There’s a breed of sobriety that comes loaded, not just with humility, but with a sort of moral altitude sickness. The man who once raised more glasses than a Soviet submarine crew now sips mint tea with the sanctimony of a minister. He doesn’t just abstain, he ascends. And I’ve got to come clean. I like the cut of his jib.
In prior posts I’ve mentioned ‘King Baby’ as a personality profile that I was asked to interrogate when I was in treatment. I’m pleased to say I am not considered a narcissist by any psychiatrist that has treated me. I’m not the full self-absorbed shilling; I play at it. Like most things I do. My traits manifest as a natural disposition for entitlement and that the rules do not apply to me like they apply to you. As someone in treatment jokingly said to me: “Rules are mere suggestions to the gifted.”
In essence, I think of myself as special and different. Not consciously. Not all the time. But it’s in there. And narcissistic traits are exacerbated through alcohol and drug use, causing misalignment and friction in daily life that – surprise, surprise – needs smoothing over with more alcohol and drugs. Pour hard liquor on a narcissistic flicker and it can become an inferno. That said, those same traits that once caused the problems, now provide a surprisingly sturdy crutch.
My ego was the world’s worst drinking companion: bloated, belligerent and with a voice that sounded suspiciously like my own after a bottle or two of Albariño. It was that swaggering part of me that insisted I was the exception, not the rule. Ego exonerated me from the usual edicts that apply to everyday folk, and it was always the first to protest when someone might suggest I’d had enough. In essence, my ego was a fabulous fraudster: seductive, surly and slurring.
What I lacked in real purpose, I made up for with recalcitrance. That was my drunk schtick. Some people drink to forget; I drank to agitate, confound, amuse or wound. Regretfully, I could be quite funny with it, which only encouraged the performance. Towards the end, it became a grim routine, a cabaret act for an audience of one. In my case the longer I let alcohol and ego run the show, the less room there was for anyone else, least of all, the version of me that wanted to sober up.
I liken my active alcoholic ego to Christopher Reeve’s Evil Superman in Superman III (bear with me). Under the influence of a botched batch of synthetic Kryptonite the Man of Steel goes rogue – his bias for public duty and upholding the law now absent. Our hero ends up slouched on a bar stool, drunk, the bar’s other patrons are on edge. The landlord terrified. Superman’s once pristine suit now sullied, glowering and greasy, he flicks peanuts into the optics, smashing the bottles one by one.
Eventually, this conflict manifests physically in a scrapyard brawl between Evil Superman and his good alter ego, Clark Kent, and of course, good prevails. The first Superman films were seminal viewing for us children of the 70s and this scene stuck with me, but I hadn’t considered Superman III as a redemptive tale until I wrote the last two paragraphs. It wasn’t recommended viewing in The Priory, but maybe it should have been. We watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre instead.
My ego then, once a saboteur is now a scaffolder of my sobriety. I regard the bottle with a connoisseur’s disdain for corner-shop plonk. Why do people bother? To what end? I now know better. In fact, I know best. My defences are constructed not from denial, but from the sturdy bricks of difference. Alcohol is not the necessary preamble to my existence, and in a country that drinks as if it were a patriotic duty, I’m not just an abstainer: I am different. I am healthy and I try and make the right decisions every single day.
Now, I can hear you thinking, ‘this bloke is just trying to convince himself’ and ‘this is just a lot of bitter old clap trap.’ And you’d be right. Take a house point. A lot of this is motivated by jealousy that I can’t join in, grief of my former life (the good bits) and being the overly ebullient and hyper-animated character that had FUN. However, I accept I can’t do that now, I’ve spoiled it for myself. Acceptance is where it starts, and we all have to start somewhere. Step one.
So, if you’re in the same dinghy of self-delusion that I was, pour yourself a glass of honesty and think about the hardest habit to break: believing your own bullshit. And should you find, as I have, that sobriety is simply the same old drama, now played with a different script and a freshly laundered ego, then so be it. This is a journey full of digressions, not a tidy narrative arc. It’s not the Kryptonite or the capes that matter, but the wrestling match with ourselves. Sometimes the best we can do is dust off the suit and keep flicking peanuts.
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