The False and the Vicious

I didn’t write for a while. Almost three months. Wow… But, I rather write nothing than write crap. I must also say last three or four months were quite busy regarding writing new stories and submitting them, so the Writing Magic did happen, and very actively so. So did the sober time marched onwards. Thanks Gods for that.

As for this story, I wrote about it before, but I’m sure repeating good ideas is good for the memory to act upon good things in the present and future. So I’ll keep on with the right things. Below are my ideas on some subjective, some objective (I hope) and on the irony of the False Motivations and the Proverbial Vicious Cycle of Addiction.

Living sober, I often looked back at my drinking time, compared what I said about it in AA meetings with what I heard other people shared, and I saw that very few people had thinking similar to mine toward reasons for drinking and not being able to stop. This is not to say that I am hugely original, just that there are so many of us around, and everyone’s stories are different and maybe some of us don’t express certain thoughts, out of being ashamed, or out of fear to be judged.

My vision of why I started drinking and drank for a while, besides the brilliant AA theory of allergy (yes, brilliant, I am not being sarcastic; it is bloody smart and I wish I figured it out waaay earlier!), is as follows. I was under a certain amount of stress at school (I was never a great student and besides just a few particular classes never was fond of going to school), and at home (it seemed my parents, although being great people then and still are now, had no clue what I was into, which is understandably not easy dealing with an introvert like myself!). Alcohol was always a guarantee of a good time. Each time I drank I was happy, although the more I drank, the less I was happy, less social, and hangover sucked big time (yet, the negative sides of drinking never deterred me from drinking again.) I also felt like I needed to have good time more and more, often because I didn’t seem to fit in the groups of interest among classmates and didn’t have much success with the opposite sex. So I used the “escape to euphoria” tactic a lot.

Besides those usual teenager/young adult every day problems, there were other ideas that were on my mind, partially thanks to the wonders of the media. I placed them in two categories: Mythology and Facts.

What I understand by “Mythology” is all the stuff I heard and saw that was not entirely (or not at all) true regarding alcohol consumption and society. Among those were/are stereotypes uttered with serious face and just plain laughable fairytales and arguments. For example, “everyone drinks”, or “you can have one”, or even “you’re not a man if you can’t have one”, and of course bad old classic Russian challenge “Don’t you have respect for me? Drink with me!”

In addition, there are stereotypes that all musicians and writers drink and do drugs and that’s what keep them going, helps them to create masterpieces, and that’s the right way to have a good time. Since I was always into rock music and reading books, and I read and listened to tons of material, including about the authors and composers, I was sold on the idea of debauchery and creating under influence. What was an attractive idea to a teenager was very hard to bash out from the young adult’s mind.

Also that undying impression that all Russians drank was very potent! I mean, we Russians do drink, and there is a hell of a lot of us, so it is easy to make an exaggeration. But that particular exaggeration dealt a massive blow to my psychic. I started drinking around the age of 15, and just in one year I was doing it rather unhealthily – drinking a lot and couldn’t stop until I puked. Boozing with my classmates back in high school in Russia, we kept reminding ourselves that it was OK to drink, and everyone around us did (which was not true), and it’s a our Russian people’ second nature, just like fighting wars and flying to space. That kind of a mindset failed to get me on a rational thinking plane when I started thinking every once in a while that maybe I drank too much. The idea that drinking a lot of alcohol often was the typical Russian thing had stuck in my head for a very long time, and my corrupted mind always pushed for winning the eternal argument of “to beer or not to beer?”

Besides “Mythology”, there are also what I call Alcohol Facts, such as “drinking alcohol is one of the oldest human traditions” (laying out a red carpet to the stereotype “everyone drinks”, therefore “it’s OK!”) And it’s hard to argue with history: Ancient Egyptians made beer and the Greeks – the wine, and so our ancestors kept enjoying the wonders of spirits variations from then on for many a century. History doesn’t talk about the alcoholics that perished along the way down from Tutankhamen time. Those things are only to be found in individual biographies of particular famous individuals, and only if you looked deep. Therefore as a kid, and as a teen, I wasn’t aware of the victims of intoxication consumption in the World History. I only learned of conquests, reforms, and discoveries… such as booze, among others.

Not only alcohol was created a god-awful long time ago, it also spread all across the world, into most countries where the tradition to drink wine, among other beverages, became commonplace. In Spanish and Latino countries, having several bottles of wine with dinner is a norm, or so we read in books and see in movies. Again, a movie or a book about Britain almost always features s characters sitting in pubs, and we’d get an idea that they sit in pubs all the time. As for Russia, my parents always put several alcoholic beverages out for a family reunion, and themselves, as most of my family, are non-alcoholics (although everybody at the table did drink, so do all Russians drink, hmm?)

So there is no stigma of drinking alcohol on planet Earth. Quite the opposite – it seems that it is widely encouraged. And that’s a blessed territory for the alcohol producers, therefore advertising prospers too. Ads sell you the most attractive, bizarre, funny, and romantic illusions and images of how you’d definitely benefit from the use of alcohol (which, naturally, places advertisement into the “Mythology” category), starting with the look of the bottle and ending with the depiction of profound happiness, solid gentlemen success (yes, particularly gentlemen, because ladies in those ads usually look either promiscuous or needy), and other wonderful nonsense you are assured you can’t live without. We look for what we want in the ads, we want to hear what we want, and it ads do great jobs with that, trying hard to be of service, just as much as they are often vicious and misleading.

Those are the reasons for my starting drinking and continuing drinking for a while. Quite a lot of reasons, hey. Quite a pile of crap. Rather scary, although it does make sense if you look at it from the safe distance of a psychological study.

With time, alcohol was becoming a problem for me. I failed classes, lost jobs, messed up relationships, and hangovers were getting worse. But I kept boozing. Now, why in the world would I?!

Enter his majesty the Proverbial Vicious Cycle. Let’s see what that means. I drank due to stress, and due to drinking I was causing more trouble for myself in school and work. Therefore I drank more to get more “fun” in life which in turn led to more stress, because I couldn’t manage drinking. So I kept screwing up things. Moving from one country to another, breaking up with a girlfriend, leaving most of the relatives behind, meeting new people, taking new classes, doing more homework, – those changes were many, and all changes lead to stress. The more I messed things up (because I drank to deal with changes and anxieties they brought) the grumpier I was becoming. Consequently I spent less time with others. I was getting more attracted to people who experimented with drugs and alcohol and that lifestyle in general. I was into bands that drank a lot. I remember particularly reading more Hemingway, and besides being a masterful writer in general, he seemed to write about drinking a lot.

The more trouble I ran into thanks to alcohol, the more I was looking for justification of my action and the normality of alcohol consumption. And I’d always find it, can you believe it? The proof that alcohol drinking is OK was always around. Pure magic…

So the reasons why I started drinking were exactly the reasons why I couldn’t stop drinking, because those socially created concepts and illusions were very persistent. I should also mention that those concepts and illusions are so attractive to the people who make booze and people who drink it, that they are constantly supported and/or re-invented. That’s my vision of the scoop, anyway.

And of course dependency. Addiction. The ever-rising tolerance to drug/alcohol consumption. That didn’t help me to slow down or stop drinking either. It took me over 10 years of drinking and at least two years of actively participating in sobriety groups to fully face the illusions and the facts and create a modus operandi to fight them and continue staying sober.

And that is exactly why, I think, it is so hard to not starting to do drugs and drink alcohol in our Western societies. It’s not just the advertisement that waits for us on every corner, trying to sell us a bottle. It is the stuff that hits us before we even saw a single alcohol ad. The TV, the books, the lyrics accompanying our favorite music, what our peers say, etc. And all of that is undeniable part of our lives, so banning or escaping all these things is impossible, and really, pointless. We just, somehow, need to invent a system to not to sell out, not to give in, to stay strong against the message of illusion and facts meddling with our minds and consequently bring us more trouble than enlightenment. Because it is not just about alcohol, is it? It is everything else we see every day that the ones in power and the ones with product are trying to sell to us: clothes, another car, a lifestyle, a behavior, all wrapped with smiles and promises of happiness. It’s hard to fight them, but it is our life, goddamnit. It’s worth fighting for. One day at a time, everyday.

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the front image was copied from

https://www.google.ca/search?biw=1680&bih=933&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=MY0EWsajKcP6jwPqtb2oBQ&q=funny+alcohol+in+space+ad&oq=funny+alcohol+in+space+ad&gs_l=psy-ab.3…36529.39148.0.39387.11.10.0.0.0.0.274.1431.0j4j4.8.0….0…1.1.64.psy-ab..3.3.728…0j0i30k1j0i8i30k1.0.EefIIV5dPdA#imgrc=FGtgAq7ar8B0cM:&spf=1510247700033

thank you.