I suppose the most pernicious thing about alcohol, exempting the physical and immediate behavioral nastiness of it, is really, like a good friend once said, its ability to lock you into a loop, to make it very hard, in other words, to take in new information, feedback about your work (or romantic life), and to make corrections.
Even without alcohol, making changes to oneself are often hard and oftener just not very likely. We don't say we don't know or that we're sorry easily, but perhaps we should.
Instead, I constantly hear:
a) outraged people
b) people who know the best
c) people complaining about other people and how stupid they are (implicit message is not that clever guys)
Come away from any awkward conflict-type situation, and you, too (and me) will most likely try to justify your actions, and paint the other person's actions with thick nasty old paint. Regardless of reality.
Add alcohol to that mix, and all of a sudden, you might as well not be curious about anything, because you know everything, and all of your intuition is 100% accurate all the time. Not only that, but fuck people who disagree, right?
Am I right or wrong here?
So anyway, understanding that a) the world is vastly more complex than we can hope to understand and b) lots of things cannot therefore be assigned causal arrows, particularly our own actions, and that c) alcohol diminishes our already quite small capacity to fully comprehend (a) and (b), well, the only thing left to do is drop out alcohol and work hard to correct previously blocked feedback. And even then it will be quite difficult. Because we alcoholics, once sober, will want very badly to find meaning, even or especially easy meaning, the kind we are used to. But meaning finding isn't easy.
No comments:
Post a Comment