Ingrid's Reviews > Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction

Having grown up in a divorced, dysfunctional, sexually and emotionally abusive household, I know very well those feelings of wanting to escape, numb and hide- from those who were hurting me, not protecting me as they should have, for not seeing that I needed help, and from my own damaged self. That inability to say no when you are young, helpless and scared haunts you all throughout adulthood. We wind up unable today no to anything, living a lifetime of trying to, and failing, to please others to the point where we end up feeling mentally exhausted, unhappy, powerless, alone and afraid of being abandoned. So many women I've met feel this way because of some trauma in their childhood, or they grew up in a very dysfunctional family where the problems overshadowed any adults' ability to bond or connect with them enough to feel like they mattered, or that anyone cared. It's a lonely life that only gets worse the longer you hide or run away from it.

Turning to any form of escape, especially addictive ones like alcohol, drugs and sex, are temporary fixes, but so destructive for everyone around us. It becomes your only way to escape who are and the life you never wanted. Until it starts killing you and those around you. Vargas writes, "We had all been brought to our knees by our inability to say no to something that was killing us.". I was never able to say no to my parents, or my abuser, the kids who tormented me growing up, to the unhealthy ways I tried to escape back then and they wound up nearly killing me as an adult. I present day, I am baffled that I was still unable to say no to the things that were ultimately destroying me- anger, resentment, denial, hiding, dishonesty and shame. I was unable to say not to drinking as a way out of anything painful.

Vargas is brutally honest about all of her own struggles and battles with lack of self worth, fear of abandonment, perfectionism, personalizing every failure as her own, and terror of not measuring up to the vision people had of her and one she was desperately clinging onto for herself. It's a tough battle, not just overcoming addiction, but to "solve the mystery of why I kept going back to what was killing me". Facing your own failures is incredibly hard, especially when the people in your life who hurt you deeply aren't willing to face theirs. We can never change others, nor the outcomes of their lives, but we can take charge of our own actions to love, respect and accept ourselves so that we can do the same for the people in our lives who dared to care and love us. And we can accept that it's okay to ask for help, no one can truly do anything alone in this world. We aren't meant to...

Great read! I come away inspired by this beautiful line, "You light up a room when you walk into it. Don't walk into it drunk." Have the courage to be present with whatever is on your journey in life.