Drinking, writing, and the catastrophic fantasy of escaping yourself

why every lie contains the truth

Over the past week, I spent some time going through old writing, some of the pieces I’d written way back in 2019 or so. They were personal essays as well as flash fiction/fantasy (very flash—like 400 words tops, with no real beginning or end). And all I could think as I was reading was: who the fuck was I trying to be back then?

It’s jarring to witness your own thoughts years after they are long gone. In my case, all the more surreal because six years ago, I was jamming my writing into mornings before going to my corporate job. We were on Covid lockdown. We were still in Trump Round One. And most significantly: I was drinking heavily all the time and hiding the very real madness that created.

What came with my drinking was fantasizing. Imagining a life that lived alongside me, that I wanted desperately, but I believed I could never have. My writing was a way to reach out and touch it, if only in my dimly lit mind. Writing for me then was an escape; an attempt at getting what I wanted without having to do the work for it in real life.

You can be anyone when you are a writer. You can create entire worlds which do not exist unless and until you conjure them up and hammer them down onto the page. It’s an almost-existence. It can be soothing. It can be stimulating in a way that regular life can never be, because inside the writing there can be secrets. And when you are an addict, you love secrets. And when you confess bits and pieces of what you are trying to hide (but also recklessly want to reveal), people love it. Other people who also want to escape their real lives (surprising to no one: there are gazillions) eat that shit up.

But it wasn’t real. It was writing done through a broken throat, a smudged lens. I never wrote when I was drunk, but my drinking was not a ‘binge’ it was a lifestyle. Addiction is a way of living that revolves around secrecy, hiding, and deception. In my case, I was deceiving myself most of all. My life was not what I wanted. I couldn’t see a way out. So I drank to get out, even if for only a little while. I wrote to get out, too. I wrote about drinking and sex and the cosmos in an attempt to be someone I was never going to be if I stayed in the state I was.

In one of the passages, I wrote something like: I am going to have to be addicted to something, the best I can hope for is that I get to choose.

? Um. What. ?

Some of what I used to write was okay. But there was nothing that anchored me to myself. I was writing around something I couldn’t see. I was stringing words around a void, a gaping black hole. It’s hard to re-read, to be honest. Mostly because I can tell you for certain that back then I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see my own disassociation. I couldn’t admit my own self-annihilation. Part of me was so crushingly sincere, and part of me was so full of shit.

Writing is menacing that way. We put down our words and we let them tell a story. We think it’s control when in reality it’s surrender. Once I wrote those words, they existed. But the phantom life I wanted to be living didn’t and never would. Unless I gave up the ghost. Unless I gave up the lies and shattered my own mask.

Addiction stories are brutal and tragic, but in the end they are just stories like any other life. We are creatures who have been handed an impossible task: to live in this world with our bodies and minds, and to not give up. Not even when everything hurts. When the pain is drowning you and you’ve never been able to be yourself long enough to find your own way out of it.

Recovery is a story, too. One you get to write if you are so very lucky. A story that has a beginning. A day when you stop lying. A day when you tell yourself the truth, finally. And it breaks open absolutely everything else. No more illusions. No more escapes. No more fantasizing instead of taking real action.

In my book of inspirational poetry, Luminae, I wrote a poem that goes like this:

If you are going to tell me
the truth
tell it to me all the way
to the end.
Tell it so complete
that when we turn around
and look over it
it is impossible to go back
to the way it was
before the telling.

And I have to say, I had no idea how insanely prescient that poem was. Once I told my ugliest truth, there was never any going back. I have always said that Luminae was guiding me toward a recovery I couldn’t see coming. The messages I was channeling when I wrote that book are astounding to me now. The concept of the book comes from ‘lumen naturae’ a Jungian term which refers to ‘the light of the darkness itself.’

Not light separate from dark. Not light inside the dark, like a candle in a cave. No. The light which is the darkness. It is the phenomenon of the darkness and the light belonging to one another. Oneness. Wholeness. My life story. My addiction story which contains my recovery story.

They are not separate after all. They contain each other. There is no recovery without addiction. There is no light without darkness. This is why life can be so maddening, so tricky to get a handle on. Because every attempt to sever ourselves from ourselves, only delivers us back to ourselves.

So you can write or drink or gamble or cheat or play mind games all you want, but there is no escape. The fucking around contains the finding out. There is nowhere to go and nothing you can do to ever completely lose yourself. The only question is: do you want to live in the glare of that reality, or in the shadowed blur of the illusion?

Either way, you are what you are.

And as for me, I don’t ever want to push me away again. The pain was too awful, as were the hangovers. And the writing? Eesh. The writing just wasn’t very good. Because even though I was in it, back then I was like a ring of stained water circling a drain. I was the drain and everything caught in it. Addiction is drowning in a tablespoon of water. It’s impossible and entirely real. And it takes forever to realize it's happening.

But if you do manage to catch a glimpse of your own self-deception, be grateful you are one of the lucky ones, and don’t hate it for its ugliness. Reach out and touch it, acknowledge it. It isn’t separate from your beauty. It’s within it. You see, that’s the thing about trying to pretend you can escape yourself. Every lie contains the truth.

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Photo by Dimitri Bong on Unsplash