RE: Nothing But The Night - Aug 2, 2022, 11:54 PM

So, this is not a happy email and I figured I’d get all out at the same time. I have been struggling with an alcohol problem and it is getting acute. Since you are the closest people in my life I figured I would let you know, otherwise it will only get worse. I am not sure I am committed to sobriety for my whole life but I don’t want to drink indefinitely. I am really terribly ashamed and would have been more honest earlier but my pride has gotten in my way. I apologize that I have to send this but otherwise really bad shit might happen. I am very vulnerable right now and have been feeling very isolated and don’t want to feel that way ever again.

I AM a very robust young man and committed to excelling in my social and professional life. I just think I need some help in that endeavor.

All my love¹

Nothing But the Night

I would have guessed I wrote that email later at night, but the days somehow get longer when you spend the whole time drunk. In a decisive moment I made the decision to confess my secret sin. One that I had long known was something of a problem, and which, in desperate moments, I might have even admitted too, but never really came clean about. Coming clean would mean ceding some territory of my life to something that I didn’t want to be true, something that would be a bad and immutable mark on my character. Having a drinking problem is a bad thing, and we actually do talk about people who have drinking problems as if they are bad people. We don’t like to admit that, and we certainly wouldn’t ever come clean about it, the way I didn’t want to come clean about my secret, but it persists and festers with us and never gets any better for remaining hidden. Even if we actually think of drunkards as sick people, we don’t think being sick is a good thing, and very likely they deserve their self abuse, maybe even for the very fact that they are doing it to themselves in the first place. So I didn’t want to be like the family friends or local characters who were spoken of with that tone that they really are letting us all down with their problem, because I knew they were bad, and no good little boy wants to be bad.

After deciding to stop drinking, I actually managed to make very few mistakes, and by design or chance happened to do some very important and helpful things without being told to do so. First, I decided to do the thing that I had never wanted to do before, which is tell my friends and family that I had a problem that I needed help coping wit. It is offensively anodyne at this point to say, that the first step to getting help is admitting you have a problem, but as is true of so much wisdom that has become so obvious and tortured and yet remains useful, this statement is true. I wasn’t ready to tell my parents yet but I knew that my friends and siblings would be helpful first steps. So I wrote the above email, and then composed a pretty similar text to both of my siblings. I sipped away at a few beers while I did it, smoked cigarettes down to the filter and meditated a little on how strange it was to start the process of quitting drinking whilst drinking. But irony abounds in the mortal world and no great insight comes from this one.

It was a curiously calm and ponderous evening for me, though alcohol abuse can allow for such moments of clarity. It was curious because, in my benders², there were sweet spots that could be struck; mornings were hell and to be avoided at all costs, and if I overindulged to quash the fear in the morning, then the afternoon would be very sedate. By sedate I really mean asleep, and not tucked away like a cute little kitten in bed, but on the floor, in front of a noiseless TV. If there was some activity that needed to be attended to in the early afternoon, that would necessitate using the proper amount of alcohol to elicit right amount of courage to get through, but would usually temper the drunkenness. On such days, around 6 or 7PM there could be very lucid moments. These moments would strike me as particularly odd, because all the urgency of the morning and the early afternoon, to drink and quash the feelings of fear and panic, never threatened to appear. I neither needed urgently to drink, nor did I feel particularly compelled to stop drinking all together because life seemed manageable. A clear sober feeling would come over me, despite having had more than ten drinks in the day. Those moments were rare, and most of the time there was an all-over body ache that consumed me. Words will never do justice to suffering, as suffering is a gestalt, un-decomposable into its constituent pains. Yes, I felt tired all the time, a real leaden feeling in the eyes, and a hollowness at the center of my head, and yes my stomach was upset much of the time, and my back ached and my muscles generally felt strained and of course I had anxiety and restlessness and occasional panic but even though I can name them individually, they added up to something that was of a different category than tiredness, or achiness, or pain. With the sun high in the sky and no work done, and no plans for the day except for a short excursion down the alley to the corner store for more cigarettes and beer, with my apartment in complete shambles and empty ramen packets strewn about the counter top³, I had more than pain.

I have had to review several sources of information to piece together the critical events that transpired in the earliest period of drying up: cross referencing my calendar, texts, phone calls, emails, and my movements as tracked by my phone.⁴. From these I have determined that I started coming clean on the night of August 2nd, very late, as described above. The following day, the 3rd, I had a phone call with my siblings and further made two other calls. One to my Physician and the other to my Therapist, both of whom I was able to make appointments with for the following day, August 4th. It certainly occurred to me then and persists with me now, how surprising it was that I was able to make both appointments with almost no notice whatsoever but I think mentioning substance abuse gets all sorts of wheels turning in the medical apparatus. Therapy at 2PM, and Doctors at 3:30PM, the first of many doctors and therapy appointments in the next few weeks:

On the 4th I left my apartment at 1PM, heading to my local watering hole for a few beers and a couple of whiskies for good measure, leaving the bar around 1:40PM to get to the Therapists. The whole problem I was confronting was deeply rooted in that need to get a few cocktails in me before I could face the long 15 minute walk to my therapists office. The whole cycle, in curt summary, appeared like this. Anxiety or boredom $\rightarrow$ drinking to excess $\rightarrow$ drunk $\rightarrow$ hungover $\rightarrow$ anxiety $\rightarrow$ drinking to excess $\rightarrow$ drunk $ \rightarrow $ hungover $\rightarrow$ anxiety… Rinse and repeat. And Repeat and Repeat. Typically the drunk-hungover-anxiety triumvirate would take place over a weekend, but if the anxiety warranted it, then that cycle might repeat into the week, as it was so happily doing at the time we are at in our story. We were hovering somewhere on the border between hungover and anxiety and I knew that venturing far from home, with an hours long period of sitting followed by another undetermined amount at the doctor would require some lubrication to get going. Countless times, I have been at bars in the middle of the day before some activity that pretty much everyone else could handle sober.

The Sun Also Rises

Admitting to abusing substances, when the admission is to the right sort of person, elicits certain mechanical responses. I can’t remember with precise detail the exact course of our conversation, but when I told my doctor how much I had been drinking and my desire to stop immediately, he was very encouraging and treated the request with a great deal of gravity. As I have reviewed before (see the first installment in the Dry Up series), their is some amount of danger in quitting drinking cold turkey. Luckily for me it was more uncomfortable than it was dangerous, but my doctor took the precaution of asking that I update him twice a day or so with my vitals, which I took at home. Suffice to say that my first meeting with my doctor was some kind of ground breaking, one frank conversation in a series that had been long overdue, and which I would become quite good at completing. One final detail is worth reviewing: Going to leave my doctor’s office, with my drunken body half out the door, my doctor said to me “You’re a pretty brave guy.” In the moment the comment made me laugh, and it would be repeated in the weeks to come by more healthcare professionals. I laughed because I thought the comment was ironic. Looking for help after admitting to a problem, you don’t feel brave or courageous or strong. You feel desperate and scared, at the furthest and most frayed edges of sanity. I felt like a pretty irresponsible and meager person for having made so many mistakes, and for consistently burying my head in the sand to their consequences. No one who had so willingly and continually made the mistakes that I did could be called brave for then starting the process of rectifying them. I was drunk after all and bravery is easily accommodated in the drunk. It is frustratingly anodyne to say, but remains true that admitting to having a problem is the first step in getting help, and so people treat that action with a great deal of reverence, thus my Doctor’s comment.

I left the doctors office with resolve and bitterness and went home, stopping along the way for a six pack. I was due to be traveling in the morning by plane, and the condition I was in was so acute I worried about my ability to actually make the trip. My resolve was extended to actually making it to the airport, pouring myself into an airplane seat and being deposited on the far side of the country, where a group of my friends would be waiting to safely comfort, console and supervise me as I started to dry up. My doctor did question this decision and I soberly made the observation that sobering up could very likely be done a lot easier with my support system of friends, that had vacated my neighborhood for their summer travels. My doctor agreed, if not reluctantly and assured me, after I rather desperately pleaded, that he would prescribe something for me to take that would assist in my endeavor. The primary symptom I wanted help with was fear, but he was reluctant to promise any pharmacological treatment for that. It was great comfort to know that soon, the pharmacy would be receiving an order for some miracle drugs for which I could take advantage in my toilsome endeavor to stop drinking.

The comfort I took in knowing that I would soon be able to benefit from modern pharmaceuticals, and that I was safely in the hands of my physician, did not have sufficient strength to prevent me from continuing to drink. But the drinking took on a fundamentally character. I drank reluctantly and heavily in the physical sense rather than the sense which refers to its intensity. The arm which raised the glass to my lips felt more massive, and not in the sense that we usually mean, of BIGGER. It felt denser, and clumsy. Drinking was a chore to attend to as I mustered my psychic forces. I got back to my apartment with my beer and drank it, and that evening I sat on my back porch as the sun set and the air was still and warm. The curious sense of clarity came over me and I felt calm and actually happy. Recalling my state of mind now I fear I might revise the feelings I had in that moment, but my best recollection is of actually being happy. I was still drinking but that was a temporary thing, and soon I would be relieved. Relief is really all we want in life, and when we are denied or made to believe that it will never occur, our lives become intolerable.

A pdf version of this essay can be found here.