Gaining Perspective (Easy To Be Locked In Without Realizing It)

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.

4 Years Sober Redux

I have been sober over 4 years.  I am very proud of that fact.  I don't mean to denigrate it or take it lightly.  In fact, I see it in almost religious seriousness.

My life has changed immeasurably since I got sober.  For one, I make about three times the money I made when I was drinking.  I know this sounds perhaps superficial, but I assure you, especially with a family, it is not.  Having a solid middle class life is nothing to laugh at or to take lightly, not when the alternative is clear and available, or worse, a deeper, darker alternative, with nothing to look forward to at all.

Speaking of.  Looking forward to things is very important.  I'm not sure I can underestimate that.  It is important to keep in mind current reality, to not get lost in fantasy, but it is likewise healthy and vital and essential to have a respectful notion of future growth, the capacity to realize certain sought after goals, emotional maturity, and to have the capacity to change one's goals according to feedback, to self-correct.  Alcohol stops those things--excuse me: consistent chronic alcohol abuse stops those things, mostly the capacity to self-correct.  It shortens one's perspective into a very narrow slit and doesn't let go.

However, the scientist in me would be remiss if he didn't point out that I may have undergone many of these changes even if I were drinking.  I am, after all, at an age where such changes happen regardless.

Still, although it is not perfect, I know that I have a certain emotional levity--the ability, to actually view myself, to hold simultaneously self-doubt and self-assertion, and to use my insecurity to my advantage, attributes that are difficult to acquire without hardship and the constant onslaught that we should just affirm our deepest intuitions and fuck everyone who disagrees.

There is, indeed, some hubris in the assertion that we can know, and I would prefer to hold the assumption that we cannot know, that we must constantly strive to know, and that this struggle should inform us at a basic and constitutional level.

Which is why I won't just say that not drinking did the trick, end of sentence, end of paragraph.  I will instead say that it is something I should have corrected a long time ago, and I finally did, and I'm far from perfect in this respect, but I'm very very glad I did, and I wouldn't have gotten to the point where I could even write/say what I just did if I didn't stop drinking.  I was definitely locked in the cycle I see in many many people, which is outrage, affirmation of righteous intuition, very little homework being done, and more assertions than anything else.

Truth, if it exists, is very difficult to access.  I think this is self-evident, and applies to all fields of study, including human interaction, and, because of that, I'm quite hesitant to ascribe reasons to events that are far too complicated to begin to comprehend, including my own cessation of drinking.  Still, I'm quite glad that I did it, and I will continue "not" doing it, forever more, regardless of how much I might imagine I could, given a hypothetical non-consequential world where I can indeed control myself.  One truth that I know is that I cannot control myself with regard to alcohol.  For that one, I don't need more evidence.

4 Years - Obligated To Mark This Moment

I feel like I should at least mention that it has been 4 years since I last had a drink and decided that hey, I'm going to seriously ruin my life if I keep drinking.

The incontrovertible truth was that I was taking yet another sick day off of work.  This just shouldn't be the case.

Anyway, I'm sober.

Here's what sobriety doesn't equal:

meaningfulness

satisfaction

lack of boredom

perfect embodiment of ideals

So don't figure that it will deliver those goods, that is, if you decide you might try it out for a spin.

Why NYC Sucks.

It doesn't intrinsically just suck, but here are a few of the most apparent reasons for me.

Nobody feels that it is a home.  It is a transient city.  For those that feel it IS a home, their misplaced sense of place is actually founded on rootlessness, on a  fundamental "spareness" of being, which is best exemplified with this fact: you can make and remake yourself in NYC as often as you desire.  For people who don't like themselves (me me me or at least, me 5 years ago!), this is great.  (Paren: I like NYC less now and like myself much more: Paren).

Because it is a masturbation machine.  Because nobody thinks NYC is a home, nobody wants to take care of it like a home.  People want to use it for their needs and then get out, or get back, or whatever.  Needs may be and often are narcissistic (it is the center, it is the biggest, it is the loudest and so are we, its denizens).  I'm being harsh, but hey, it is true.

NYC is all about signalling that you live in NYC.  There is no such thing left as "original" here.  It is a roving consuming animal, all of us, and it.  "New" neighborhoods are consumed as fast as you can say fuck me.  Why?  Because if there was a scrap of originality there, on the horizon,, everyone who wants so desperately to project themselves as original will go there and consume the shit out of that originality.  And by those terms, they will fully pollute whatever was there, and whatever is left will be blathered off into a waste basket.  The whole city is based on this dynamic and there is no starting point for originality anywhere, to be clear--it isn't as if the real originality actually is consumed and gone.  The so-called real originality was gone 40 years ago and what's left was a shard of an echo, frozen into a lyric.

Car alarms and noise and buses and general just disgust.  Pissing people.  Pissed off people.  Commuting on the misery of infrastructure that exists thusly, filled with all those people.

Me.  I make NYC suck.  You.

Deep breath.

Personally, I probably feel the need to move on every 3-5 years, and the fact that I've been here over 7 years now makes me feel totally worthless somewhere.  I've used up the hope here a long time ago, and now the shell of shame is all that keeps me somewhat sane.  Yes, shame keeps me from coming undone.  Because I can see my own growth in the outlines of puke on the sidewalk, I can sort of come to terms with my past, here, and only here.

There are plenty of crazy redeeming things about NYC, none of which are the point of this blog post and none of which actually undo the bad things. I am certainly not claiming that NYC is worse or better than any other city.  I am just generally sick of it and need some fresh air.

I'm Looking For Home.

It's not a hard thing to fathom.  I want to feel like I'm at home.  Relaxed, and engaged, and comfortable, and surrounded by the things that I love and that make me want to submerge myself deeper.

Lately I've felt exactly the opposite--that everything is alien.  The strangeness that has pervaded almost everything is hard to pinpoint, both in a way that is totally accurate and a way that tries to unveil its origin.

Why should I, after all, feel so tremendously off?  Everywhere?  Even at home?  Is there a reason that would allow me some sort of excoriation to jab at and turn over?  I'm serious!  I really could deal with reasons here, instead of the opaque ambiguity of feeling lost.

I admit that my current job does not help the situation.  I'm basically staring at lots of computer code all day long.  It makes me feel unhinged, even though it is, at a basic level, incredibly logical, incredibly mathematical.

Oddly enough I've finally sort of gotten a hold on the tremendous back pain that has plagued me for many many years.

Too many tangents here.

I have  sense of pervading hopelessness, but it is not so acute that I will be silly and act out like a teenager.  It is instead the way it is spread so thin, how it just sort of layers over everything, that makes it so damn cloying.

I'm also sick of NYC.  I'll say that btw.  I should have a different post on that.  I will endeavor to post about that now, actually.  Two posts in one day.  It is a testament to my strange sadness that I must write.

What To Do When Sober?

I admit that it isn't easy to figure out what the best regarding activities when you get sober.

What are you supposed to do, after all, especially when so many of your nights/days/weekends have been dominated by seeking out drinks--whether, or especially, drinking is not the main subject, it always sits in the backdrop.

I remember drinking on the way to going out drinking, so I would be good and stoned drunk before I arrived.  This was all about anxiety alleviation, this need to be charged prior to the main event, which was in itself, drinking.

So much energy and waste went into being "okay" to be drunk.

And so, what do you/  When not drunk?  When sober?  When not going to get drunk?

It is hard. I'll admit it.  Even after the clarity of the first few months or the first few YEARS.  It is still hard to know what to do.  Very few things offer the same kind of immediate reward of seeming deep relaxation and relative immediate release.

Not Being Scared of Failure.

That might sound like a fancy way to talk about some mostly soft and emotional concept, but it's not.  Here's the book.  McArdle is especially cogent and tight in her writing.  Forgetting about all of the technical background to her eloquent chapters, there is this: we live in a culture where we're quite afraid to fail, which makes us less likely to try new things, and those of us who have succeeded, obsessed with keeping our status--that is, trying to do things perfectly the first time.

McArdle says it is important to engage, that progress and success happens in increments, small increments, and that nobody has pure success without lots an lots of iterations first.  It is a really important less for anyone who has thought of themselves as imperfect, and thought of this imperfection as pure failure.  It is okay not to be perfect.  It is okay to try.  It is okay to play a little and experiment with things to figure them out.

Packaging Your Message 2

But the larger reason that it matters that we take care to communicate with empathy and thoroughness (see yesterday's post), is that we could be wrong.  Our assumptions that a) what we're saying is coherent, b) that it is logically represented, and c) that we have stated it lucidly, are self-serving and hard to check, especially when we are emotionally engaged with the material.

This is probably worth a larger post on its own, but I'd argue that our capacity to understand that we could be wrong in any given situation should be used much more widely than it is.    Why assume that you make sense?  Isn't that the lazy way out?  If you're the rare person that doesn't have to make sense when talking with someone else (and who could this be?  even billionaires, or especially billionaires, have communications that demand precision), then don't worry about it.

But I guess my "test" or way around this problem is this: assume you are wrong, and then communicate from that starting point.  Seek less comfort.

Packaging Your Message

At some level, it is disagreeable to think about the way that one's words might be received, and to alter those words according to perceived reception.  After all, we then must frame ourselves contingent on our perception of other people's perception of us--that is, we must guess at how they might interpret our message and have a quick mini-conversation with that phantom conversation partner prior to actually communicating.

This is, in a very real sense, how severe anxiety manifests itself, partially because it might in most cases prove impossible to corner all possible interpretations in time to actually communicate.

But it is also disagreeable to contour our speech for consumption at a more guttural level, one that provides the bravado of a good "fuck you" and the satisfaction of outrage.  Why should we cater to others at all?  Why think about how our expression is or is not received?  At an abstract level, the answer is that language is contingent on multiple nodes, each person necessary but not sufficient alone to produce it.  There's no real language without the capacity to understand one another, to have a degree of "inter-subjectivity" -- to be inside each other's heads.

I think the reason we find it disagreeable to change our speech is that we feel as though we're compromising our message, that somehow it isn't as pure or authentic if we change it.  I'd argue, or at least I feel, that this is a highly selfish and almost narcissistic or conceded way to operate.  Making sure that other's understand what you're saying, or what you mean, assures that you get what you want, and it also helps the larger functions of the interaction you may be having proceed--whether at work, a traffic intersection, or in an unfamiliar setting.

It is also incredibly hard to concede what we don't know, at times--say a board meeting, or anytime we want to impress our superiors.  But I'd submit that the capacity to hone in on what we don't know, what remains ambiguous, or what is not being communicated clearly, and to distill it (both the gap, or space itself that isn't being successfully bridged, and also a way to synthesize that gap and move forward), is something that takes time to learn, and that builds a tremendous amount of character.  It certainly isn't always intuitive, especially in a toxic self-centered culture, and it certainly doesn't mean you have failed, if you chose to acknowledge it in real time.

It Is Possible To Be Unhappy Anywhere

Let's all play a game, whereby we run.

We could run from anything, parents, teachers, peer pressure, social outings, or inferiority in general, en masse.  We could figure out a way to see the negative shit in any situation, finagle, pull, and coax out the layers embedded in normal discourse that represent the darkest most angsty and inward interpretations, lexical touchstones that reify what we "always knew" anyway.

We could let outrage bloom.  We could allow it breathing room.  Outrage at everything, anywhere, all day, all night.

We could frolic with the narcissism that accompanies not taking anything seriously.  And we could certainly froth with the stubborn refusal to self-correct.

That would be easy.

And then we could keep on running.  All day, All Night.

Absurdest Comments: Drinking to Celebrate Not Drinking

Every once in a while a comment comes in that just irks me in a deep and fundamental way.  You see, it is illogical, this comment, the smiley face following the admission, for instance.  It drives me crazy, nuts, batty.  I won't delete it.  But I will highlight it thusly:

SOBERDUDE?  Listen up.  Listening?  You're not fucking sober if you're drinking.  I don't know how else to say it.  You can be one or the other, not both. If you chose to be one, and post on my blog, I appreciate your honesty, and your willingness to share your experiences, but I wholeheartedly disagree with your logic when you think you can be both.

Finding Meaning and Sobriety

So the hardest part of getting sober beyond the whole physical thing and readjusting to live part and finding basically a somewhat new set of friends and basically sort of relearning how to do a lot of stuff, is this: relearning how to enjoy yourself.  For, shall I say it explicitly?, the problem with people like me, who can have one hell of a time when drinking is that, well, drying up the source of booze also dries up a lot of the outward affected personality.  And the willingness to engage.

And basically queue a kind of new dry period of stoned realization that life isn't just going to get easier, i.e. social situations and anxiety will not just go away because there isn't any booze greasing the hinges.

And anyway this is apropos of nothing, as per the usual.  Now play it again, Johnny.