Sobriety and Unlearning Self-Hatred

The first step is realizing how deep it runs.

Alcoholics: we’re all self-loathing. Or so we’re told. I certainly can’t speak for all drunks past and present, but as a recovering alcoholic myself, I certainly resemble this description. But ask any “practicing” alcoholic if they despise themselves, and most will no doubt scoff at the notion, or, if they have major gripes about how their life has turned out, will invariably blame others for their misfortunes.

And therein lines one of the cruelest features of alcoholism, and addiction generally. You hate yourself — but you have no idea that you do, let alone how deep that self-hatred runs. It’s only when the fog lifts in recovery that you get a glimpse of that howling chasm of that hatred, and the sight of that alone is enough to drive many back into the loving arms of their addiction.

With that option off the table, however, there is no choice but to push on and confront it.

Last year I wrote an essay on Ursula K. LeGuin’s haunting science fiction short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in which I cast the story as an allegory for addiction. The story, for those who don’t know it, runs something like this. There exists somewhere a town (You’re never told where.) where everything appears to be perfect, in which all of its citizens appear to exist in a state of perpetual bliss and contentment in a sort of hippie utopia. But there’s a catch of course; at the end of the story you learn that in order for the citizens of Omelas to exist in this state, a lone child (Again, we’re not told why.) has to be kept in a state of permanent immiseration, locked up alone in a dark dank basement and subjected to unending malnourishment and abuse.

And at the tail end of the story we learn that a small but noteworthy minority of Omelas citizens, upon learning of this child’s suffering, can no longer countenance living in paradise on the back of such suffering, and walk away from the town, never to be seen again. The rest, presumably, continue to distract themselves with the palatial pleasures of their real-life utopia while putting the hapless child as far out of their mind’s eye as possible.

Anyone who has ever walked away from an addiction, I’m willing to wager, can relate to this story.

I wish LeGuin, who passed away last January at age 88, had written a sequel to the story, one that perhaps followed the travails of one or more of the Omelatians in exile and explores their state of mind. I’m willing to bet that most if not all of them, when not shielding themselves from the elements and foraging for food in their new inhospitable environs, would be spending their days grappling with deep-seated guilt and shame for the suffering they (to their own minds at least) helped inflict on that poor child, and for their inability to save it (the child is conspicuously ungendered in the story) from its pit of despair. I may yet write this story myself, but for the time being we’re left to ponder these wanderers’ state of mind, which I’m sure is not pretty.

As a former addict myself, my recovery has come in various stages. The first stage was positively euphoric — I was thrilled to be free from the clutches of alcohol and amazed at my newfound ability to survive and indeed thrive without it, as well as dazzled by my newly rediscovered energy and vigour. Sadly this didn’t last very long, and this euphoria gave way to unadulterated anger — which I discussed in great detail in my article “My Year as an Angry Ex-Drunk”. I still can’t explain what that anger was all about. I can only liken it to a malfunctioning printer that suddenly starts spitting out a vast parade of long-forgotten-about documents after being fixed. Not pretty.

Eventually the anger subsided, but it then gave way to a fierce bout of depression which I later delved into in “When Your Addiction Stories Backfire”. At this point I was starting to think I should just stop writing about addiction, seeing as whatever point I felt I was at in my recovery was obviously a mischaracterization. I had previously thought I was through the worst of the recovery process, but it turned out I was still in the thick of it. I went to AA after over a year of self-stewarded sobriety and started looking for a therapist. I kept on writing. Because why the hell not? People seem to like my trainwreck stories anyway.

I have now been sober for 28 months. I still get booze triggers, although they get fewer and farther between as time goes on. But it’s taken the better part of two years of sobriety and finding a therapist who I click with for me to realize how deep my own self hatred runs. And on that front I’ve only begun.

I learned to despise myself very early on in life, while also learning how to hide it. While there were a couple of half-hearted suicide attempts in my junior high school years, I never behaved in a way that got me sent to child psychologists or anything like that. I never cut myself or engaged in obviously dangerous behaviour — I was so crippled by insecurity that the mere thought of such behaviour would have been unthinkable from a public embarrassment standpoint. The drinking began in my university years and slowly crept up on me. Mostly I isolated. I flitted from one job and career path to another, never quite settling down to anything, all the while stuffing down my creative impetus and artistic inclinations. If it hadn’t been for my wife I doubt I would ever have pursued my writing in any serious way.

This, in sum, was the core of my self loathing. I didn’t make a big spectacle of injuring myself or dive-bombing into trainwreck city. I just deprived myself of countless potential sources of happiness. I stopped playing the piano. I gave up my acting, and for a very long time my poetry writing. I stopped travelling. I stopped replacing my clothes and shoes to the point where I looked like a wreck in whatever job I was in. I drank but I never partied, and let my social life wither on the vine. I ignored my sexuality and erotic self to the point where I forgot it existed. I pretty much did everything I could to self-sabotage, and yet somehow kept myself completely in the dark.

And now here I am trying to put the pieces together, and still struggling to untie the knot of self-hatred while instinctively tugging it tighter out of anger at myself for having done all this to myself and to my closest and dearest. There is so much that I would go back and change if I could, but I know I cannot go back and erase my vicarious existence in Omelas, or save that miserable wretch from the dungeon. I can only keep walking.

Someday in the not-too-distant future (I hope) this chapter too will be behind me. But I have a feeling that this is the longest one yet, and definitely more than one Medium post long. Perhaps I do need to write that sequel in honour of science fiction’s greatest lady of letters. But I think I hate myself a bit less for having written this piece. I think. Ask me tomorrow.