With trepidition I feel myself coming clean with it.

I've been hiding. Not for days, not for weeks, for months. Many, many months.

I thought it all had started the day I broke up with Lucky - but I had been traveling that winding road for months before that. Did I start on that path last summer - the second time Lucky and I had broken up, or was it earlier - maybe when I was laid off from my job as as advertising exec, maybe when I broke up with Lucky the first time (fucking have to have the first strike to get to the third - "play ball!"), maybe it was the DUI sixth months into what I used to think was the best relationship of my life (a story I still haven't told)- maybe it was when I decided to start doing drugs again and go to my first circuit party at 30, and then my second and then my third (and so on) ??

I've been hiding behind any thing that would medicate me, soothe away my fears of not being lovable, being wrong in some deep, irrevokable way. I drank alot when I was a kid, drugs, booze, sex - I started young. It became an integral make-up of who I was - the load-bearing beam of my dysfunctionality. I learned that sex with strangers would make them like me, feel closer to me - give me control over others, that drugs made life more interesting, and booze - oh booze made me fucking sexy and funny as all get out - even if I couldn't remember your name or the punch line 20 minutes after you had come in my mouth and the joke had come out of it.

Don't let me paint the wrong 'Movie of the Week' picture here (could John Stahmos play me though - he needs a job - Rebecca's carry his dead weight) - I have had many periods of control, or abstinence. My Senior year of college - I didn't drink or do drugs for a year. But I fucked around, man did I fuck around. I would bore of a guy after a month - usually because it meant if I kept seeing him I couldn't (in good conscience) go to the bookstore. See if it wasn't booze, or drugs, or sex, or shopping, or a person, or working out - it would be something. I just kept shifting the blame. I blew out both tires on my truck hitting that median - because of the booze, I wasn't to blame. I let that guy and his roomate bareback me - I was higher then a kite on drugs, I wasn't to blame. I would spend $500 bucks on shirts in the days when I was only making $21,000 - I really needed those clothes, I wasn't to blame.

I fall back into these behaviors - not because I have a problem with booze, or drugs, or shopping, or sex, or working out - but because I have a problem with - me.

I just use everything else to mask it. I am an amazingly funtional - self-hater. I can bump up before work, drink at lunch and get through the day impressing them all. I am the typical Leo - playing "life of the party", never really remembering how many drinks I had - but able to count the phone numbers, the conquests, the laughs. I can mix my K with my E with my T (but not G, at least that one I know is a one way trip to an early grave - the only thing I seem to have a wake-up call on) and seem pretty normal.

I need to take a good long look and figure out how I want to proceed with this life. I've done a great job faking it - but I think the cracks are starting to show through.