Five Years Sober*

The reciprocal triangle of anger, addiction and depression—and anger as creative energy.

I’m not much for counting, but five years is a long enough time that I feel to do a bit of reflection. Back in January 2018, I finally got tired enough of feeling tired and depressed that I felt to give drinking a rest, first for a week, then for a month, and then for an open-ended stretch during which “I’m not drinking right now” has continued right up to the present.

As I’ve written before, it’s not that I quit 100% and didn’t have a drop since. I was never one to draw such hard lines around myself, and neither did I have the sense that total abstinence was necessary. I quit ninety nine percent, then ninety, and then, more recently, one hundred percent—although there’s still an asterisk on that because once in a while I down a little mini shot of Angostura bitters as a digestive, which, it turns out, isn’t a totally unheard-of way to enjoy this cousin of all those Italian amari that I love so much.

As always, I go my own way.

You might ask “which is easier?” but which would that be—zero or…exactly how much? It’s not really about whether it’s Sober or sober* for me, because I agree with everyone from Stanton Peele to Adi Jaffe that since the substance isn’t the cause, abstinence isn't the cure, while at the same time I know from my own experience that I’ve come to side with the freedom of not having to choose versus the freedom of being able to choose at any particular moment. For now, it’s certainly fair to say that I don’t drink, because I don’t…although I do reserve the right to continue to dodge allegiance to anyone else’s rules and regs.

Before I stopped drinking I didn’t identify at all with the idea of addiction, which had been sold to me as either something that only some people with an ‘addictive personality’ were susceptible to, and/or something caused by certain substances that were just plain addictive. The thing is, I’ve done both cocaine and heroin, for example, and I didn’t get hooked on either one, and I also smoked and drank from age of ten or eleven, and have long since stopped both—and so if I do have an addictive personality, it must only apply to certain things, at certain times, which doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense as a general categorization.

Since then, I’ve come to understand addiction instead as a behavioral pattern that all of us are susceptible to, an attachment to something that becomes an end to itself, to the detriment of the main thread of life, and therefore, that becomes a dependency—and that the attachment develops as compensation for some early trauma or other lack—most often, a lack of connection.

In that light, addiction makes a hell of a lot of sense to me as a way to describe many of the patterns of my life. As celestial bodies, Enlightenment and Oblivion are locked in a close orbit with one another, as close as Escape and Freedom, which also often seem to be exactly the same thing. I wanted freedom. I wanted to escape. I wanted both! …and I thought they were the same. I wasn’t so desperate to escape anything more that your average ’80’s middle class public school city-kid very-small-t emotional trauma, but there are parts of it that sucked enough that I’ve been trying to get out of the house, get out of school, get out of San Francisco, get out of my job, get out of my boredom, my disappointment, my loneliness—trying to get out of the ordinary, out of being like anyone else, outside the rules, out of line—definitely, clearly, unequivocally more out and away than in, for as long as I can remember. No wonder getting out of my mind seemed so attractive.

Whatever it is that I wanted to escape from, the chief result of looking for that escape outside of my own self was the inevitable, eventual realization that, of course, that search would be fruitless—and yet, how else to get away? The truth was also something that I suffered a lack of, and so, not knowing its shape, I often tended to go the other way from that as well. I couldn’t bear the thought of going through what bothered me, especially on my own—which is, of course, in actuality, the only possible way that actually points forwards, as opposed to back for another ride around the same circular track—and so I chose to act through inaction. I’d say that it’s not like I was making a conscious choice for the status quo, but that’s exactly what I did in fact. There were plenty of times when I looked on down the road, and I could see the truth out there in the haze, and then I just shook my head, wrapped myself up in my coat, and turned around the way I came.

And so we come to the subsequent result of all of those attempts to get away. The partially-digested source material itself, the fact that I was indeed avoiding something larger, and the realization, slowly sinking in, that escape isn’t really possible—not to mention the neurochemical effects of a constant stream of alcohol—all of those manifested in me, as they do in so many others, as what tend to call “depression.” Another behavioral pattern, another groove worn in the tired mind, a protest, a statement of something like ‘I can’t live like this.’ And so, with no other alternative, if not “like this,“ then “I can’t live,” which spells it out pretty well in fact—as depression is a partial death of the psyche, the result of a desperate and highly acute retreat from a reality that seems unbearable.

What’s been increasingly clear to me lately is that even though now I’m doing my damndest, working out every morning, writing every day, living real clean and simple, I’m still prone to stretches of depression, which these days manifest not so much as the proverbial black cloud but as a grey tide rising up from beneath to the high-water mark—and then beyond, like a slow, weak, and mean tsunami, swamping everything in a low bog of salt-scummed flotsam, weeds, and oil traces, just high enough to pour inside my boots and leave me stuck standing there, spook-eyed, staring at the sun.

Or, you might just imagine walking around in wet socks.

My reaction to this these days, aside from doing my best to zoom out and observe myself in the moment, and remind myself that I am not “depressed” but that I am feeling depressed—and I can do that, I can turn the dial, I can see myself on the screen, and it helps—is that it makes me angry. That old, all-too-familiar and still-so desperate-to-escape feeling comes up, and dammit, now I will look it in its eye, and when I do, I am fucking pissed.

Just other day I found myself watching an interview with ultra-runner Charlie Engle, and the guy asking the questions—who happens to be Deepak Chopra—said something real sweet, that “anger is the memory of trauma.” Now, I think anger can be other things as well (for one, the violent “no” that pushes trauma away), but that sort of nasty memory does describe a lot of it for me. I’m angry because the boy that started drinking at the age of ten is still part of me. I’m angry because the young man who was more and more depressed and lonely in his twenties and thirties is still part of me. I’m angry because I didn’t know that my less-than-catastrophic drinking and moderate, yet chronic depression were so closely intertwined, and I’m angry because all of that time that I spent in that sad old cycle feels wasteful, and shameful—and also kind of boring, which also makes me angry. I’m angry because this crap still comes up for me, and really, was all of that really necessary? I’m tired of it—and the more it comes up, the more it makes me want to puke.

It feels to me that there’s this triangular relationship between anger, addiction, and depression, with anger as the memory of or reaction to—well, let’s just say, something bad, and then addiction as the far-too-frequent compensating response, and finally depression as the result of both addiction (which is itself a type of retreat), and as ‘anger directed inward’ as it’s sometimes described—all followed by still more anger.

It’s OK. I should be angry. It’s not that I’m trying to make more of it than it is, or was, and it’s not like it’s just coming up now, but I have a long-standing habit of underestimating the impact of what began for me as youthful excess but then proceeded to persist as something much more pernicious, and also of understating my resentment of my parents for their part in how much I suffered as a result. I know, we all have fucked-up families, and my god, of course, I’m a grown-ass person here, and I take responsibility for the course of my own life. It actually seems pretty ridiculous to be talking about my parents at all at this point—and, yet it’s still true that sometimes, even now, I’m still just furious, not about anything they did, but about what they didn’t do.

If one way to think about depression is as the unfortunate result of anger turned inwards on itself, then perhaps the more productive reversal is anger as the result of depression. Either way, this anger is etched deep within me, and as much as I dislike the taste of it in my mouth, I don’t really want to give it up. It feels right to be angry. If you ask me why I don’t have children of my own, some of it does go right back to anger and resentment. I’m not fragile, but my nervous system kindof is. I’m sensitive to disturbances. Most dogs have too much energy for me. Kids? Are you kidding?

For me, anger is the most under-used of my emotions. I stayed away from it, for one, because my sister was so violently angry about I'm-still-not-sure-precisely-what that I went the other direction as far and as fast as possible. I didn't want to be anything like her. I also downplayed and skipped over my anger because, well, I haven't suffered anything like ‘big-T’ trauma, just your fairly standard-issue neglectful parenting by two soon-to-be-divorced young professionals—and I didn't want to make too much of such small potatoes. Yet another reason is that anger tends to be ugly, and as a man, I don't want to be an angry man, nor do I want to be like other angry men—and most of us, of any gender, get very little practice in embodying or expressing anger in a way that's at all positive, let alone interesting.

Although we damn well should!

Needless to say, those potatoes are still sitting right here in the pan after all these years. Not unexamined, not un-therapized, not even, to some extent, consumed, digested, excreted and alchemized but also still RIGHT THE FUCK HERE. The fact is, I am (still) angry, and it does me good to let that be true and to let it be part of me. I would love to say that I've forgiven everything and everybody, because, I know, I know, that's the only way to inner peace... but you know what? fuck that. I'm tired of minimizing how screwed up things were for me, and how much I do, yes, flat-out blame my parents for how idiotically ignorant they were, and for how many years and hearts and dollars that cost me down the road. I was injured early on, and I don’t mean that my parents injured me—and I know, I can’t and don’t know what injuries and difficulties they suffered themselves—but still, they let it happen. I know it's not pretty, but the fact is that this anger still colors my feelings about them, and that I don't really relish spending much time with them, even as they get old and soft and forgetful and needful. I don't want to care for them. They didn't care for me.

Shit was real, motherfuckers! Now, I’ve done some bad shit too—and do I expect to be totally forgiven? It's a nice idea, but of course, no. I know that I'm not, and perhaps it’s not so totally necessary after all. What if closure is a myth? Let’s just say it sure could be. Anger isn’t exactly pleasant—and I'm not trying to keep it on life-support so it can stick around any longer than it's useful—but I need my anger right now.

A lot of people suggest writing this sort of thing out on a little scrap of paper and then letting it burn. If anything, I need that fuel now more than ever. I am using that energy, or damn well trying to, putting it into the work that I'm doing. Not in or out of anger, but with it behind and part of me, pushing me onwards, and deeper.

So what does all that have to do with getting sober? Well, goddamit, sometimes there’s nothing more this angry fucker wants than to get a good hard heat on. While most of the other purported benefits are imaginary, drinking does have the actual benefit that, at least for a moment, the forgetting is real. I’m familiar enough with my own self at this point, and with the nature of addictive patterns that I’m confident that having a nice belt or three of mezcal wouldn’t knock me off the mythical wagon—and still, at the moment I’d rather not satisfy that particular urge that particular way. For one, I don’t want to forget so much any longer. Or, I’d love to for a hot minute, but I’d rather manage to get there through my own machinations. The urge comes up, and as I’ve learned, it’s not so much an urge to drink as much as an urge to escape, an urge to quell that old, familiar feeling of desperation. An urge for relief.

I still yearn for that relief—but I also want to be around to hear the story, however angry it might be.

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Further Reading

I’m writing a memoir which deals with all of this material in much greater detail. I’ve published several chapters here on Substack already, and the first one is right here.

You might be also interested in some of my other writing on alcohol, especially these two prior pieces Change of Heart and A Five-Minute Love Affair With Natural Wine.

A shout-out to fellow writer and Substacker

Kyle Thiermann

for kicking off One Year of No Beer last summer, and also to

Holly Whitaker

whose prompt about anger spurred me to finish this piece this weekend.

I also recommend these fine books on alcohol and addiction:

Annie Grace, This Naked Mind — my favorite book on how to change your relationship with alcohol

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain

Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction

Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth

David Poses, The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery

Holly Whitaker

, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol

Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Charlie Engle, Running Man

Amy Dresner, My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean

Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Johann Hari, Lost Connections

Caroline Knapp, Alcohol, A Love Story

Mary Carr, Lit

Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

…Please stick around, I’ve got some questions for you:

1. What is your own relationship with alcohol, and how has the relationship changed over time?

2. Have you ever felt the urge to drink, or the need for relief, come and go?

3. What’s your own relationship with anger? What about depression? Does the triangle of anger, addiction and depression ring any bells for you?

And finally, please let me know if you enjoyed this piece by clicking that little red heart ❤️down below ↓