Day 8

October 27, 2007

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering
Madame De Staal

It's Saturday night and I'm sitting in a coffee shop looking around. I've always wondered what kind of people hang around these places when others are out having fun, and I realize they look a lot like me. Back when I was a younger man and intent on pursuing a career as a writer, I used to sit in these kinds of places and make up imaginary stories and backgrounds about people I saw to jumpstart my creative inspiration. Today I look around and see blank faces, isolation, and alienation. This is how I perceive others because at this moment this is how I perceive myself. I have problems with intimacy which is an unusual problem for a psychologist as I have in many ways the most intimate job in the world. Many of my friendships are based on alcohol, and these are not true friendships but instead a happy liars club content to leave our shared insecurities unspoken. Camus said "Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves". This is the essence of the alcoholic friendship. You take turns buying each other drinks and raising glasses to each other as a component of your shared denial. This I know from many years spent in bars.

Boredom is a key component of alcoholism. Drinking lets you turn the remote control in your head to another channel for a while, and this is often a welcome distraction. Without this variety life can become hopelessly repetitive.

And yet...... Many people seem to move through life taking this in stride. Their little lives keep them busy and content enough to keep moving on without the use of mind-altering substances. Kind of... Most people have some kind of distracting addiction such as food or television, or even their children or their family. Although I believe this, I also realize I'm rationalizing my own addiction here. Some poor soul who stuffs herself for emotional comfort while watching American Idol has nothing to do with me drinking myself to death. Not really.

I crave stimulation. I want to be inspired. Often I feel these things when I'm drinking, but these brilliant flashes of insight vanish as each evening creeps to a murky and hazy end. I feel like I almost touch it, almost get it in these little moments, and then the moment passes. I wake up feeling awful and with a terrible sense of dread for what I might have said or done the night before. No amount of distraction or insight is worth this feeling. But yet we come back for more. For years we come back for more. Years and years and years of our lives disappear and we can't account for any of it. It's not really living and it's not really dying, but some kind of terrible purgatory in between.

So I find myself in a coffee shop at midnight on a Saturday Night. I spot an attractive woman sitting across from me and for a moment I catch her eye. What is she doing here? I look around and see a couple holding hands and laughing and they look like perfectly happy people content to be sitting here enjoying each other's company. I realize in this moment that I am seeing these people's humanity as opposed to my own alienation I projected onto them when I first entered the shop. Perhaps the storm clouds of my depression are moving a little. I hope so. It's 12:01. I have survived my first weekend sober in at least ten years. Things could be worse. I continue to think there might be hope.