In Vino Et Veritas?

The last year has been a painful transition. I’ve spent the last several years experiencing moments of happiness, or what I thought was happiness, only to come quickly crashing back down to reality. This only led me to try to recreate the tiny spurts of feeling good, which created more confusion. So, I had to boil this all down to the basic. What is happiness? It seems like a very simple question. It’s anything but. My life has been like an attempt to sustain the human body on high-fructose corn syrup. Initially, you feel full and giddy. Then, that sugar-rush wears off and you realize that continued attempts to feed yourself this way will leave you malnourished. One part of the problem is solved; I know I’ve been doing it wrong.

We’re all different, but for me – I had to accept that alcohol was either driving my social life, or it was sitting in the passenger seat giving me directions. I am not going to attempt to turn this into a tirade against alcohol, but I do think it’s a slippery-slope for everyone. Right now, I’m not drinking at all. I don’t have any current plans to do it again. I have the urge, and analyzing this urge has taught me some difficult things about myself. For the past several years, there has been nary an event attended or friend’s house visited, where alcohol was not present. I’ve asked myself this: at some point, did I start going places for the chance to do something, to experience something – or did I go there to drink and feel anesthetized? If I’m honest, it was the latter more than I’d like to admit.

I think initially when I started drinking all those years ago, I thought it would augment my sensory perception. It did, sometimes. It prevented me from censoring my emotions. Sometimes I don’t allow myself to get angry, upset, or excited when it may be necessary and healthy. The alcohol strips that repression away. However, it also peels restraint away where you need it. Instead of thoughtfully evaluating actions before they are taken, life becomes ex post facto justification. You don’t learn from mistakes; you adopt them into your behaviors. To do otherwise, would be to admit that you’ve lost control.

Control is a funny thing. You’ll think because you make it to work on time everyday and your bills get paid, you’ve got it. You set the course. I always did. I worked, went to school, and made sure my daughter’s needs were met. But emotionally, I may as well have been the homeless man on the corner asking for a few bucks so he could get his next fix. I suppose some of us wear our inadequacies on the outside. My unseen emotional well-being has been almost totally dependent on artificially-created, temporary pleasure.

It’s not hard to see why that is. Creating some kind of lasting happiness seems out of my reach, as I’m sure that it does for many people. If you don’t already have it, the patience required in waiting or preparing for it is almost impossible to practice. Then again, maybe life is truly so terrible that we all need to self-medicate. Or maybe, it’s bad sometimes – and other times it is incredible. If I’m going to continue the practice of numbing myself, I’ll stay in the middle. I’ll never get to the incredible. And frankly, we should all be offended by each other. Do we really need to drink to tolerate company? Why do we do it? Listen, I’m not downing it. I’m really trying to evaluate the practice. I realize that some people are very aware of what they’re drinking and why; after one or two, they’re done. But in what I’ve observed, that’s not generally the case. Not by a long shot. Why does alcohol accompany almost every instance of human socialization?

I know what I want, more or less. The getting there has always been the problem. In the meantime, I want to go to dinner because of the food and the company, not because of the wine. I want to go to the beach because I love the smell, the breeze, and the sand – not because of a bottomless solo cup full of beer. I want to sit on the porch and talk with my friends because I love them and value what they say – not because we’re killing a bottle of vodka together.

So, that’s what I want and it’s definitely a work in progress. Strangely, I can’t say this decision has been met with overwhelming support. In fact, only just recently have I been asked if something is wrong – because of the choice not to drink. That to me is a real testament of how alcohol-supplemented socialization doesn’t actually promote any kind of valid communication. That question should have been asked long ago.