I’ve always been a physically tough little chick, having grown up in the midst of a mostly male family and a neighborhood where the boys far outnumbered the girls. I snapped fingers playing backyard football with the neighbors, fractured a leg in a wrestling match with my older brother and cracked my face with a high-stick to the cheekbone in a cul-de-sac street hockey game. It is important to me that I never, ever cried in front of the boys; I always offered a blank face and a stiff “I’m fine-just need a minute” before making it inside to curl up, wail and go get my bones set. However, my physical toughness belied the emotional fragility that has since become a running joke in my family.

As a child, the extreme fear of doing wrong led to constant voluntary parental updates on my every action, as well as “confessions” of insidious thoughts that popped into my head. Ahhhh, the joys of juvenile mental illness. As a result of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, depending on which show I happened to have watched or which article I may have read, I convinced myself that I was, to the bones, murderous, deviant, crazy, evil. A modern Mary Bell.

When I was about 9 or so, there was a case that garnered nationwide media attention, at the middle of which was a man who had killed his entire family. His defense, the first of its kind, was that he had committed the murders while sleepwalking and had zero recollection of the events. This, of course, spelled disaster. For the two weeks subsequent to finding this information, I was petrified of bedtime. I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling in my pink-walled bedroom, terrified to fall asleep in the event that I may accidentally slaughter my family. Jeffrey Daumer made me wonder if I wanted to eat people. I quit babysitting after I read about Susan Smith.

I have heard many refer to their supposed OCD, almost always followed by a statement about a need for things to be clean and orderly. Though this is a symptom, it isn’t even close to the whole picture. For me, OCD manifested itself as a form of mental Tourette syndrome, in which I had literally no control over my brain and which images or thoughts would invade it. Flashes of stabbing my mother after seeing a show about matricide, images of torture, murder, rape… Though all of this was driving my blossoming mind to madness, not to mention the fact that there wasn’t a violent bone in my little body, I was too young to understand that it wasn’t my fault, nor was it a reflection on my moral structure. And, anyway, this was the mid-80s; mental illness was not yet commonplace and OCD was not part of mainstream society’s vernacular. As such, I convinced myself that I was a beast for having these thoughts. A sick person, not an ill person. While having “episodes,” which may or may not have been brought on by something external, I was eaten alive by guilt every second of every day for weeks, months. Panic struck the second I opened my eyes in the morning, gnawed at me throughout the school day, peppered my days with trips to the elementary school bathroom to freak the fuck out in private. I began wishing that I would to die before I hit fifth grade.

I washed my hands until they cracked and bled. I was not necessarily afraid of germs myself, but I worried that I may pick something up and hurt someone else. I would not touch anything that someone else might ingest, especially children, without several washings, and there had been a recent E. coli scare at a big-name restaurant that fueled my fear. I was most compelled to wash my hands, though, to rid them of some sort of magical, invisible guilt-inducing power, Macbeth-style. Out, damn’d thought! I arranged things for this reason as well, not to maintain order, but in a futile attempt to rid them of an imagined negative force.

As I had not yet discovered booze, I simply bucked up and tried my best to make it through life. Though this undoubtedly sucked, I took the same attitude that I did with my more palpable maladies: a blank face and a stiff “I’m fine-just need a minute” before making it inside to curl up, wail and try, desperately, to get my broken mind set.

As my teens merged into my twenties, right about the time that I began my illustrious career in boner sales (more on that later), my childhood demons were introduced to some decidedly adult forms of self-destruction. I was never a big drinker in high school. Unlike most of the seasoned drunks that I met in rehab, AA, etc…, most of whom began hitting the sauce by the time they reached seventh grade, the death-grip of paranoia to which I had grown so accustomed kept me check. More often than not, I was the gal cleaning up puke or blood (or, occasionally, more upsetting things), explaining to my girlfriends that maybe it’s better to just keep your tits covered, and trying to keep my dude friends out of fights. But that was a long time ago, and many have suffered worse from me by now.

Sometime during my 19th year, I can’t pinpoint when exactly, I discovered that whiskey allowed me to do something that I’d never, literally never, been able to do: shut it off. Shut off all of the terrifying, obsessive thoughts that had whirled wildly through my brain, non-stop, for my entire life. I could have a conversation and actually listen, because my mind wasn’t racing with all of the reasons that I should hate myself. I could take a bath without getting freaked out halfway through by some wicked thought that had found me in the silence. I didn’t have to deal with the internal struggle to separate the OCD from myself, to sort out the sickness taking up residence behind my painted smile. Booze allowed an amount of time to feel normal, where that black, hateful shadow would dissolve and I could live outside of my head for a couple of hours. Whiskey set me free; there’s no simpler way to say it.

In the beginning, before my new friend had put me into the back of an ambulance, unconscious; before it left me punctured with IVs in the ICU; before it had me yelling (I’m told) at family and staff in Urgent Care, it was my greatest ally. It did for me what no amount of familial support, therapy or medication could. When I had a good whiskey buzz going, nothing mattered. None of my problems, real or imagined, could break through the haze. And if things took a melancholy turn, a bottle paired with the Afghan Whigs or Jeff Buckley could make sadness an almost beautiful place to wallow. Interestingly, my writing was much better drunk as well. There were many times that I read something I had no memory of writing and it would be better than projects I’d labored over, sober, for hours. The likely reason is that, when sauced, the crippling fear of judgment was erased. I could be honest, unashamed. I’d even allow myself some pride and faith in the future. These were foreign concepts in my everyday life, since I learned at a very early age to push my crazy aside when interacting with the normal folk. Not sharing much of what was in my head became a survival tool.

At first, those who knew me were still used to the girl who was too afraid to be “bad.” I drank beers at social gatherings-maybe a bit much, but that’s par for the course for a girl just out of high school. But, behind the scenes, it was starting… I kept bottles of whiskey in the back of my closet, beers were clandestinely carried in my bag, stuffed under anything that I could find to cover them, and it was a skill born of necessity that allowed me to keep bottles from clinking as I walked through the house. I managed to keep it under wraps until Christmas night, 2001, when my new found raging alcoholism reached bloody new heights.

Like some fucked-up coming of age, my sickness had blossomed into a stronger, more deadly, more horrifying enemy, as it had now discovered its appetite for booze and self-destruction. So this night was a turning point, an undeniable foreshadowing of the tragic events to come, an introduction to the outside world of the raging, black, terrifying disease that had stayed hidden for so long inside of my head.