It’s always been twenty-twenty
In hindsight with me
And now
That’s even more true
And it feels like such a relief
To have
An explanation
For everything
In my life
I’ve been through
For the fear that consumed me
When I was a child
For the nightmares
And paranoia
Imagination run wild
For always sensing
That I was somehow different
Observing life
As if from the outside
For never feeling comfortable
In my skin
And all the attempts
That I made to fit in
The compulsion to be liked
Exhausting
For the intensity
And obsessions
Loving my way into hate
For pleasing then resenting
And always
Finding someone
Else to blame
For the nervousness
And anxiety
And constant stream of thoughts
The duality inside me
Clear
From the very start
For reaching and then gripping hold
Of things to help me escape
To quiet the negative thinking
The feelings
And the pain
And the guilt I tried to ignore
Almost
Every single day
For making clear my rebellion
With statements skewing
Black or white
Never wanting to live in the grey
Or look too deep inside
Focusing on other peoples’ problems
As a way to hide
For indulgently fantastic daydreams
In which I’m light and carefree
Playing conversations out
Of men confessing
Their love for me
An increasingly stark contrast
To my reality
For always putting on a performance
When someone takes off my clothes
To avoid being intimate
Or having
Vulnerabilities show
For desperately searching for answers
And ways to help me control
My seeming inability
To moderate
The embarrassing
Lengths I would go
For the rules I would make
And then break
Justifying as I went along
Smiling on the outside
But sensing there was something
Seriously wrong
For the gradual and progressive
Loss of hope
And emptiness felt inside
Struggling to be happy for others
Numbness becoming
My preferred state of mind
For the never ending sorrys
For things that I might
Have done or said
And always waking up
With firm resolutions
That all too soon I’d forget
And for eventually being
So broken down
That a higher power was able
To break through
And make clear to me
What I’ve sensed all along
But now fully accept
As my truth
Which is that I’m an alcoholic
And that alone
Explains everything
In my life
That I’ve been through