Jill Nystul - One Good Life: My Tips, My Wisdom, My Story

My forty-sixth birthday seems like yesterday, and yet it also seems like a lifetime ago. The date was February 20, 2008. It was not merely a birthday. In fact, it was a rebirth. As birthdays go, forty-six is not one of those overwhelming milestones that make us cringe and dread the turning of a decade. But for me, that birthday was a most auspicious event: It was the day that I graduated from the Ark of Little Cottonwood, a residential treatment facility in Utah. It was close to home and also very far away. I had entered the Ark seventy-eight days before, on December 5.

How I came to the Ark is a long story. The short version is that about ten years before, when I was in my mid-thirties and married to a great guy, Dave, with whom I have four wonderful kidsErik, Britta, Kell, and Stenand seemingly had everything that anyone could have wanted, I was miserable. Amorphously, absolutely, and horribly miserable for no reason that I could really explain. All I knew was that I wanted more and needed more and that more was something indefinable and elusive. I felt like I needed to escape something but I didnt know what. The utter confusion and feeling of being completely lost and not knowing why or how to fix it was too much to bear. So I turned to that ubiquitous social lubricant: alcohol.

I could give you a litany of reasons and excuses for why I drank. Its true that I had a great deal of anxiety after each of my children was born. It wasnt postpartum depression. It was postpartum anxiety, where I had a constant sense of impending doom and bouts of nearly paralyzing panic attacks. My doctor prescribed Prozac, and although it eased the panic attacks, it suppressed my libido, and that was like pouring fuel on a fire. The truth is, my marriage was on the rocks before I started drinking. Yes, the pun there is intentional, since levity often makes what was once painful for me seem less so as I look back. Ultimately, after twenty years of marriage, my husband and I separated for a year. With work, we reconciled and healed. Still, I remained anxious. I turned to food as a coping mechanism and suddenly I was dealing with weight gain. Ironically, I didnt gain weight during my pregnancies, but after each one, I added on more postpartum weight. I was sleep-deprived. And I was conflicted: I loved being at home with my babies, and although I also wanted to go back to work, the thought of going back to work made me anxious. My second son, Kell, was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of two and a half. I have battled foot pain since I was sixteen, when I was diagnosed with a nonmalignant tumor on the bottom of my foot. It was successfully treated with radiation therapy, but wouldnt you just know it, while everything else was happening and my life seemed as though it was spinning out of control, that wound site on the bottom of my foot reopened and refused to heal despite two skin grafts. Thirty dives in a hyperbaric chamber finally healed my foot. By this time, my turning to alcohol morphed into full-fledged abuse.

Despite all this, I make no excuses. I suppose that from the very first time I stood up in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and stated, My name is Jill and I am an alcoholic, I began the process of taking responsibility for myself and my actions. It was Step Four of the twelve-step program that instructed me to fearlessly take a moral inventory of myself. I remember the very first time that I took that palliative drink. So many things were building up inside and the demons were daring me as I drank with the sole and deliberate intention of numbing the pain. The remedy worked that day for the simple reason that when our senses are altered, we feel less pain. Sometimes we feel no pain at all. I was anesthetized. Lets face it: When youre passed out, you feel nothing. And so the sorrow would leave until I sobered up, and then the next time it crept up, I would reach for the bottle again. I became caught in the vicious cycle.

Hiding in a bottle and drowning sorrows are clichs because they are facts: Alcohol as a painkiller provides false and temporary sedation. So on and on I went, seeking solace in the bottle, until my family gathered together and staged an intervention. My husband and children found the help that I needed and couldnt find for myself. I didnt make it easy for them. It was like trying to corral a wild mare. But somewhere in my alcohol-addicted brain, I knew they were right and there was no other choice but to get help in a place that was safe and dry and could make me whole again.

I often think that if not for my family, I would either be dead or in jail. If not for my amazing family and the belief that I now hold so dear in a Higher Power, I have been given a second chance. Call the Higher Power what you will: I just feel there is something or someone out there or up there, along with my family and the angels who worked as counselors at the Ark, who helped me to save myself.

I share my story not because I am unique and crave the spotlight, but quite the opposite. I share because I know that there are many like me who are scything the same path I was. I want those people to know that they are not alonewhether they are addicts or love an addict. Addiction of any kind is not shameful. It is neither deliberate nor meant to harm. It is also conquerable. I never say that I was an addict. I emphatically state that my addiction remains in a current state. I must be vigilant. I must be aware that I could easily slip. My battle is one that I fight every day, and I do so one day at a time. At the end of each day, I take great joy as I emerge triumphant.