It seems that every time I sit down to write nowadays, I’ve got a beer or a glass of wine or something next to my keyboard keeping me company. While it’s easy to explain this away with alcohol kind of lubricating the more emotional parts of myself, realistically, I’m developing some kind of alcohol dependency. The truth is that I’m having a drink or two or three most every day and writing really has nothing to do with the presence or vacancy of a bottle on my desk.
I’m not an alcoholic, though. I still feel like there’s a lot of runway before I get to that point. The fact of the matter is drinking is the best way to lean into the punch, so to speak. What I mean is, suffering, to the undisciplined, requires a certain amount of personal debasement.
Whenever I feel upset, I find it easier to give myself more things to be ashamed of. When I feel like my suffering is too great (it never is, it’s mundane comparatively), I find new, additional ways to suffer. Shame makes suffering more bearable. How cruel would it be to be proud and suffer regardless? If I’m going to sit here imagining hurling myself from the roof of my apartment building, it’d be much better to become the kind of pathetic that would require. It’s too difficult to hate myself for getting left at the altar, but it’s much easier to hate myself if I cope with said circumstance in the most obviously destructive ways. Every time I open a drink, I feel embarrassed more than anything. I’m aware that the reason I drink is to move myself further from who I want to be, to meet this expectation that I am a fuckup, that I am pitiful and wormlike and that what I deserve most in this world is the underside of a shoe.
The thing I am most scared of in life is being fully displayed. The me I see and identify with is not someone I want to have seen. And while I do not want people to look at me and say “wow, that is a deadly combination of arrested development and alcoholism”, such a description is preferable to being judged for the things I actually am. In other words, when I feel this disappointment, it’s best to become something worth deserving of that feeling.
So, every time I drink, it’s to debase myself. It is to become someone shameful and shallow and anneloid. I cannot handle my emotions without that.
The mature position is that suffering happens regardless of who you are, and that you just have to deal with it. It has nothing to do with being you and everything to do with Being. But I can’t understand that. What I can understand is that miserable people suffer and that if I’m suffering, I must be miserable. Cheers to that.
jeez, louise 