We convened in The Chapel. A multi-faith space for those seeking their higher power if that’s where they wanted to get it. The leaded windows cast a flat, empty light across the dated carpet – a dignified gloom which was fitting for the proceedings.
It sometimes took a while for the group to engage in the morning. We were reticent to start the exhausting process of confronting ourselves and our past behaviour. Not this morning though because Kevin had something to show us and he just knew it was going to hit home. He welcomed us with barely restrained delight.
Kevin was one of the lead therapists at the well-known rehab facility that I attended to undo the problems I DEFINITELY WAS NOT having with booze and drugs. Kevin was an engaging, softly spoken South African. At some point he must have been put in charge of his own grooming but had politely declined the offer; wire-rimmed spectacles, fly-away hair and an unkempt beard completed the crumpled collegiate image. We all liked Kevin.
He scanned the room with the practised hush of a man about to unveil something terribly profound. Ta-daaa! He showed me and my cohort of miscreant addicts a hastily scrawled trajectory of addiction – beginning with a relaxed cadence that then built to our own personally orchestrated crescendo of chaos. When he put it like that it was so fucking obvious.
This is an absolutely terrible approximation of Kevin’s chart.
If anyone had dared suggest I had a problem with alcohol or drugs in my 20s I wouldn’t have listened. Would you? I’d probably have gone further than that, laughing it off with the patronising air of a man tragically at odds with his own reality[1].
But here, a collective clarity permeated the group. We were experiencing our first truly shared perspective. Knowing looks were exchanged, an epiphany combined with the nagging feeling that we had been grifted. Booze had played a shitty confidence trick on all of us – and maybe that’s the most apt definition of ‘confidence trick’ that there ever was. We were outraged.
“Why weren’t we told?”
“Would you have listened?
“No.”
“See?”
“That’s so fucking weird!”
“We’re in a psychiatric hospital, mate,” a fellow patient interjected. “It’s really not that weird.”
It was a fair point.
We were being shown a WHOLLY AVOIDABLE path, punctuated by tragedy, arrest, overdoses, self-harm, infidelity, violence and loss; and they were some of the light-hearted bits. Kevin’s scrawl depicted an accelerating frequency of addled events, with a line of equilibrium denoting positive and negative outcomes and a downward curve into the type of chaotic – below the line – dramas that we’d all rather forget.
Some of us had succeeded and forgotten a lot, unable to share many of the details of the incidents from our own chronology. In some cases, my now lucid pals, had garnered the information from friends and family. Stories on which existential shame and guilt was built. An example: one of my pals was engaged to be married but the marriage never happened. Mired in drug addiction, blackout fucked for 15 years, my friend wouldn’t have been able to pick his ex-fiancé out of a line-up. (His thing was around 40 pills of assorted types per day. He slept with five pills in his hand to swallow on waking. EVERY. DAY. FOR. FIFTEEN. YEARS.) We had to look through old pictures shared by his relatives to deduce who the lucky bride was. He was very matter of fact about it.
We all have to start somewhere though, right? I’d kicked off proceedings properly with drink driving at age 17 – caught without a licence to lose, lucky me – I was a keen binge drinker who was totally bought into the societal norm that if you weren’t at school, work or playing sport then you were in the pub. I had my first drink in a pub aged 13 or 14; a Southern Comfort and lemonade after playing cricket. The pub was great. And the pub was the goal. Always.
I can frame my approach to life at that time by telling you about a conversation with my college tutor, Elizabeth. She sat me down and asked what aspirations I had for a career. I said I wanted to be an ‘advertising exec’ and when asked what attracted me to the profession, I replied that I liked the ‘lifestyle’. In truth I had seen something on the telly where some advertising folks were partying and taking cocaine and I liked the look of it – the actual job was a side show to the good stuff. The tragic thing is that I have half a memory of the thing on telly being an old episode of Miami Vice. Imagine basing your future on a badly acted cop show and the TV trope of the coked-up ad exec. I imagine the programme makers were trying to convey moral decay, not produce a recruitment video.
Having failed in my efforts to get on to an ‘advertising management’ degree (yes, really) I studied marketing and communications, and having consumed a lot of ecstasy during my stay, I left university with a bang average degree, and an ounce of coke hidden in the footwell of my car. So far so good. Hanging in there.
The rest of my twenties would be a doddle, surely?
[1] More to follow on my narcissistic personality traits – for now look at ‘King Baby Syndrome’ www.castlecraig.co.uk
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