on alcohol & despair
halloween, wine marriage, shirley temples, something new
i woke up this morning and immediately got my period, ran to my shelf and popped my period cup in, impeccable timing really. it surprised me, normally i can track its presence easily by the cloud of sadness and intensity of feeling that precedes it the day or two before. none this time. but this is probably because i used all of that emotion crying my eyes out on saturday night in a subway station, incredibly drunk and also almost-certainly roofied.
it is halloweekend and i am dressed as the ocean (i’d wanted to be a tsunami, glue little houses and people to my costume, but alas i didn’t have the time). i’ve ended up alone at an incredibly pretentious soho nightclub at 5am. i would never go here normally, but the owner is a regular at our cafe and got us on the vip list for free. it was entirely my own decision, being there alone, i tell my friends who are leaving earlier that i want to stay and talk to people, be an anthropologist in this strange community that i have no intentions of ever returning to, i promise i’ll be fine. at the time i was close to sober and entirely confident i would be. what i don’t say is i also have made it my unspoken mission to milk the complete most out of my halloween experience this year, in a misguided attempt to make up for the events of last year (of which i have no interest in getting into but which were devastating and terrible and not celebratory or fun at all, to say the least).
i still was fine, it was fine. i meet the strange terrible people i was curious to meet, social media influencers and european businessmen on vacation and a glorified real estate agent from ohio and former nba dancers, and a very nice girl who takes me by the hand into the same bathroom stall as her so that we can both cut the line, who afterwards introduces me to the group of french boys getting bottle service who she’s with. none of them want me, i can tell. everyone is tall and white and a model, or rich, there is no in between. i find the only other brown person in the crowd, a man around my age, he’s friends with the dj, he buys me a drink i put my arms around his tall neck and try to make conversation but i find i am not enjoying myself, when he asks if i want to leave together i say no.
but i am a bit drunker now and when a new man who gives me incredibly bad vibes grabs hold of my waist from the dark ether and showers me in compliments i am foolish and i tell him i am there alone. i don’t remember what else i say but i know i try to abandon him in the crowd, feel certain it is time for me to go, but when he finds me again i still accept the drink he hands me. far away from the bar where there would’ve been plenty of time to slip something in it. that dangerous moment when you think there is still some experience to be juiced from the present, when you don’t want to move on without more of a story to tell.
i have the self-awareness to leave soon after, when i notice the world become a fog that is not just drunkenness, make my way to the train station alone, onto a train going vaguely in the direction of home, call a good friend. but not before i have a complete emotional meltdown. you know the kind. the rest is a blur but i somehow accidentally ride all the way to coney island (to the ocean, dressed as the ocean, the irony), uber myself home, and fall asleep in the bathtub. the water is still running two hours later when my roommate knocks on the locked bathroom door, late for work. i wake startled with no idea how i got there. i think i must’ve been cold, think i must’ve wanted to get the blue paint that was all over my body off.
so after a day of hazy nausea and dizziness and vomiting everything that i put into my body (including water) i am finally fine around 8pm. really, it’s fine, i insist the next day, it is. i knew the risks, i made my choices, i took care of myself, i am not looking for a savior. was honestly pretty proud of myself the next day that i didn’t find one.
but i’ve been thinking about taking a little break from alcohol. after tomorrow, because my friend is having a party and i am a sucker for the allure of a gathering filled with people i don’t know yet and i will 100% want the conversation curiosity lube that is wine.
this thought has passed through my head on and off for the past two years. i’ve always brushed it off - it’s not like i’m an alcoholic, i have no interest at all in drinking by myself, i don’t even drink that frequently, it’s an entirely-social behaviour, i hardly ever black out nowadays, i prefer beer and wine to liquor, i barely ever take shots, i know my limits. things i tell myself. it feels against my core desire as a human, to embrace life at its fullest capacity, to write off something so legal, so common. it feels prudish or annoying or self-righteous to even discuss the idea. not without a clear problem, without a concrete moment of rock bottom. i’ve met alcoholics, i know people who’s parents were ones, i know i am not that. i once dated someone who didn’t drink very much, and it always made me feel messy and inherently less-than in comparision, but that was also rooted in other things. i met someone more recently who didn’t talk about it so dramatically, framed it more as a temporary life choice, like taking a T-break, this concept is familiar to me, it gave me encouragement, i think maybe i’ll think about it to myself like this. trying to foster a healthier relationship, not writing the substance off entirely.
it’s no secret that i drank a lot in college - particularly the last two years, particularly while i was living in the co-op community in austin, where despite our best intentions to decenter alcohol from our community events they remained very much in the center.
my favorite of these events (in which every time i inevitably became extremely sloshed and woke feeling like there was a dagger embedded in my brain) was called wine marriage. while some of our events doubled as money-making schemes where we charged entrance fees for open-to-the-public concerts or sold punch, this was one of the few that was entirely house-residents only. house residents meaning all 112 of us. purely to facilitate our own community-building and inter-cooperative connection (there’s 10+ co-ops in austin, we often held events together, it was great).
basically: we pool our house’s money together to buy 4-5 boxes of varying flavors of terrible wine (red, white, and rosé), and a big roll of twine. a couple of people work in time-slot shifts at the wine table, facilitating the process. there’d be a dj. the only catch is that to get a plastic champagne glass full of free wine, you must find another single (non-twined) person in the crowd and ask if they want to get married to you. if they say yes, you then approach the wine table as a duo and present your wrists to get wrapped in twine together, cementing your marriage (until your glasses of wine are finished - and then you find a new partner). this continues until either everyone is so incredibly drunk that they’ve had enough, or we run out of boxed wine (always the latter). in theory you are supposed to find a new partner each time, have an enlightening new conversation with a stranger, and meet as many new people as possible (the event is often done at the beginning of a semester, when loads of new residents have just moved in).
of course all sorts of tomfoolery happened. one of my housemates would propose to someone, get his cup of wine, immediately down it and rip his twine off, and go off to find a new unsuspecting partner. groups of 3-6 people would get their wrists all tied together in complicated orgy marriages. we’d run out of twine, we’d run out of cups. it was always a fucking good time. everyone dressed up and enjoying themselves, everyone getting equally drunk on communally bought alcohol, no one spending any money, no one worrying about a commute home, always someone to talk to, always someone to hold your hand, always (probably) someone to kiss.
but also. the moment where you end up drunk in a puddle of tied-together kissing housemates even though you have a long-distance boyfriend. the moment when you fuck up and get wine in your contacts, while tied to a girl who used to be involved with the same girl as you, when she takes care of you and you feel sorry. the moment when you realize part of you hates the person you’re dating, when it slips out a little bit while you’re messing around on the communal eliptical, when they go to sleep in your room alone and you realize you’re not having fun anymore, when they leave your bed the next morning too early and you wish they’d take you with them. the moment when you wake up beside a boy you definitely should’ve stopped leading on by now and he kisses your forehead in the morning like he loves you and says you went swimming and showered together the night before under the christmas lights on your bathroom ceiling, but you don’t remember any of it. when you feel sad and you feel guilty because it’s so obvious that you were using him to fill the void of somebody else, because to him that was a moment unique to the two of you. but you weren’t there, you were drunk and you were in the past.
going to dive bars alone in the city, bringing along a book or journal or something to work on, and ordering a shirley temple has become a little ritual of mine. half the time the bartender comps them for me, i leave just a cash tip in thanks. one dive bar i found lets you bring in outside food, the bartender told me himself unprompted when i first came in, i left and got a deli sandwich from the nearest bodega and came back, he made me the best shirley temple i’ve ever had, i sat outside on the patio in the backyard with my journal and eavesdropped on first dates.
i think most of the time they assume i’m some sort of recovering alcoholic, that i’m consciously sober, maybe this is a story i’m telling myself, it seems so unnatural not to order alcohol at a bar, like i’m doing something embarassing, like i’m doing something wrong.
i did this while getting drinks with friends a bit ago, getting a shirley temple to start with, going through the whole non-alcoholic, right? that’s right bit first, only to come back 20 minutes later for an estrella. i just wanted to slow my alcohol consumption, not stop it entirely. later i have a glass of wine at the jazz club we all go to, i play drunken chess and send voice memos debating the plot of sex and the city to a friend and i have a great time. at the time i was hesitant to jump right into drinking without first getting a wrangle on how i was doing internally, if i could handle it tonight, if i wanted to put myself in that place of emotional vulnerability. at the time i was on a good streak, had not cried hysterically drunk in a bathroom in weeks.
but two weeks before i had done a comically bad job - part of the reason why i was playing it safe. let me set the scene. i am in a dive bar with my ex boyfriend and his good friend. she is great, she is funny, we are fulfilling my dreams of amicable divorce and laughing talking over each other while telling our breakup story to her sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, we know we are going home together, if not to have sex than at least to hold each other, this is possibly even better. we are spilling our drinks, we are drinking a lot, she is arguing with the bartender about taylor swift, it is mostly a very good time. and then i go to the bathroom, and as i leave she has persuaded the bartender to put on death by a thousand cuts - arguably the saddest taylor swift song of all time.
and then i am going out into the hallway, down an entire flight of stairs, into the big room that appears to be empty, to my singular stall under the bright white lights to sit on the toilet alone. and it hits me while i am descending the stairs, once i lock the door i am crying. sobbing, really, all-out, full on wails. i am purging i am getting it all out of me, so that when i go back upstairs and they’re playing a different song i can be me again. the kind of despair you only descend into when you’re alone.
but i’m not alone. i learn this when out of the fluorescent ether comes a voice hey are you alright? immediately i am quiet. my sadness wasn’t supposed to have any witnesses. i don’t know what i could possibly say in response, and so i close the door as fast as i can and jog back up the stairs to the bar before whoever is in the stall beside me can reveal themselves, before i reveal myself to them. and i was right they’re playing a different song now, everything’s fine, i turn away from the door, we close our tabs, pull our belligerent friend away from her argument with the bartender and go off in search of a karaoke bar. and possibly it is the best thing that could’ve happened because for the rest of the night, my sadness has been scared out of me. it’s amusing, really, i tell my ex weeks later and we laugh about it.
what i don’t tell him is that after we get home that night i have another moment of complete and utter despair in the bathroom alone downstairs. i am in despair for so long that when i come back upstairs to bed it is getting light outside. i curl into his body and it’s over, but it happened. the drunkenness makes it easy to forget it happened, i almost do.
back to this saturday night. it isn’t the being roofied part that causes me concern, it is this emotional breakdown i had in the train station. it is that too often have i had this moment, of complete and utter despair, induced by alcohol. there is no other way to describe it other than despair. if you’ve felt it, you know.
what’s funny is i have even had this moment while covered in body paint before, over a year ago now, dressed as a martian. green not blue. it wasn’t halloween but it was a costume party. i woke the next morning glad drunk-me hadn’t gotten what she wanted, sober-me knew it was for the best.
of course, i have also had some great moments under the influence of alcohol. of friendship, of romance, incredible nights of dancing, wholesome interactions with strangers, campfire conversations, karaoke, stargazing, intense moments of human connection that i would not give back for anything. but lately i have been thinking more and more about how susceptible i also am to this despair.
she’s a great conversationalist, my drunk self, she’s incredibly confident and good at listening and funny and flirtatious, at her best all she wants is to make the people around her feel special, feel heard, feel connected - but she’s also unpredictable, her moods come and go. she’s easily triggered, she easily disappears. into her own insecurities and fears. and it’s just a fact she’s come to terms with, that alcohol both makes her powerful makes her brave, but in the same hand thins all of her protective layers, all her emotional resiliency.
the uncomfortable truth: there always comes a moment, if i drink enough, that i feel i am nothing, if not wrapped in someone else’s arms. like clockwork it comes, this intense and complicated need for physical comfort and validation, she appears out of thin air. not always does it manifest in despair, in a breakdown in the train station on my way home, but the echo of it is always there - even if buried slightly under the surface, even if tonight i am able to ignore it completely, even if from the outside it doesn’t appear as if i am experiencing the feeling at all. and so it is this i want to live without, for a little while at least, see what life feels like without that alcohol-induced temptation to salve oneself with another human’s affection.
i smoke weed and i do other drugs and i don’t experience this desire hardly at all - it is only alcohol that gives it to me so strongly, this poisonous voice inside my head that tells me i am worthless if i don’t find someone to kiss by the end of the night. someone to kiss me. the way women and men think about this feeling is different, i am certain. for me it is about feeling wanted, feeling chosen, feeling desirable. it’s hardly ever about achieving a person like a trophy. the origin of the feeling is darker, more hollow, more desperate. something only society could’ve ingrained.
i wrote a little last time about how i’ve been working on curbing my instinct to use sex as a tool for validation - it’s true, i’ve said no many times when i could’ve said yes, i’ve removed myself from situations, i’ve resisted temptation, i’ve (sometimes-barely) chosen longterm emotional safety over instant gratification a hundred times, i truly have been working on tuning into my authentic desires, deciphering which voices in my head are my own and which are society’s, which are the voyeuring Man behind my eyelids’. immense progress has been made.
but it becomes clearer that alcohol is one of the places this temptation originates from, where it is often first born. and i wonder how much easier the battle would be without it. how much happier i could be, how much more sustainably, how much more emotionally resilient, how much i really could actually just use weed as a substitute in social settings where it feels too much to be completely sober. i much prefer the feeling if i’m being honest, feel it facilitates conversation and humor and sheds anxiety in much the same way without the other side effects.
so here it goes i guess, incredibly loosely, let’s say that i’ll give myself a month. trying this new thing. but, not until tomorrow.
