#3 - My relationship with drinking

Most of the choices we make, at the time of making, don’t seem like choices at all.

During COVID, I started having a drink at home in the evenings. After long days at work, household chores, I felt like I had earned myself the right to a tipple. Over the next several months, it became a pattern and before I knew it the pattern had congealed into a habit. A habit that stayed with me. My relationship with drinking changed from done to celebrate to done to fix the day, to take the edge off, to kill boredom. A cure-all for all sorts of things in my life.

COVID times rolled on for far longer than any of us had anticipated. Plus I thought I was functioning okay. So I kept renewing the lease on my alibi for drinking. But I could not keep up other parts of my life the way I wanted to. It became harder to wake up early, to maintain a workout schedule, to write in the mornings, to keep a journal, to do intermittent fasting, to eat healthy (I am the type to munch on something along with my drink).

The one thing every child wants is to become an adult. You and I have wanted it too. And then when we did become adults, strangely enough, we behaved like children. We regressed to living like our decisions were not really ours, like there were others pulling the strings for us. We acted helpless; we turned to others; we blamed them if things didn’t turn out well; we didn’t take responsibility for choices that we claimed were not ours—we became the very definition of children. Not the part filled with innocence; the other part that is helpless.

And then one day we realized what was going on and we said to ourselves, I’ve had it. I will change. I will choose wisely. There’s a bit in the movie The Counselor, made from Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay by the same name, that goes:

Actions create consequences which produce new worlds, and they’re all different. And all these worlds, heretofore unknown to us, they must have always been there, must they not? You have to acknowledge the reality of the world you are in. There is not some other world. I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you’re in, Counselor. That is my advice. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There’s only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago.

The language is expositional and turgid, not McCarthy-like at all, but does it fit in the context of what we’re talking about?

Most of the time, the choices we make, at the time of making them, don’t seem like choices at all. Only they are. Some of these choices turn us from boys to men; some keep us locked inside the mind of adult-babies. Are these choices, these decisions, reversible? Is any choice reversible? Every choice creates a future that would otherwise have been impossible. When we collide with this future, the only thing left to do is accept it. We don’t get to choose whether or not we want this future that has come to our doorstep. The time for choosing is gone. The time for accepting is here.

What is accepting? It is not resigning to our “fate.” It is not reconciling to our lot, whatever that means. It is coming to terms with reality, recognizing it for what it truly is.

Something from Carl Rogers fits here:

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

The will to change comes from acceptance, is what Rogers seems to be saying. What does he mean by it? I will make a guess.

When we accept, we stop berating ourselves. Berating ourselves can be painful and weirdly recursive, like picking a scab every time it forms, so we hate ourselves for doing it and yet we keep doing it. We look at someone, something — others — to pin the blame on: parents who forced us to do this, partners who made us do that, friends who imposed themselves on us, and so on. We end up being hostile to all these others who, we trick ourselves into believing, have baked our lives into its present unhappy form.

Accepting puts an end to all this hate. All the energy that was being sucked, like a dying man sucks air, by hate is now available to us. A superpower?

Yet, none of it is at hand if we are stuck at choosing. If we still think, I must choose better, choose wiser, we’re missing the point. At the proverbial crossing, which McCarthy’s character refers to, we cannot turn back. We cannot undo the effects of whatever it is that has brought us to this crossing. It may seem that seen through such a worldview our lives are irrevocable. I think what McCarthy means to say is that time is irrevocable. The time we have spent living out a mistake, no matter the point we realize it, is time that is lost to us forever. Nothing we do now or later — the wisest of choices notwithstanding — can bring that time back. So: accept that lost time, accept your reality.

Josh Waitzkin wrote:

How you do the small things is how you do everything.

He was talking about our tendency to think we can “wait around for the big moments to turn it on.” He goes on to say, “But if you don't cultivate turning it on as a way of life in the little moments – and there’s hundreds of times more little moments than big – then there’s no chance in the big moments.”

Let’s say this crossing that McCarthy talks about, let’s imagine that to mean a big moment. Birth of a child, marriage, the first day of a job that you believe will pull your self-esteem out of the gutter. Any of these, for instance. You may believe, may even be excused for it, that you can use the occasion to make a complete turnaround of your life.

But the force that has propelled you to this crossing, what of that force? Will it not continue to propel you similarly? How do you deal with it? You can’t just ignore it or wish it away. You must accept it first. You must give it a place.

Neither Waitzkin nor McCarthy nor Rogers are suggesting that fresh starts are impossible. On the contrary, they are making the argument that the surest usher for a fresh start is self-acceptance.

Every time I told myself I would watch my alcohol, I did. Until I didn’t. It seemed like I had to make a choice: curb my alcohol or curb my life. It confused me as to why I could not make this one choice. Every run of this cycle reduced me a little. I felt smaller in my own eyes.

I wasn’t a drunk. I didn’t drink every night. I didn’t pass out on the couch or blow up my credit card. Probably, all this made it harder to call myself out.

At the start of the year, I came to a realization. I may not have been a drunk but I had a drinking problem. I recognized that I wanted some important things that alcohol was getting in the way of and without subtracting solitary drinking from my life I would never be on the path to those things I valued.

Accepting the reality of my situation has made me feel more capable of making a choice. I have subsequently chosen to honor the promises I made to myself. I believe the only reason I’ve been able to do that is because I’ve come to accept that I have a problem.

Recent weeks have brought a thought to mind. Perhaps there are more worlds I’m a part of that I need to acknowledge the reality of, worlds where I see the truth about some important relationships of my life. Such as my relationship with food, with money, with loving and being loved. Layer by layer, little by little. See what the mirror has to tell me.

Cormac McCarthy at Santa Fe’s La Fonda Hotel in 2023, the last year of his life. Image credit: Kate Joyce