What Sobriety Taught Me (So Far)
The nature and the nurture of reality.
So, if you’re into anniversaries
and celebrating and commemorating things, and one could argue that all
milestones are worth celebrating because joy should be seized whenever
it lays out in the open begging for your attention, here’s an arbitrary
one:
It’s been 159 days since this.
It’s long enough to reflect and notice a considerable change in who I
am. We’ll get to whether that’s good or bad. It was an easy choice, but
it’s been a difficult implementation.
As a musician it is hard work to not
get plastered: I would spend three-to-five nights each week in bars,
often times till close. And people have historically always, always bought me drinks. Friends and strangers seem to get a morbid rise out of pouring gasoline on a liver fire, I guess.
As
a substitute, I have consumed vast oceans of Topo Chico, a beverage I
had not even heard of until I moved to Austin, and now one I cannot
breathe without. I can’t say I ever entertained the idea of drinking
mineral water as a recreational activity. And yet I set a new record by
pounding eight at a birthday party on a recent evening. Many bartenders,
club owners and friends have asked me if I am okay. None thought to ask
that when I was slamming eight beers. I wonder when it stops getting
awkward.
I
also wonder when I start developing healthy habits. I spend the vast
majority of my time stuffing my face with pizza, watching football and
fretting recklessly over what I’m going to do with the rest of my life
now that I have a clear-ish head. I suppose it beats lying on the lawn
and holding onto a blade grass to stop myself from falling off the face
of the Earth.
A long time ago, on
one breezy, sunny summer afternoon, my dad, his wife and I were sitting
on a patio at Gramma Mora’s Mexican Restaurant on Hertel Avenue in my
hometown of Buffalo, New York.
In
between bites, my step-mama asked us both what our greatest flaw was.
My dad went first, and his answer was quick, definitive and shocking. He
said, “I wish I cared more about other people.”
My
father is one of the most loving, patient, kind, and wise people that’s
walked this pebble. I have no idea how, or why, he’d come out firing
with what sounds like the ultimate backhanded slap to himself.
Flash
forward to this birthday party where I slammed eight Topo Chicos. (Ocho
Chicos?) I saw gorgeous young women dancing on bars, and I gasped at
fools rolling around on a floor covered in body-paint. Silly-string and
balloons pelted me from several yards away. Entrancing, psychedelic
music of all kinds tickled my ears. I had signed on to be host and MC,
and did a capable, enthusiastic job. And yet, once off-stage, I often
retreated to a silent corner and streamed the Sixers game.
I
heard a card-carrying member of the outer-ring of my friend circle tell
me, “I hate what you write. And then I love what you write. Sometimes
in the same sentence. Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re amazing.”
I
heard another (somewhat) closer friend tell me, unsolicited and
seemingly on the verge of tears, “You’re amazing. And you have no idea
how amazing you are. And that makes you even more amazing.”
I heard a (ostensibly) very close friend tell me, slurring, “I love you, man. You’re one of my favorite people of all-time.”
And
I would smile, and say “thank you,” and we would all hug. And then I’d
wander back off to take a piss I didn’t have to take. I felt like I was
living in the third person, like I was a surveillance camera peering
upon my own life. An unbiased observer. A watchful eye for someone who
needed watching over. I was completely detached. I wish I cared more
about other people.
I
caught myself ruminating on a lot of things: my health, my job, my
bills, my pile of laundry, my lost debit card (again!), my forthcoming
European vacation, my failed romances, my current circle of friends that
I wish to cull to a more manageable size, my plans for the weekend, my
brother I haven’t talked to in over four years, my goals, my ambitions,
my career, my philanthropy. I am a pathologically restless soul with a
pathological amount of pathetic personality quirks. I need to fix and
finalize these things before all my flaws eat me alive , all before
everyone notices. At that moment, I finally understood what my father
was talking about.
I
am so concerned with how I am that I actually forget to just … well …
be. I don’t converse well with anyone beyond pithy zingers. I don’t
share anything of substance with people in real life beyond music or
humor. The National once sang, “When I walk into a room … I do not light it up.”
It hits home so hard. So much wattage is being expended gathering,
re-gathering and napalming my abusive and destructive inner dialogue, so
many inward-facing amps, that the energy directed outward is muted and
minimal. My body is here. My mind is not. I’m not present. I’m not
really here.
And at that moment … I realized why I used to drink: To silence my inner dialogue and focus my energy outward —I drank to care more about other people.
Mistakes are a man-made construct.
We’re all living, breathing organisms trying to survive — making
decisions with imperfect information that precipitate a range of
probable outcomes. No action we take has fundamental, intrinsic value
beyond eating and sex. If we eat the wrong thing (or fail to eat), we
get sick or die. If we do not have sex and/or have sex with the wrong
people, a whole litany of sub-optimal outcomes are possible.
Problems
are man-made, too. They’re deficits in character that we only deem true
when we compare ourselves to an arbitrary standard, or when we compare
ourselves to arbitrary people close in proximity to us. Comparisons
kill. Expectations are hell.
Someone
once told me, “don’t let a mistake become a problem.” In other words,
if you fuck up, own it and fix it before your fuck-ups define your
character. I’ve always believed this, and yet I am starting to believe
I’ve had it backwards this whole time.
I’ve
had (and have) problems. Problems I invented. Problems I wanted to get
away from. I drank a little much. I still don’t really exercise enough. I
shake and sweat uncontrollably. I shut down and avoid dealing with
things. I am frayed, frazzled and burnt the fuck out — and have been for
as long as I can remember. Right now, as I write this, I look like I’ve
been hung in a smokehouse and run over by a truck. I walk with an
unsteady gait. I sit hunched like a geriatric Quasimodo. Oh, how many
days my alarm’s gone off, I’ve hit snooze, said “Fuck this shit,” and
said, “I’ll try again tomorrow,” — all before 9 a.m. Sure, I want those
days back. I make no secret about it. I wasted them all. Sometimes while
wasted. I let my problems become mistakes. See? Backwards.
What
I do not have, however, are problems I cannot fix. In fact, it is my
rumination over them, and subsequent self-loathing for spending that
much time hashing and rehashing a strategy for assassinating them,
that’s more problematic than any black-mark you could tag on me. I live
in a constant state of stress, paranoia and a complete lack of presence
in the “true” reality.
Reality, or what we think is reality, goes mostly unnoticed. I think back to David Foster Wallace saying, “This is water.”
So much of life happens under the surface and under the radar. Even the
most delicious cake in the world is mostly flour. Our thoughts, when
left to run wild in the silent cacophony of our own heads, can cause
unrelenting madness if we let them. Our expectations can defeat us before we even scramble out of the blocks.
Everything
you do and, by extension, everything you are, is filtered through
everything you think, and everything you feel. When you have no filter,
you can let all the light in and it becomes easier to care about other
people.
I
wake up every morning afraid I’ll fail at this whole “not drinking”
experiment, or fail at life and in many other things. I’ve had recurring
nightmares that I’ve been dragged away from my desk or thrown off a
stage or into jail or prison or a hospital. I’m so convinced I’ll be
“outed” as a failure that I’m essentially posting this as a preemptive
strike to say “not unless I reveal I am a failure to all of you first.”
So, what I’ve learned so far is this:
I drank to step out of my own head. It’s a secondary problem — a
manifestation of my own inability to silence my inner critic and exist
in a state of empathetic reality. The primary problem I need to solve is
being kind and understanding to myself, so that I may be kind and
understanding to others. I need to be able to trust that problems don’t
need to turn into mistakes, and that even if they do, mistakes aren’t
failures, and they’re nothing to be afraid of. Every day, every new
person I meet, is an opportunity to make the most and the best of
whatever’s in front of me. That’ll help me chill the hell out and open
myself up to more of what’s around. I want to fully inhabit this body
and not be the surveillance camera in the corner monitoring my every
move. That’s all I’ve got. That and a fridge full of Topo Chico, anyway.
0 comments :
Post a Comment