126. ...caught up chasing my tale.
(morning thinking)
The guys from the team go out after work and although it’s nice to be asked my heart sinks as I decline. I do want to spend time with these men but the need for it to be a boozy pub thing frustrates me. What else is there?
Why don't we have choices? Who took our options away? Always the same routines. One pint, two pint, three pint more. Wake up fuzzy and broken.
I fucking hate booze.
I see very few moments of celebration or open, communal connection in Scottish culture that aren’t firmly attached to drink. Booze and brotherhood, certainly, go arm in arm.
I sometimes wonder whether the aggressive dislike of booze culture, dropped into the void left by the ejection of alcohol from my life, could be overblown. Certainly anger isn't helping.
Do we even know how to laugh sober? When do we learn these limiting behaviours.
Getting pissed as a teen is what passes in this country as a right of passage into adulthood and the lessons imprinted restrict important parts of our social and emotional growth. We rely less on ourself and lean heavily on alcohol’s unsteady crutch. We don’t develop an ability to be comfortable and open and vulnerable in sobriety because we flooded the times where we might have learnt those skills with booze.
I fucking hate alcohol.
Do I get caught up chasing my tale with this? Tangled in my own sobriety story? There's something here about rigid attachment to ideas, being overly fixed in one way of thinking.
“My own sobriety story”. My sobriety. Mine.
Mine, mine, mine.
Is this something to own or something to experience, witness, move through and learn from?
Ownership feels static. Antithetical to growth.
There are familiar hoppy floral notes to my decryment of drinking that honk similar to the complaints of the former nicotine addict who vociferously objects to the merest hint of tobacco smoke in the air.
It’s not me that has the problem, it’s society. We’ve all been made slaves to this demon drink and I’ve had the courage to shake off it’s vile yoke!
Perhaps the Paul protests too much.
I could go to the pub and not drink.
Are abstinence and temperance the same thing?
abstinence
noun
The practice of restraining oneself from indulging in something, typically alcohol or sex.
"I feel powerful and authentic after four years of abstinence"
Temperance’s first definition in the dictionary has it as an interchangeable synonym for abstinence but the second entry offers nuance.
temperance
noun
The quality of moderation or self-restraint.
"We lack temperance in our lives, either from ignorance or from want of self-control"
I abstain entirely from things. I don’t trust myself to have restrained, healthy, temperate relationship with drink or drugs or meat or sugar. There’s been an abundance of good evidence, over the years, to suggest that my circumspection is well placed.
A little while back I lifted my meat embargo to allow organically and ethically raised animal products - I was eating Gregg’s steak bakes within the month.
I seem to create my own slippery slopes, grease the pole with the dripping fat of a poorly sealed restraint manifold. The mechanism in me that does moderation doesn’t seem to work.
As a young teen I found, in strong cider and parental drinks cabinet raiding, a reliable shortcut to confidence. For almost all of my adult life I was heavily reliant on alcohol for socialising and relaxing. Tipsy was the only way I knew confidence. Tipsy led, inevitably, inexorably, to drunk.
I was drunk. I was a drunk?
Last summer I returned to the film industry after a long hiatus to work on the screen adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s autobiographical book The Outrun. A young woman leans into drink as a salve for trauma and her ensuing alcoholism spirals wildly out of control. She eventually - PLOT SPOILER - finds redemption in nature.
I say “wildly out of control” but really, none of the drunken bad behaviour described in the book or script felt unnatural to me. All very familiar. Everything rang bells, seemed close enough to my own experiences. I was nearly three years sober as I dressed the locations; filling kitchens with empty wine bottles and creating seedy backdrops for drunken debauchery. It felt like recreating parts of my old life.
I began to wonder whether, in the last years of drinking, I had crossed the line from bad habit to addiction? As the tenure of my sobriety had increased I had begun to question how close the bullet I dodged had come. Now I wondered, had it in fact hit me and lodged somewhere inside?
Was I an alcoholic? Am I an alcoholic?
Sobriety certainly feels like a necessity rather than a choice. I don’t trust myself to have one or two convivial drinks.
I took retrospective surveys with alcohol abuse charities, filled out online questionnaire’s and they all advised me to seek urgent medical intervention. “Speak to your doctor!” and “get help now”.
SO maybe I didn’t dodge the bullet. Maybe a lifetime of alcohol dependency (abuse?) reached it’s obvious conclusion and the bullet is firmly lodged in me. Somewhere between my liver and my heart. Its ferrous presence benign while I tow the sobriety line. Sitting quietly for now. Setting off airport style metal detector alarms when I risk entering situations that might trip up my resolve. Pubs mostly.
I would like to join them. But I don't go to the pub with the guys from work. I'm careful. I spend evenings watching 12a films with my boy and wake up early and sober the next day. True to this new version of myself. Not hungover. Not ever. Never again.
Was that a bit of an angry rant? Is it just me? I don't think it is but maybe I transfer some of my own weaknesses onto society; attempt to sidestep some personal responsibility. We get angry about the traits in others that we fear or dislike in ourselves.
I want to be truthful. I want to be authentically me. I want to be accountable.
How's your own path? What's it like underfoot?
Message me up if the ground is rough or unstable. We can support each other.
Stay connected.
Thanks for reading. Love you bye.
Paul.
As a teen and into my twenties I didn’t drink and felt I was there but not being fully part of things by not joining in the drinking. Did that practise at being sober when almost everyone else was drunk make it easier to do the soft drink break between alcoholic drinks when I did start drinking. And there is I think hope in the rise of low and non alcoholic beers available in pubs. I went out with the guys from Monday night football recently and drank non alcoholic beer all evening. Like electric cars it is only a personal solution to a social problem but I think a step in the right direction.
It doesn’t come across as angry. X