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I was chatting up a couple of fourth-grade girls at the back of the church on Sunday. I know that sounds creepy, but honestly, they are way more interesting than most adults. They always have something on their minds, and they have only budding little undeveloped conversation filters that they aren’t jaded enough yet to use even if they worked. For someone who thrives on authenticity of any kind, these are my people.
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I don’t think people should ever comment on each other’s food. “You must be hungry.” “You’re eating now? Didn’t you just eat a while ago?” “Seconds? You must like it.” “I see you don’t like vegetables. Hahahaha” “Sweet tooth, huh?” These are all societally innocent comments. They are conversation gap fillers. They aren’t meant to harm, but they do irreparable damage.
From skinny people who battle body image issues and associated eating disorders, to people dealing with obesity and diabetes, these little throw-away comments create shame. And shame gets medicated. Whether the medication of choice is vomiting, compulsive exercise, alcohol, or comfort calories, harmless little digs about other people’s food are far from harmless.
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Three drinks for two people. That sure looked familiar. He carried them triangle style – two beers in plastic cups secured in the semicircles of both of his thumbs and index fingers, with her plastic wine cup precariously squeezed between his two middle fingers. His priorities were made clear by which drink was least secure in the very likely event that he stumbled. But he didn’t stumble. At least not yet.
They heard the upbeat music from the beverage tent, and drifted over looking for the party and his people. But this was a brass band playing at a summer outdoor festival for a food-truck lunch crowd, and so early in the day, he was one-of-a-kind. A kind I recognize. He was me from a decade ago.
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“What did you say?” he asked. I repeated myself, to which he wondered, “Why do you do that?” Then the budding signs of curiosity were interrupted. A distraction. The inquiry was not interesting enough to come back to it.
Just like I often feel, the topic felt insignificant.
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I made my kids watch Beautiful Boy, the 2018 Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet movie about addiction. I also made my kids watch a CNN documentary about the internet-induced proliferation of pornography. My alcoholism was traumatizing to my wife and kids. I can’t erase the past, and I refuse to ignore it, so the only thing I can do is be a cycle breaker. But as my kids will tell you, the most traumatizing thing I have done to them might have been making family movie nights out of Beautiful Boy and a CNN porn documentary. To make matters worse, Chalamet’s character has the same name as my oldest son, and when my hair was shorter, I was constantly told how much I looked like Steve Carell. In fact, someone once brought me a life-sized cardboard cutout of Steve Carell promoting The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I was once chased down a city street by a man screaming, “Hey The Office! You dat guy!” I have not shaved or had a respectable haircut since.
In spite of the trauma my insistence on confronting addiction with my kids has caused, I still feel like it was the right decision. We didn’t talk about this stuff when I was a kid – not in school and not at home. Nancy Reagan insisted that we, “Just say no,” to drugs, and there was a PSA where a fried egg represented my brain, but the only messaging around alcohol that I can remember was that we had to be sneaky until we were 21, so my friend, Brad, and I buried a styrofoam cooler in the woods behind his house and covered it with a piece of plywood with leaves glued to it.
Is talking about addiction with my children hard? Yes, absolutely, but it is also as important to unwanted-consequence prevention as talking about vegetables and condoms and exercise and seatbelts and identifying the arrogant stupidity of the sharp bulb.
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Confidence comes from doing the things that require a little liquid courage without the liquid courage.
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How do you know if you need a few drinks to talk to women when every time you are in a situation conducive to initiating a conversation with the opposite sex that situation carries with it an expectation of alcohol consumption? I don’t remember needing liquid courage when I was a drinker, but I also don’t remember socializing sober.
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I cringe at the term, “addictive personality.” My personality is one of the only things not driving my addictions. My neurology and biology are certainly out to destroy me, but I prefer to think of my personality as warm and engaging, although perhaps a little overwhelming. I have been told by those closest to me on more than a few occasions that I am a lot. My personality is something to which no one has ever become addicted.
I prefer to think of myself as having a penchant for compulsivity. When I find things I like, I tend to embrace them with the tenacity of a locked-jaw pitbull. The fact that I spent a decade trying to moderate my consumption of alcohol is laughable. I can’t moderate anything I like. In fact, believe it or not, I recently overdosed on cabbage.
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It’s hard to see my sins repeated by the generation that comes next.
That sounds like some lofty, holier-than-thou proclamation about society. But it’s not. I just don’t care that much about society anymore. It causes me deep pain to see people I love, people I have watched grow up, steer into the same lane I chose in my 20s.
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Most of the active or sober alcoholics who listen to our Untoxicated Podcast or read our Sober and Unashamed blog are referred to our stuff by their partners. In most cases, the partner has tried to implement some of what she has learned from our experiences into her own growth and recovery. This means that the majority of the alcoholics who are introduced to our stories are already feeling the pain of emotional detachment and a lack of compassion from their partners when they first find us.
Most of the referred alcoholics greet our words with the same question: “Who the fuck is this guy?” Sheri is not met with this level of venomous aggression. Maybe it is sexism, or maybe her fearlessness and confidence are obvious even to new listeners. Regardless, I think the portion of our audience that we enflame is wise to direct their aggression toward me as Sheri takes having no more fucks to give to a whole different level.
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I listened to a podcast interview of Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian who has been, for the past 35 years, studying and writing about how budding aristocracies grab power and, eventually, destroy economies. I learned a lot and found the interview both fascinating and terrifying. But I missed some of what she said because I was distracted. I was distracted pondering the fact that I don’t have 35 years.
I study and write about intimacy and addiction. In 35 years I’ll be in my late 80s, and no one wants to read about sex from a person approaching the century mark, although Betty White cracked sex jokes all the way to the end. But I’ll be an old man, not an old woman, so where she sounded spunky and vibrant, I’ll just sound creepy and perverted.
The clarity of permanent sobriety is mostly a good thing. But the clarity brings with it a growing sense of lost potential. Like what if I started my half-century quest for knowledge in my 30s instead of my mid 40s?