I'm posting this here after much internal debate, but because I am tired and don't really feel like thinking, as well as will probably be blogging minimally over the next week or so due to lack of internet access and my attempts to clean my apartment/write, and just, well, just this feeling last night like drinking was not even something I was tempted by at all. And it's hard because you're at a bar and someone asks you if you want a drink and you say water or diet coke or that you don't drink or that you're naturally perky and don't need to drink and sometimes it's almost like they get offended. But it was just so clear last night and since I've written this I've felt a lot better. Last week I picked up the phone to call my ex, actually did it twice but got voicemail and just decided it's okay. And then today I had to write these acknowledgements and it just felt wrong to leave her out. It's still hard and will be for a really long time, and I'm not always treating myself perfectly, but the drinking thing just feels like the right thing. And when I do treat myself well, when I exercise and get sun and don't procrastinate AND have fun, I feel fine. I feel like good things are right around the corner and I don't sit around and feel sorry for myself. Cause that mindset is so easy to fall into, it's like the default where my brain goes to catalogue all the failures and rejections, the "well there must be something wrong with me/cause everyone else makes it look so damn easy," once again, my favorite line from The Reuptation ever because it's so true.
But I'll just stop prefacing it and give you this and this is really one of those purging/cathartic moments, so no comments. And just fyi, I'm fine. This is kindof me in my darker moments but also a way to not become my dad, or the way my dad was when I was growing up, trying to sort through all that bullshit in words and not in bottles. I know to some people this won't make a lick of sense, so don't even bother reading, but I hope some other people get it. I'm posting this for me, so feel free to skip along to the smuttier aspects of this blog.
And if, like, some editor type wanted to publish this, I'd be happy to take it down and pretty it up and let you do so. But becuase I put a lot of time and thought into it and it's been sitting like a lump in my inbox, I'd rather it be seen by some than by none.
I Don’t Drink Anymore But Don’t Call Me "Sober"
by Rachel Kramer Bussel
The six definitions of "sober" I find at dictionary.com read in order:
1. Habitually abstemious in the use of alcoholic liquors or drugs;
temperate.
2. Not intoxicated or affected by the use of drugs.
3. Plain or subdued: sober attire.
4. Devoid of frivolity, excess, exaggeration, or speculative imagination;
straightforward: gave a sober assessment of the situation.
5. Marked by seriousness, gravity, or solemnity of conduct or character.
See Synonyms at serious.
6. Marked by circumspection and self-restraint.
"Sober" is the word we use to describe someone who has stopped drinking or
doing drugs, a supposedly mature definition for one who has moved on from
their troubled ways to better, brighter pastures, one who has seen the
light and become some amalgamation of all of the above. To me, "sober"
conjures up not just someone who doesn’t drink or get high, but someone
who is indeed "devoid of frivolity." And since I proudly claim the former,
but certainly not the latter, "sober" just doesn’t cut it. I am still
proudly a part of bar culture, the kind that is fun, gregarious and
outrageous, not the murky, alone, mope-into-my-beer kind, and refuse to
relinquish that simply because I now have different ways of letting my
hair down.
To abstain from alcohol and drugs is seen as somehow moving up, moving
beyond one’s crazy, partying ways and into a more refined, adult, mature
kind of world, where instead of sipping white whine or Cosmopolitans, one
sips bottled water and eats macrobiotic food while watching something
wholesome like 60 Minutes. To publicly state that you don’t drink, to
drinkers, is to mark yourself as other, different, even though I don’t
see myself as a "sober" kind of person, but rather one who is often taken
for drunk when I’m not, one who likes to throw her all into going out,
get lost in the camaraderie of friends and fun. For me, drinking was a
way of not being sober, not in the obvious sense, but of leaving my dark
side for my lighter side. I'd like to say the latter is the "real me,"
but they are both equally ingrained parts of my personality, and while I
enjoy the fun, laughing, garrulous social me much more than the
depressive, morose me, I can't exactly pick and choose.
In my utopia, I am always up, always "on," able to sound smart and
sociable whether or not I've had a few cocktails propping me up. But in
real life, that overly analytical part of me is always lurking
stealthily, waiting to pounce. It's the serious, hypochondriac
manic-depressive side that worries about things both far off and around
the corner, the kind that engages in little acts of self-destruction that
threaten to sabotage me before I pull myself back from the brink. There
is a dangerous, morbid part of my mind that fixates on the negative,
clinging to it with the force of a baby’s tiny hand wrapped around your
finger, its strength disproportionate to its physical size, stubborn and
immutable. This is the part that leads me to invariably fail on so many
levels, to give up before I’ve even started. This is the part that hides
behind the turned-off cell phone, wallows in my utter pit of a room,
misses deadlines, pulls the covers over my head rather than facing the
day, the world, my life. Despite my best intentions, there is indeed a
very sober strain to my personality, the kind that feels out of place no
matter how many drinks I’ve had, the kind that sees only two possible
choices for social interaction: be the life of the party or be the one
sitting alone weeping in the corner. Drinking was a way for me to be the
life of the party, or at least, kept me from the corner, imbued me with
enough off-the-charts bravado that I was sure everyone would like me. Who
wouldn't like me when I'm drunk?
Drinking lets me be that happy side of myself, perhaps the better self,
the one who is fun and spontaneous, joyous and carefree, who can never
fail because that possibility doesn’t even exist within her mental
horizon. Yet drinking is no longer an option; it cannot be my coping
mechanism because it simply doesn't work, leaving me with only a
momentary respite from my dark side while simultaneously egging it on,
luring it ever closer.
But how to navigate life's middle ground, alone, with no safety net?
Sometimes it’s easier to know that I have an instant bonding mechanism,
can talk about the variables of a drink, share stories of walks of shame
and inebriated escapades, give someone a reason to talk to me. Because
that fear looms over me every time I walk into a room that makes me
nervous—will anyone want to talk to me? Will they like me? Why should
they? Really, they have no reason to, because I’m an awful, miserable,
fat, boring, ugly person, so maybe I should just go home. Rinse and
repeat goes the spin cycle in my brain.
Moderation has never been easy for me, and I struggle with the idea that
the drinkers are having more fun, or just faking it better. Yet for all
my myriad doubts and fears, I am usually content, able to approach each
day freshly. I am often giddy, racing to call my friends or frantically
email the latest gossip. When all is well with the world, and I’m lost
in my friends or a lover, or simply my life, caught up in the adrenaline
rush of a new writing project, lost in anything that sweeps me away from
all the muddled thoughts that fight for dominance in my brain, I don’t
care about alcohol in the least. At those times, life itself surges
forward to bring me that confidence and joy that is so total and
overwhelming, there is no room for the dark side. But it is there,
lurking, waiting, and when it does hit, I am once again at a loss.
I stopped drinking at the start of 2004 as an experiment, a test, albeit a
necessary one. It was to have been "for a little while," until I felt
ready to go back to drinking, much like when I left law school I was
"taking a year off," only five years later to shudder at the very thought
of returning. I’ve had four drinks so far this year, none of which I
needed—two free lemon drop shots at a gay bar called, appropriately
enough, Therapy, downing them the day before my girlfriend and I broke up
in a dramatic, screaming, searing post-sex fight whose effects have
lingered for the past five months. I had another drink, an "apple martini
a la mode" (with vanilla vodka) on a date, and felt so warm and fruity and
sweet, much like my drink, a puddle of liquid. I had a can of champagne at
a fancy book party, thinking that it was light and bubbly, and free, and
wouldn’t do me much harm, and proceeded to hold my head in agony in the
cab afterwards. I think about these drinks in all their sweet specificity
when I want to have another one, to bring the total to five, a succinct
number, a seemingly fitting one. I weigh the value gained from these, and
so far, have chosen diet Coke instead of number five, but each time, it is
a struggle, a challenge, a test, one that sometimes requires all my
strength to pass.
The whole idea of living "one day at a time" is terrifying to me, because
it’s only if I can predict and control the future that I feel like my life
is not balancing on some kind of cliff’s edge, the kind that alcohol helps
balance out, even momentarily. "One day at a time" literally means that
anything can happen tomorrow, and it’s that kind of thinking that gives me
panic attacks. What if I am never able to write another word again? What
if I hop on a plane to some random city and never come back? What if I am
simply unable to perform everyday tasks? These are the more extreme ends
of my fears, but are the logical conclusion to my constant, underlying
worry that I am not good enough, and never will be.
But back to the word "sober"—it implies a certain degree of seriousness,
of brook-no-arguments, are-you-or-aren’t-you, one-drink-and-you-die
finality to the issue. Those who speak in words like "sober" also use
"recovery," and its ilk, 12-step language that is its own world, a
private land segregating the drinkers from the non-drinkers. I am caught
somewhere in the middle, one foot in each camp; while my mouth is now
with the non-drinkers, my mind is at the bar, flirting, laughing, having
fun, doing what drinking used to make me do—forget, relax, chill. One
doesn’t stop drinking on a lark, and yet when I stopped it was more of an
experiment, a stopgap measure for a problem that had become utterly out
of control. Yet, what would it be like to have it be "in control?" To be
like some of my friends who feel about alcohol "I can take it or leave
it?" The problem is, I always took it, always wanted it, more and more
each time. There was always that one final drink, and often one after
that, the one that pushed me over the edge from a pleasant buzz to a
staggering fool, that made it less social nicety and closer to pure
will-kill-for need, that made me go from feeling good about myself to
feeling like the queen of the world.
At first, not drinking was just something I needed to try, an urgent
experiment to save myself from imminent collapse, and it worked, perhaps
too well. Now, it seems a bit of a chicken and egg scenario—good things
have good things come to me because I stopped drinking, vice versa, or do
the two have no connection? I don’t know, though in that same time
period, I’ve moved from stultifying day job to job-of-my-dreams, starting
exercising more, returned to long dormant projects and made new friends
who feel like the kind who will be around forever, while simultaneously
dealing with the biggest breakup of my life. That is perhaps my number
one reason for sticking to this commitment—to mend my broken heart
without falling apart, without falling into the always safe but never
easy arms of alcohol. I feel like I can approach even that heartache with
a clearer mind, a purer heart, and emotions not diluted by waves of
vodka.
Now, sometimes I see people drinking and feel like a visitor to a foreign
country as I step up to the bar and order water or diet Coke, or nothing,
silently absorbing the imagined reproach of a thousand straining eyes, of
my own urges that still bubble up from deep beneath my skin. I don’t feel
peer pressure per se, but a slight removal from everyone else, an
out-of-syncness I don’t hold with quite as much pride as I do others
marks of difference. I'm left on the wrong side of the glass from those I
consider my people, my peers, my cultural equals.
People talk about queer culture as a mixture of signifiers and community
that go far beyond the actual acts of queer sex and much deeper into our
core identities and where we feel comfortable. Thus, queer culture
welcomes fag hags, the straight partner of a bisexual, the "curious" or
"experimental," the son or daughter of a GLBT person, or ideally, anyone
who challenges our heteronormative society. Maybe I’m the drinking
equivalent of a fag hag, hanging around the edges of the drinking
culture, hoping for a contact high, not a literal one but one that rides
the waves of happiness palpably rising off the pleasantly drunk, reveling
in a social atmosphere that is infinitely preferable to me than AA
meetings or Starbucks or wherever it is that "sober" people go. Because
not drinking doesn’t make you forget what it was like, doesn’t make you
forget the good times right before the crashes, the blackouts, the stupid
acts you regret not just in the morning, but for the rest of your life;
in fact, they are all the more vivid. "Maybe just one drink" often pops
into my mind with just as much seductiveness as a curvy girl in a slinky
dress beckoning to me from across the room. "I used to get drunk to get
my spark/it used to work just fine/well it made me wretched but it gave
me heart" sings Shawn Colvin, one of my patron saints of recovering with
aplomb (Anne Lamott is also up there on my list). Because it’s a fallacy
to pretend that I don’t enjoy it, otherwise there’d be nothing to miss,
nothing to fantasize about.
When I long for a drink, it’s not for the taste, but for the feeling,
the sense of belonging, and it’s usually when I hate being in my skin so
much I want to crawl out of it, scratch it off, peel it away and leap
out and be someone, anyone, else. It's when I'm at my weakest that that
urge is strongest. It’s when I can fantasize about suicide because it
seems, momentarily, an easier option than real life, and wonder what
would happen if I were gone—who would clean my room? Would my student
loans be forgiven? Would my parents be okay? Who would miss me? It’s
when I can dreamily, lazily wonder about that option, when that seems
somehow simpler than the insurmountable task of finding my missing
glasses or finishing an overdue assignment, when the weight of the world
seems to not only be on my shoulders, but pinning me down as strong as
any ropes ever have, that alcohol seems like a nice compromise. Stay
alive, but escape my troubles. Take a break, forget about them in a way
that simply sitting down and resolving to move on, or at least work
through my issues, doesn’t quite do.
This is a constant challenge, not so much because I see alcohol and crave
it—I am much more likely to pant like a rabid dog over my favorite
foods—but because I can feel its loss permeating my life. I constantly
feel like I’m missing out on some unnamed fun, fun that I can still
recall with enough clarity to know that it is indeed fun. And for what?
Many days it does not seem worth passing up. Wouldn’t it be worth a
little humiliation to avoid staying trapped in the darkest tunnels of my
mind, the places that have me imaging what exactly might happen were I to
jump onto the subway tracks, thinking about this with imagery that’s a
little too realistic. And yet it’s not death I truly want, but
hibernation, escapism, a week or month or even an hour of someone else’s
life.
Over a year ago, I tried to stop drinking, only putting in a half-hearted
effort. In the midst of confusion, brokeness and unemployment, it was
easier to rely on alcohol for my fun, though I had moments of
introspection when I did manage to push the glass away. After a sex party
spent trying and failing to get in the mood without any liquid aids, I
wrote about the siren-like allure of it; "the glossy, tempting frosted
bottles" beckoned to me from across the room. I drink drinks that remind
me of femmey girls, all pink-tinged and pretty, smooth and easy. I don’t
go for the challenging kinds of alcohol that burn your throat, the kind
as a teenager I thought made me seem like an adult. In fact, my drinks
say kindof the opposite; I want to let loose, have fun, relax, be silly
and carefree, the alcoholic equivalent of chick lit, a genre I
not-so-secretly consume voraciously.
Sitting at a bar watching others drink, as the night wears on into the
wee hours, I am usually okay, happy to watch the drunken hordes scramble
about, because the truth is, I don’t feel all that different from them.
For me, alcohol is (or was) a way to speed things up, to make my body
catch up to my brain, which is often already deep into an uninhibited
state. Last night as I frantically tried to figure out how to make a move
on the girl I’ve had a crush on since I met her, I reached for my water
and then almost took a sip from the vodka cranberry melting next to it. I
wanted that sip not for the tart taste but for the courage, the easy
excuse—I only did that because I was drunk—that classic mantra I told
myself countless times, the cause and effect mixing and merging until it
was unclear where one stopped and the other started.
Not drinking but not devolving into a terribly staid version of
"sobriety," as I define it, will always be more trying than figuring out
how to finagle a free shot. Whether by genetics, fate or bad luck, I'll
never be a take-it-or-leave-it girl when it comes to alcohol. But my not
drinking does not mean a concession that I can never have even a sip. When
I related to a friend how I'd tried another friend's mango martini, she
looked at me with great concern, like I'd violated some essential taboo.
But it's not that I consider myself an alcoholic, doomed to collapse
should I swallow even a smidgen of fermented poison, only a potential one,
and this time, I truly wanted the mango taste more than the alcohol. For
me, "one day at a time" means that I don't know what the future may bring,
but for now, I'll have a diet Coke, please, along with my sanity.
I co-edited UP ALL NIGHT: ADVENTURES IN LESBIAN SEX
