I’ve been sober for a year now and when I look back at the final six months of my drinking I shudder.

Last week was a whirlwind leading up to this point and I couldn’t help but flash back to some of the things I was going through before. I saw things in withdrawal that I couldn’t explain. I was paranoid and scared. I was surrounded by wolves at all times.

Until I was three weeks sober I didn’t even know that so much of what I went through wasn’t real. By the time I landed in jail I had been in a fight for my life every day for nearly a year. It’s crazy but even my one year sober anniversary is just the anniversary of the last time I was arrested.

Am I okay?

Mostly. Life is different now but some of those memories still invade my thoughts. For the last year and a half that I was drinking I couldn’t go more than a day without alcohol. I would get anxious and paranoid. I wouldn’t sleep. I wish I could have slept because then my dreams would just have been nightmares but instead the nightmares were my reality.

Today I’d like to start my week by putting some of my experiences with withdrawal-induced delirium on paper. Hopefully if someone else is struggling or starting to experience anything like it maybe they’ll know it isn’t real. I wish I did.

Whenever I saw my family they looked different. I don’t mean to say they looked like they were groomed differently, I mean they were different people. By this point everything I heard and saw as I went through life affirmed that impostors had taken over their identities. I lived with my brother at the time and even he seemed like a different person every time I saw him. Only the family dog was the same every time I visited my parents home.

Out in public I was surrounded by wolves everywhere I went.

Until I got enough alcohol into my system it always felt like everyone around me was in on a play that I wasn’t. Facial expressions were often distorted by the withdrawals and everyone I didn’t know before this stage was a malicious enemy. This is where the auditory hallucinations started and became a huge factor in why everything I was experiencing felt so real.

I had every reason to confirm that I was living in a dark twisted fantasy reality. I saw impossible things everyday and the longer it went on the more real it all became.

When it got bad enough I would start drinking it away and then the clock would restart. I did this so many times and for so long that my sense of reality was rooted in my delirium.

I didn’t know it wasn’t real.

By the time I started really trying to quit again my mind was fractured.

The universe as I knew it had turned on me and I knew the universe well. I didn’t only exist on earth now, but on millions of earths over millions of millions of years in time.

Before the arrests started I believed myself to be an interstellar fighter. A star seed sent to this planet to clear out corruption. We called this malware removal. My tolerance for terror was Herculean at this point and I no longer shared reality with those around me. This was the point where I couldn’t seem to stay out of jail and eventually they made sure I couldn’t leave for a while.

None of my crimes were violent. None of them weird. All of them had one thing in common.

They were a result of my decision to stay sober a little longer than I should have.

It took three weeks in a cell for my mind to start realizing I was back in the real world. I wasn’t seeing things that couldn’t be explained with modern logic and the persona that I had built up over the course of the last year didn’t match my experiences.

I could talk for hours about the things I’ve seen if it weren’t for the fact that verbalizing what I went through is uncomfortable. I can’t really talk about it without crying and if I dove too deep I might even hyperventilate.

Long term exposure to alcohol withdrawal shattered my brain. It still scares me and I’m very grateful to be a year down the line. I have high sympathy for anyone who may be struggling to stop and knowing what I went through I fear for anyone with a similar experience.