Michela and Alessio met six years ago through his partner. She works in a gluten-free food shop in Cisterna di Latina, he arrives at the weekend from Rome. It’s immediately a true friendship, even if it takes Michela a while to admit it to herself. Because Alessio, at the beginning, makes her uncomfortable: he has no filter, he says things as they come, without calibrating them based on the context or the people in front of him. «I gradually realized that the problem was mine» he says today. «Alessio needed someone who was close to him and who didn’t judge him».
What Michela discovers over time is a more complex picture than she imagined. Alessio has a personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, diagnosed for years. He lost his father (who died from alcohol-related causes) and has always lived with the profound feeling of not being up to the standards of the people around him. He felt inadequate, says Michela. He looked at those who had made it, in his eyes differently from him, and that perceived distance crushed him.
Alcohol in all this was not a pleasure, but it was an escape. «I realized that a glass of wine wasn’t enough for him. You felt it good in an instant and half an hour later drunk». It wasn’t the glass of wine from the meal. It was something that Alessio was looking for to stay in that head a little less.
Michela does not spare herself in the story. At the beginning he made a mistake as almost everyone makes a mistake: he applied pressure, he said things that seemed obvious. «But how do you not realize that you are hurting yourself? How can you not see that the world is spinning and you are still?».
What worked was something completely different. Stay close without expecting sharing in return, at least at first. Listen without telling yourself. Stop ordering wine at the restaurant when Alessio was present, not because someone told him to, but because he realized how much it cost Alessio just to look at that glass. Coordinate with Guido, Alessio’s partner, to keep him safe in the worst moments. «Nobody taught us how to behave. Yet what you can do, in these cases, is ally yourself with the right people».
The most serious crisis arrives on a Sunday. Michela and Alessio spend the day together, a day that in his eyes seems calm, normal, beautiful. Then Alessio calls her back. He drank and left the house. Michela and Guido manage to trace his location and within two or three hours, Alessio is taken away in an ambulance.
That moment becomes the watershed. Michela and Guido had already found the CrAL, the Alcohol Reference Center of Lazio, and had talked about it with Alessio indirectly, at dinner, without it seeming like an intervention or a solution dropped from above. When his psychiatrist confirmed that it would be the natural next step, Alessio accepted. Thus began the journey: a month of daily meetings with a medical team and a psychotherapist who still follows him today, with gradually reduced but never interrupted frequency.
Alessio has been clean for more than a year. She writes, sings, cooks: things she had already done before and that Michela and Guido have learned to use as anchors, as concrete alternatives to propose in moments of difficulty. «We got off the train and Alessio told me: you know, to take away this anxiety I would drink something. Clearly he didn’t. But you carry that thing with you, that association between discomfort and alcohol is there, and eradicating it takes time».
Michela doesn’t think the journey is over. On the contrary. «You don’t have to think “I did it” and therefore I can let go. Probably the best way to get out of it is to think that you never got out of it at all». Those five minutes when the urge returns should be taken seriously, not ignored. A bad day must be faced, not allowed to become two bad days.
To Michela six years ago, the one with the prejudice and discomfort, he would say only one thing:
«Try to imagine what it would be like without the abuse of that substance. And stay, while he makes the journey. Because if he is already such a wonderful person today, think about when he will be totally free.”
