![]() They mentioned God a lot, which made me uneasy, and at the end of the meeting everyone held hands and recited a prayer. Scrolls hung from the walls and laid out the Twelve Steps. On his instruction, a few days later I went to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Octavia Bright as a toddler and her father at the piano. I felt defensive, although not so much that I refused to listen. He prescribed me antidepressants and used the word “alcoholic”, which seemed dramatic. After a series of blind, impulsive actions that strained many of my relationships and culminated in a serious motorbike accident, I ended up in a psychiatrist’s office, bruised, anxious and depressed. ![]() Over the course of my early 20s my drinking had spiralled out of control. Had I stopped drinking entirely I would have had about three days to live.) (It’s funny how we say that, “stopped drinking”, as though the only liquid worth talking about is alcohol. Three years earlier, I had stopped drinking. It would be untrue to say this forgetting came as a surprise to any of us, but I’ve since thought that one of the most complex dynamics in a family is navigating everyone’s right to denial. ![]() His expression was one of childlike relief. My mother cut up his pasta while I showed him another way to load up the fork. ![]() We jumped into action, wanting to wrap him in humour and solutions. She and I were now on the same side of an invisible boundary separating us from this man we loved. ![]()
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