Alcoholics have been robbed of their coping mechanisms. Credit: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Alcoholism is a strange condition: a kind of obsessive self-mutilation with thoughts. The drinking itself is almost incidental: medicine to treat the thoughts until you learn, if you are lucky, that it doesn’t work and never will.
Alcohol is not available to me — I am sober almost 20 years — but there are other things to mutilate with. One of them is fear. I should be used to it by now, but I still wake each morning surprised by it. I fall to fear, like a cartoon woman, and I cry in my study.
I see alcoholism as a parasite — people used to think that alcoholics were possessed by demons — and although this idea absolves me of everything I have done, and is romantic, I believe it. I have to, or I couldn’t go on. If alcoholism thrives on fear, it also thrives on isolation. It courts it: if you have ever wondered why alcoholics behave so badly it is because we want, on an unconscious level, to be alone.
The alcoholic can build misery in happy times, and usually does because it feels safe with the familiar. What would it do with pandemic? I always thought that, as someone anxious in ordinary times, I would be calm and useful in extraordinary times. The curse would be reversed. It wasn’t like that; or at least, it hasn’t been so far.
I was crushed by Covid-19, and I didn’t even have it. I imagined everyone I love unable to breathe. Then I imagined myself unable to breathe. I imagined the global economy crashing. Then I imagined all the hundreds of millions of pieces of individual despair that would follow from the crashing of the economy. I read about the poverty, the callousness, the untaught children and the domestic murders. I read the foolishness. I read the lies: what equaliser? I imagined our world falling into an abyss from which it would not return, because this is only the first act of our ending. And on, and on.
Two things reliably rescue me from these kinds of thoughts and both of them, with pandemic, are withdrawn. The first is writing and I find it difficult, at the moment, to write. I cannot write because I cannot think. There’s nothing to write about anyway, except the view from the window and I am not good at landscape.
I want to write about people and, just now, there aren’t any. What do I have to say about pandemic that a frightened child couldn’t say? My husband turned to me last week and said, with almost desperate joy, “it’s bin night”. “I’ll do the recycling bags,” I said. That was it. I can’t outwrite a parasite. Not this one, though I had some success with the other one. I like it neatly imprisoned in paragraphs from which it can’t escape. Prometheus on its small rock, chained with words. It makes me feel safe.
The second is Alcoholics Anonymous, where I have gone for 20 years to know I am not alone. I don’t go for the speech. I don’t understand the AA steps — what character defects and what God? I only tidally believe in a God of my understanding and, like a child, when I believe I really believe and when I don’t, I don’t. I don’t think alcoholics have more depressive emotions than non-alcoholics; we just have more emotions generally. We are like pianos with 12 octaves. We crash up and down: the most joyful, the most despairing, the most afraid.
I go for the animal warmth, to find other creatures like me. It’s not the worst mental illness by any means, alcoholism — it’s potentially arrestable — but most people consider it self-murder. They cannot understand it. It is anathema to the creed of mankind, which likes to act in its own interests; or thinks it does. That leaves the alcoholic with only another alcoholic for the comfort of being known. It’s wonderful and it works, when you can find it. The condition cannot be wished or thought away. It can only be diminished with love, often topped-up in church halls and municipal meeting rooms. It’s strange and prosaic, a metaphor for life.
But the AA meetings closed, with everything else, and I am alone with the monster and our long, repetitive conversations, which leave me prostrate, because the voice is so practised, and convincing, and it knows me so well. Then I recover to mania, which is the opposite of peace and, though easier for me — no one weeps in mania — is harder for those around me.
I know it’s a luxury nowadays, not having Covid-19, which compounds the guilt of just having alcoholism and a glut of isolation and fear, which magnifies the voice. I was told that I could log on to any meeting in the world. I could go to a meeting in Alaska, or New York City. But, at first, I didn’t. It took me many years to go to AA, and many more years to listen when I did, and I need the warmth. It’s possible to skulk on Zoom, but I prefer to skulk in person.
Eventually, last week, I went. I can’t write about AA but what is said is true. It’s not the same in lockdown — more accurately lock-in — as it is not the same for the non-alcoholic seeking love. I do not know when they will return. I know what drinking alcoholics are facing now, and I am fearful for them, but, without AA, I cannot reach them. I can only imagine them. My sponsor says that to survive alcoholism you have to learn to live in the day, like a spaniel. I have never really managed this; perhaps pandemic will teach it to me.
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SubscribeTanya, thanks for this. I’ve been off and on sober for 2 and a half years (mostly sober, a few relapses). I thought when I stopped that I would stop getting so depressed ha ha. In fact the depressions got more extreme, but weirdly sometimes once in a day, never for very long, and then up up up high as a kite – so your 12 octaves image was spot on. Meditation / mindfulness helps, and I do have warm bodies around, even if they’re not recovering alcoholics. Being trapped alone for 2 months would probably have sent me right back to the bottom. Day 19 today, which is better than 0.
Congratulations on 19 days. I was using alcohol to self medicate, manage my mood changes, didn’t know how severe my depression was until I got sober. Working the program with a sponsor has changed my outlook and attitude, but I still need to take a very small dose of antidepressant every day.
Working through the steps made all the difference for me; between having to live with the thing constantly, and living another, and monster-free, life entirely.
Tanya – I am also in recovery. 24 years sober. Zoom meetings have not been all that helpful for me. Watching people carrying their phone around the house and doing other distracting things keeps me from hearing the discussion. At grocery stores I see people piling their carts high with alcohol and I hear that news that drinking and domestic violence are up with the lockdown. Unlike you, I am writing more and more because I want to document every day of this pandemic and all the emotions I’m going through. As you mention, the alcohol is almost incidental, it’s the mental gyrations that lead to the drinking. I’ve been attending all kinds of mindfulness meetings, seminars, guided meditation and dharma talks. That’s what’s helping me stay safe and sane. Best wishes
Tanya, I hope that life-saving AA physical meetings will be able to resume soon, so that people affected by enforced isolation can get their medicine. There must be people in recovery who are dying without it.
Good luck.
Do persevere with the online meetings. This virtual stuff can take a bit of getting used to, but it’s are looking more and more like the blueprint for the future. I didn’t like them at first (not least because I hate looking at my own face) but I am beginning to get back the sense of community and fellowship that we need so badly. Isolation is the killer, and alcoholism loves separation.
Well how about South Africa where alcohol is now banned? Here in Canada alcohol sales have jumped. since the lockdowns started. Not surprised though it is no solution.
Tanya, I have gone to AlAnon for the families of Alcoholics for over twenty years and more open meetings than I can remember, and I echo what you say
My AlAnon meeting is not meeting on-line, but thank God I have been to CoDA, CoDependents Anonymous, where we have a new step meeting just started on line as well as the weekly meeting, and I also go to Adult Children of Alcoholics who now welcome children of dysfunctional families, which counts me in.
It is not the same as meeting face to face and the camera is not working on my computer, but it has kept me alive in Lockdown, as has walking every day on the hill where I live, and consciously praying while I walk. I am closer to my Higher Power than I have ever been, or rather my Higher Power is closer to me, except perhaps last summer when I walked in the heather on the mountain overlooking the ocean after my meetings and watched the sun setting into the sea, and felt Him embrace me every time. It was so powerful I can hardly describe it. It was a spiritual enlightenment which I knew He was giving me, after my meeting, in the fulness of the natural world, but something more powerful and more spiritual than the beauty of nature alone .
Even if I slip, and I do, He picks me up, like a Father picking up a child. I need to trust Him like a toddler held in the arms of a loving parent, a loving mother or father, full of tender concern, so different from the authority figures of my childhood, whom I can trust completely.
I haven’t been drinking more than normal, which is nothing Monday-Thursday, and 5-6 pints of ale Friday-Sunday
6 pints, if I’m being honest.
Tanya,
Your reference to the 12 Steps – please note a short excerpt from a letter of AA cofounder Bill W. in 1966, “Sobriety, freedom from alcohol through the teaching and practice of the 12 Steps is the sole purpose of an AA group”.
I have found recent Zoom meetings a great fillip, especially exposing our local AA community to meetings/inspiration from all around the world. However, looking forward to face to face meetings, starting here in NSW today.
Thanking you,
Rhys G.
Tanya,
Been sober 34 years and luckily where I live there are still a couple of in-person meetings. I loathe the zoom meetings and refuse to eat the picture of the watermelon instead of insisting on the real watermelon.
Crushed by covid 19? and you didn’t even have it? Newsflash, chica, you might give the steps a go. There is a hell of a lot of power in doing them, if you are actually interested in a challenge….and in power. The steps have a way of cutting through self-indulgent, fear based, whining narcissism. Simply not drinking does not equal sobriety.
I’m not sure writing is helping you as to generate the words you seem to be having to go back to your sewer and fish out all the repugnant things that you chucked in there and set them up on a rickety table still covered in bits of effluent for us to gaze at and consume. Unfortunately I’m not buying as I’m looking for strength, fortitude and rebellion among our people, not more middle class metropolitan weeping, clapping, rainbow stickers and self-pity.