Addictions, Part 5 — Touched with Fire Media

I have a lot of worries about quitting. The truth is that I haven’t gone more than a few weeks without a drink since graduating college, and those spans of a few weeks have always been confined to fruitless efforts to quit through sheer force of will. I don’t know what’s around the corner, really, because I have no direct experience of consistently sober adulthood. The only thing that really makes me think that I might be able to make this stick this time is that I’m not trying to do it alone. Writing these blog entries has caused a lot of people to reach out with offers of help, advice, and an open ear, which I hadn’t expected when I started. I’m in therapy and taking it seriously — there’s probably a whole entry to be written about the ways in which I’ve tricked, or failed to engage with, my various therapists in the past — and I’ve got a real plan. Meetings, new activities to fill the time that I spend drinking, a host of new writing projects.

But I’m scared, too, because I’ve never tried to do any of those things sober. When I started doing drugs I was just 19, a bundle of anxieties, insecurities, doubts, and inhibitions; part of what I liked about drugs were the ways they alleviated those things — get stoned and I could tune out the world; get drunk and I could have a conversation; take speed and my doubts and insecurities vanished. How do I make friends if I have to sit there, silently feeling my fears and inhibitions, while I try to do it? Jesus, how do you date sober? I know almost nobody, and that includes many people who don’t have any particular problem with alcohol, who feels comfortable making the first move without a couple of sips of wine in their stomach first.

The dating thing is one of the things I’ve thought most about, because it really worries me. I’m 36 and I haven’t been in what you’d call a serious, committed relationship since I was 28 — at least not one that I was serious about and committed to. Part of the reason the last one I was in broke down was because I drank too much — she never put it exactly like that, but I can recognize so many of her complaints about my behavior, the things that caused her to leave me, as actually being symptoms of an addiction that neither of us was really prepared to admit that I had. I always intended, for as long as I can remember, to have a family — you know, partner, kids, dog, cat — and I am dead certain that a primary cause of my failure to come anywhere close to that in the last many, many years is my alcohol and drug use. I’ve come to feel I’m dangerous. Nobody deserves to be in a relationship with an alcoholic. Especially not the kinds of people I would like enough to get into a relationship with.

But how do you find partners without booze? Notwithstanding the occasional person I’ve staggered home from a bar with — those never last more than a night — all the relationships I’ve been in have been aided by the disinhibition and celebratory spirit found in a drink. You chat with a girl on OK Cupid, and you meet for a beer, and after two or three you’re able to flirt, and after three or four you’re able to kiss her on the stoop of her building. How do you flirt, how do you make the first move, without having had a drink? These are genuinely practical matters. I feel I’m in a bind: to build a relationship, I have to get clean; to meet a girl, I have to get drunk. Maybe I should start hitting up dating websites and then quit the instant I’ve had a promising date. That’s not crazy, is it? Is it? IS IT?

Of course it’s crazy. But the way I’ve lived my entire life to this point has been crazy, in one way or another. Sometimes I’ve lost my mind and been quite literally crazy — like, should-be-in-a-mental-hospital deranged. But most of the time it’s just that the volume and consistency of my consumption has been nuts. When I really sat down and began to evaluate my behavior — really, when I began to write these things — I found myself shocked. I drank what? How much of it? And every day? For how long? Of course my life is a wreck. Of course the first two drafts of my novel were a complete mess. Of course the last person I dated was just more than half my age and used to sell me pot before they legalized it. Of course I take a two hour nap every afternoon. Of course I failed to file my tax returns my last year of graduate school. Of course I only see my friends when they almost physically drag me out of my house. Of course I haven’t published anything in five years.

I’m impatient for change, and terrified of it. Because living this way, while not all that fun, has two chief advantages:

(1) It’s easy. Though there’s a lot of anxiety, depression, physical pain, spiritual malaise, sadness, and boredom involved in living the way I have for the last 15 years, there’s very little challenge. It’s not hard to wander down to a dark little bar that has soul music on the stereo and sit there drinking Knob Creek and Boneyard with a book in your hand. It’s not hard at all to live a quiet life where you mostly keep to yourself. It isn’t even hard to keep your house clean and your car insured and stuff like that, so long as you don’t have too much else to take care of. What’s hard is making friends, getting a good job, editing your novel, caring about people, and engaging with life in all its unpredictability.

(2) It’s reliable. Though I may wake up in the morning with a headache, though I may take three trips to the bathroom every night, though I may look in the mirror and think, “You fat, ugly sack of shit,” so long as I trundle down to the bar at 6 PM every night, I will be guaranteed to have a few hours of pleasant, loose-limbed, uninhibited pleasure in my life. The guilt and shame about doing something that’s hurting me will be gone by the time that first beer is polished off. Then you can just go home and eat crap and watch Parks & Rec for the 7th time, and it will all be fine. A lot of things can happen when you’re drunk, but I can never once remember thinking, “I’m bored. This sucks.” I’ve been sick, injured, sad, angry, whatever — but never bored, and never anxious. That’s the magic of it.

Anyway, I’ve made a decision. One of the things I’ve been dithering about for the last few weeks, since realizing I had to quit, was setting an end date for myself. I felt like there was preparation work to be done, including trying to understand better why I started getting fucked up in the first place. I’m sure there’s still a lot of that work yet to be done, but I really do think I’ve come understand something about myself that I never knew before in the last few weeks. So my decision is this: tomorrow is my last day. I can’t run this race anymore. I know it won’t be simple and I know I might relapse and I know there’s still a lot to be done, but as of Monday I’m getting clean, by hook or by crook. I’m ready. I’m worried, I’m doubtful, but I’m ready.

There are a bunch of things, very simple, practical things, I need to do in the coming days and weeks. I need to find a meeting — I’m not going to do AA, because they emphasize powerlessness, and feeling powerless is a large part of why I started taking drugs in the first place. There are other groups, other ways, and I think I’ve found one.

I’ve decided to take up a martial art. I don’t care about MMA or boxing or anything like that, but I have long been interested in physical fitness — the one addiction I didn’t detail here was exercise — and I think the discipline might be good for me. (That, and having something to do in the evenings, when I would usually be drinking.) I’ve been researching, and there’s a jiu jitsu place in North Portland that I’m going to check out this week.

And I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking, about something strange: I think part of the way I ended up like this was a lack of community. Not that you can’t be a member of a community and fall through the cracks, but the fact of the matter is that most of our lives take place online these days, and while I genuinely enjoy and love the people I’ve known either only or mostly through the internet, there’s a need to see people face-to-face that isn’t getting fulfilled. I think this is true for a lot of people these days. We don’t live where we grew up, we don’t know our neighbors, we don’t leave our houses and jobs. And so I’ve been thinking: I might start going to a religious service of some kind. This is weird for me because I am, in no uncertain terms, an atheist. I’m not even one of those people who says they’re not religious but spiritual. I’m a materialist. I am convinced. But churches and synagogues and mosques have long held communities together and given people a sense of loyalty to one another. I think I need that. I don’t know how to negotiate it, really. I’m drawn in some ways to Catholicism, but I don’t really care for the authoritarianism and social stances of the Church, even under Pope Cool Uncle — er, Francis. There’s a gay-friendly Unitarian church down the street from me, which seems a natural fit, but I know more about the early Christians of the southern Europe and the Near East than I do about mainline, Protestant Christianity as it’s currently practiced. I’ve thought about Judaism, but really — no shit — one of the things that discourages me is that the synagogues in Portland are all very far from where I live.

Anyway, that last one is one I’m still thinking about. I might never pull the trigger on it, because it would feel dishonest to walk into a church and treat it like a social club. But it might also be the most important of all of these — who knows.