We tell ourselves stories
I hated this quote on sight and for decades after, having not read the essay it opens and therefore assuming that it was the kind of saccharine “storytelling makes us HUMAN” kind of thing a poet would say. I’ve since done a full Uno Reverse on this line and now love it after reading the rest of the piece and realizing she’s talking about how we all lie to ourselves- how sometimes you have to lie just to get yourself out of bed, and then lie to yourself again as you go out into this extremely brutal world. It’s the Queen of Hearts telling Alice that she needs to practice believing impossible things, that at Alice’s age she could believe six impossible things before breakfast. It’s as much whimsical nonsense as training for the kind of magical thinking that adulthood requires of us. We tell ourselves impossible things in order to live.
A switch flipped in my early 30s and after that I knew that drinking had become something different for me and that I would never be able to go back to my previous relationship with alcohol. It took me years after that to stop drinking, and I really scrambled for a story I could believe about why and how this part of me had changed. I told my family one person at a time that I had quit, an always-weepy undertaking I never got good at, and in one of those conversations one of my brothers gift wrapped a lie for me: “I knew it had to get one of us,” he said, referencing our specific genetic cocktail. “I guess I just assumed it would be me.” I grabbed onto that like it was a life preserver, and I let myself believe that this was some kind of zero sum game- that if I carried this, it meant my brothers would never have to. This is not how addiction works (or how genetics works, or how statistics work, or how life preservers work) but that lie worked beautifully for me. This has not stopped being the hardest thing I’ve ever done, not for a day, but the first year was the kind of difficult I don’t even know how to describe. It was wind tunnel-loud in my head and dead silent outside of it, all the time, and I felt like I was being physically compacted like at the end of The Crucible/ the first Ninja Turtles movie. With a change like this you’re really betting the farm on the idea that the future you, a stranger you’ve never even met and don’t particularly admire or want to work for, is going to be worth how much this hurts right now. I couldn’t believe that I was worth it but I could almost believe that me agreeing (like I had a say in it) to house this thing for the rest of my life would keep it away from the two people I loved most in the world. Nearly anything becomes bearable, I would think, if you can let yourself believe that carrying it will keep it off someone you love.
When that lie expired I went actively searching for one that couldn’t. What I’ve landed on, and what I genuinely believe now, is that every person is born with an individualized magic number of drinks that you can take before you become addicted. Maybe your number is 20,000 and you’ll never come close, or maybe your number is 10 and it’s as much of a sure thing as anything else in this world. It’s Price is Right rules- closest without going over wins- but you never know how much is behind you or how much is ahead of you until you’re already over the edge. I don’t know what my number was but I felt it when I went over. I’m going to believe until I die that this is how addictions develop, and then after I’m over that next edge I’m going to ask God to confirm that I was correct (right after I ask him about who killed JonBenet Ramsey, because even in the afterlife I will have my priorities straight), that I had gotten this right. That I had done this right, or as close to right as I could, even though I already know that any way you get this done is right. 8 years sober today. Onward.
