I Don't Know How This Ends

My wife had left with our little boy.

I couldn't sleep.

I don't mean I was lying there mildly pissed off, staring at the ceiling wondering if I'd get a few hours before morning. I mean properly awake. Brain going mental. Turning things over and over and over.

Alcohol. My wife. My boy. Work. Money. Me.

Mostly me.

And somewhere during that night, something changed.

I wish I could explain exactly what it was. That's partly why I started writing things down.

There wasn't some dramatic moment where I poured a bottle down the sink. No doctor gave me terrible news. I hadn't been arrested. I hadn't woken up in a police cell or crashed the car or lost my business.

Nothing like that happened.

Something just clicked.

And I suddenly knew something that, if I'm being completely truthful, I'd probably known for quite a long time.

I was addicted to alcohol.

Even writing that sentence now feels strange.

At the time I used a different word. I picked up my phone and wrote to my wife:

"I am an alcoholic."

I don't particularly like that word now.

Nobody says heroinholic. Cocaineholic. Methoholic.

Why does the substance I became addicted to get to become the name of what I am?

But that night I needed the word.

I think I needed something strong enough to finally cut through my own bullshit.

Because I'd become exceptionally good at bullshit.

Not necessarily bullshitting everyone else. Although there had certainly been plenty of that.

The person I'd become really good at bullshitting was myself.

I could tell myself I was stressed.

I'd been working too hard.

Money was worrying me.

I'd had a difficult day.

I'd had a good day.

I deserved a drink.

I'd been good recently.

I'd stop tomorrow.

I'd cut down.

I'd proved I could stop before, therefore clearly I didn't have a problem.

Someone else was drinking, therefore I might as well.

I could manufacture a perfectly reasonable explanation for doing the one thing some other part of my brain was desperately asking me not to do.

And the really fucked-up thing?

Both voices were me.

That's what fascinates me now.

I'm an artist. I'm not a doctor, neuroscientist, psychologist or addiction expert.

I'm simply the person this happened to, like many other people whose brains have learned their own versions of the same arguments.

And I've become slightly obsessed with understanding what it was doing.

I don't know how this story ends.

That's important.

I'm not writing this down five years sober, looking backwards and arranging everything into a neat story where every warning sign was obvious and every lesson makes perfect sense.

I'm writing it down while it's happening.

I might read some of this in a year's time and discover that I understood addiction completely wrongly.

I hope I do.

I might discover that some of the things I'm absolutely convinced about today are complete pish.

They stay in the notes.

Because I don't want to write the clever version afterwards.

I want to know what happens when somebody who analyses absolutely everything finally accepts that he's become addicted to alcohol and turns that obsessive curiosity onto himself.

I want to understand the little demon.

Where it came from.

Why I listened to it.

Why it was sometimes so convincing.

Why I hid what I was doing.

Why I thought I was smarter than it.

And what happens now that I've finally stopped pretending it isn't there.

This isn't me explaining how I beat alcohol.

I haven't.

I've only just started.