On Alcohol & Suffering

I can’t quite remember how long ago it was, but I seldom forget who I was and wasn’t. At 41, I am still aware of the person who has walked closely behind me, but at least the larger parts of him are dead now. Just the odour of what rots inside the past. It is somewhat important to preface this with a small admission: I can’t promise you a flowing prose-piece highlighting how easy and serendipitous this has been. It has been a different version of difficult. Perhaps, that’s just me.

I think it’s silly for me to ever entertain the notion that I might be a ‘recovering alcoholic’. There is no pull from the past. No warm memories to reminisce over. There is no yearning to escape, that way. At 41, I understand that there is no escape in any cocktail of drinks, just delay and amplification. I see no fun in it. I see hiding. I see lonely people feeling a sense of togetherness amongst paper bonds. What brings them together chains them to something else. Some might call it blindness. 

Why am I writing this on an August evening as the sun disappears? Because it keeps reaching out to touch me. Not as temptation, but as a threat. I am reminded of its hold in others. That willingness to burn. The romanticised downfall of reason. How it paints an illusion of truth. Deep, urgent truth.

I want to be fair and compassionate, but I do not grant myself such indulgences. At 41, I cannot do the same for you.

Under the hypnotic spell of it all, we mistake the loud for the honest.

Desperate cackles fill rooms with false intimacy. Glasses are raised to collective and individual undoing under the guise of freedom. No freedom ever really came with a chemical shortcut. Just illusion. I watch their mouths move, no longer hearing them. So engaged and desperate. So convinced. So convinced that these words that march out from a mistreated prefrontal cortex are a deeper truth.

With the death of the prefrontal cortex comes the lack of capacity to regulate one’s own emotions—yes, we’re getting scientific now. The internal landscape is a war-torn battlefield of projection. All the anxieties, shame and deafening knowledge of one’s own shortfalls—they don’t vanish along with inhibitions. They are weaponised. 

The hardest thing about stopping was learning to sit with the rot of my own discomfort. To stay with it. To unpack who I was, and wasn’t. Worse than any nightmare or bereavement. Just a brain telling the truth for the first time. A disgusting, shameful truth. Alcohol and the ego are close. They do not allow such things. So you don’t simply sit, you’re far too Epicurean for that. Instead you externalise the pain. Vulnerabilities are turned outwards. Blades at the wrists of anyone foolish/caring/unknowing/loving enough to hold out a hand.

Reason is obliterated, leaving an unfiltered baseline of unresolved friction. This crude, predictable and ultimately useless defense mechanism… They call it passion, sometimes grief. It is none of those things. Just a lonely person failing to cope. Glorifying weaknesses. Trapped souls singing freedom songs. They package up their inner torment, and outsource it to a bottle, all the while expecting the world to applaud the live-action wreckage.

At 41, I am done applauding.