years this motto became part of who I was. Over time I learned to cope, and faking it became a way of life. Through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood it helped me and it hurt me. At times it saved me by helping me avoid things I needed to avoid, that I wasn't ready to face. Sometimes it hurt me by keeping me from activities that could have brought pleasure and enriched my life. It led me to use alcohol as an escape, to pretend that everything was all right. It went with me to college and allowed me to bluff my way through for a while. It helped me survive the military. It enabled me to bury the part of me that made life unbearable. It helped me put one foot in front of the other when I didn't know what was ahead. But at the same time, it kept me from seeing that there was something wrong in my life that needed to be addressed.
       And that something didn't go away when I escaped with alcohol, when I joined the Air Force, when I married and accepted the responsibility of a family. And becoming a counselor to help ease the pain of others didn't fix it either.

Over the years I became weary of faking it. In a vague, nagging way, I knew that many of my problems were connected, but I didn't know precisely how. When I became a counselor and observed people with ADHD, I saw similarities between their experiences and mine. As new research verified that ADHD--with or without hyperactivity--often continues into adulthood, I felt a strong need for an official diagnosis. So I took the big step and arranged for diagnostic interviews and testing at a well-known clinic.

Sure enough, I was diagnosed as having ADHD. It was scary, but I felt like shouting for joy. It was deliverance to know that I was not suffering form a personality defect or a lack of moral fiber. My attacker had a face and a name: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It was a start at knowing what I could change and what I couldn't. It was something I could learn about and apply that knowledge to living more productively. I also knew it was not going to kill me. Instead of my life flying apart as I attempted to find reasons for my problems, I could now apply myself within the restricted but liberating context of truth my diagnosis gave me. The journey would be lifelong, but now I could get on with the journey. I could go forward instead of going one step ahead and two back.

Accepting the reality of what I have has enabled me to take better care of myself. I have learned to give myself permission to do what is important for my recovery from ADHD as well as for my recovery from addiction. I have learned to live rather than escape life. My disorder has not been cured, but I have learned to control the symptoms. The storm waves in my life have quieted; the harshness has softened; the jagged edges have been smoothed; my torment has ceased. The fly on the wall down the hall is still there but it is no longer driving me crazy.

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