A Note Before I Start

There are probably a couple of things I should explain before I start.

I am not an addiction expert. I am an artist who became addicted to alcohol and then, apparently, became completely fascinated by what the fuck had been going on inside my own head.

I analyse everything.

After something changed in my head, I started writing things down. Thoughts. Questions. Memories. Things the little demon was saying to me. Things I suddenly realised I had been doing for years. Sometimes something would occur to me while I was making coffee and I would write that down too.

It helped. That is really the only reason I kept doing it.

Somewhere along the way the little demon acquired a name. Gollum. G for short, mainly because I could not be arsed typing Gollum every time. Then, because apparently this was not ridiculous enough already, I started calling myself Sméagol. S.

G and S are both me. I am not hearing voices. There are not two separate personalities living in my head. It is simply a shorthand that makes sense to me for describing an argument I have had with myself far too many times. G is the bit constructing the argument for alcohol. S is simply the person this happened to, like many other people. Sometimes he bought the argument. Increasingly he tells G to fuck off.

I am writing this as it happens. That means I will probably contradict myself. I will remember things later that change how I understand something I wrote earlier. I might become absolutely convinced of something today and decide in six months that it was complete pish.

I do not want to go back and make myself cleverer afterwards.

So the pish stays too.