You don’t know what it’s like.
I’m not asking you to.
It’s my experience, not yours.
I tried for years, four to be exact, before I knew the word “alcoholic,” to explain to my family what I felt when I drank alcohol. I felt good, like, really, really good. But that wasn’t good enough. Skinnier, unkempt, spacier, less available, always wanting to party, grades slipping, discipline decaying.
And it felt good, really really good. Every time, rain or shine, Monday or Friday, celebration or mourning, it felt good.
When I drank I felt held from the inside. A stick of dynamite I swallowed, burning my esophagus, igniting my guts, clearing space to breathe effortlessly. My chest opened, a radiating warmth, full body relaxation. I no longer questioned what life was for.
And that wasn’t enough, not when I lay drunk in bed, unable to stand, on a Thursday afternoon, while they tore through my closet yelling
“Where is it?! Why do you do this to yourself, son?”
I’d already told them.
I tried again.
The first time I drank I almost cried, with joy, with relief, for the end of needing anything to be different. Almost. Mostly I just noticed I belonged here, right where I was. I wasn’t scared anymore. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t need to, because I stopped asking.
I’d been depressed my whole life. Depression was a room with the walls too close. Then this.
I went from a habit of surviving to wanting to keep living, and living meant feeling like this.
That’s about as spiritual an experience as I’d ever had. The transformative kind. The type that rearranges the personality in a single moment. One night, three beers deep, and the trajectory of a life reset with conviction.
And I was faithful. Whenever the opportunity arose, I drank, and I drank until I reached that feeling.
You don’t have to know what it felt like for me.
I never said you did. But I tried to share it with you anyway, because that’s what we do when we find something we love. We want to give it to the people we love.
I offered it to my fraternal, twin brother behind our parents’ backs; booze first, then other substances I’d found the same joy in. He told on me. I was punished. I knew the law. I knew we were both under age. But the law said nothing about this.
My family was religious. I was sent to a Catholic school. Christians were prosecuted for spreading the words of Jesus— were they sinful? Did they deserve their punishment for breaking a law that said nothing about faith?
I was sharing God on tap. I didn’t know that not everyone found him there.
I didn’t have to know what it felt like for you, brother. You never asked me to. You just said “no”. That should have been enough. But faith can be blinding.
Years later, at my father’s table, I was now a father myself. Two dirty plates and empty seats beside me, my children having eaten and gone back to playing, I said something about what I wanted the world built on. Care. Something that sees what it stands on and what it’s making and actually protects and honors it. He looked at me the way he’d looked at me at seventeen. You’ve always been the idealist, he said. You need to be realistic. It’s human nature. Take your pick. The greed, the envy, the lust, the exploitation, the violence, the hypocrisy. It’s just the way humans are.
My mother nodded. Don’t you understand?
“No.”
But you already understood me.
My nature is human too.
