Drinking, drama, and the colossal bore of distraction

we are over distractions but we are not free of them

Ask anyone and they will tell you: I can’t stop looking at my phone and I’m so sick and tired of it. It used to be that friends would tell me this about their situation with an incredulous look on their faces, and a desperation in their eyes like they were really hoping to get free.

But now they just sort of sigh and seem resigned to the monotonous cycle.

Scroll, stare, scroll. Whatever.

The thing of it is: distraction is boring as fuck, but that’s not what we have been trained to think (or notice).

We think the excitement of checking the phone is what’s distracting us but it isn’t. The lure of entertainment or novelty entices us to look. But it’s the tediousness of hating ourselves afterwards for having done so again that is so fucking distracting — and honestly played out.

But maybe therein lies a mind-flip we haven’t yet allowed ourselves to acknowledge. Distraction is boring. Distraction is lame and uninteresting. Nothing more to think or say or write about it. Moving on.

I guess I’m more likely than other people to see it this way because for me, my recovery is my way of moving on from what had become the most distracting (albeit life-threatening) bore: my shitty and abusive relationship with alcohol. In a nutshell, it went like this:

Me: I’ll just have one this time.

Alcohol: ok lol

Me: fuck my life

Times one hundred thousand million times.

I cannot tell you (I’m going to try to tell you) how many times I woke up hungover and nearly in tears (in actual tears) about having fucked-up another perfectly good day/night/vacation/event/quiet regular evening because I couldn’t find my off-switch for alcohol. Even after over a decade of trying.

I cried for the sadness of not being able to crawl out of the sadness, over and over. I cried for not understanding, for not getting it, yet-the-fuck-again. I cried because I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing to myself. It was terrible and tragic and a waste — and a total fucking bore.

I was literally bored to tears with the monotony of the drama and futility. The false promise of the excitement of drinking lured me in, but the cruel crush of being kicked to the curb and left for dead by life was a major distraction from taking control of how I actually lived it.

No one ever tells you drinking is boring as fuck. No one ever tells you that the bore of it won’t stop it from killing you.

It’s not exciting to get in screaming matches with your husband over nothing important. It’s not interesting to run down a dark street barefoot and alone at 2am yelling nonsense even in your fucking 40’s. It isn’t a total blast to be itchy in your own skin because you’re spending a long weekend at the beach with a friend who would raise more than just an eyebrow if you drank the way you really wanted to in front of them.

Drinking became what I thought about a lot. When I would drink next, if I should, how much more I could get my hands on. Why I reached for more when I knew more was very dangerous and I kept proving that to myself over and over again.

This is the nature of all addiction, of course. You keep doing the same old goddamn thing, and you keep hating yourself for it after. It’s a slog and a drag and the irony is that you think what will jolt you from the bore of the addiction is the substance you’re addicted to.

In our culture of mass media, social media, Big Media — we are sold intrigue, excitement, novelty, at every turn. We are encouraged to post about every little stupid inane thing and then to hyper fixate on “engagement stats” with our “content.”

So much so that our overstimulated-maxed-out-brains are over it. But we can’t stop consuming it anyway. Even though our boredom with all of it is killing us. Our engagement is killing our engagement. Our obsession with drama has all but entirely blunted our potential for creativity and innovation.

The greatest lifeline my recovery offers me every single day is an invitation to find meaning in my challenges, struggles, joys, and discoveries, and the intimate environment I’m creating for me to inhabit. In fact, my recovery is how I define what matters to me most at my core — and the world at large has shockingly little to do with it. My life now is rich with discovery, not dramatic with distraction.

Mindless arguments are not interesting to me. Tearing other people down is not intriguing or stimulating in the least. Products and stuff, skin care and self care, reels and goofiness, self-harm, anger, hate, attack ads, cruelty, and all the rest of the click bait isn’t part of my life anymore, and I don’t miss it.

Just like I don’t miss waking up to an empty bottle, wasted day, or giant shard of broken wine glass stuck in my foot that I couldn’t even feel until the unconsciousness wore off (for instance). All that shit was meaningless. I never found myself in alcohol the way I thought I would.

I could never make it make sense.

And once you see what addiction is, it starts to dawn on you that what it is at its core is an attempt to find meaning where there is none. We want meaningful lives, and recovery is the process and practice of immersing ourselves in a kind of living that honors and celebrates that.

We celebrate the challenge of it. It’s the complexity and nuance of discovering the goodness in ourselves and others that contains the meaning of our lives. To be here, against all odds, making new connections and starting new projects that allow for the engagement of our whole selves: mind, body, spirit, and soul.

The allure of drinking, like the allure of any escape, is a temporary relief from the pain of living a life that feels meaningless. But we will never find meaning in distraction, that’s the catch. Meaning lies in the richness of what is true, kind, and life-generating inside of us. And we all have access to it all the time, if we can learn to cut through the noise.

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Photo by Andrea Sella on Unsplash