We are desperate to believe that there is something solid and real in the gaping maw beneath us, something besides teeth and oblivion. But there isn’t.
Fall of the Damned into Hell, Hieronymus Bosch, 1490.
Drinking every day, you build a moat around your mind.
I had lost sense of time. Every day was interchangeable. In the depths of my depravity, every day felt like it might be a year, until eventually it was.
Every morning, I would awake to the realization that I had fallen deeper than I had previously thought possible. The itch of that knowledge was insufferable, and I considered anything that might rid me of it to be reasonable. Complete and utter self-destruction seemed like it might do the trick.
Drinking to forget works. It takes dedication and hard work, none of that “I’m worried because I binge drink on the weekends” shit. You have to do it every day. You won’t be any less miserable, but eventually you will have no clue why you are.
Coming out on the other end, I was trying to find out.
“Just a moment of peace, please. A moment to gather my thoughts. If only I could stall my falling, find some plateau, some rock to hold on to. Just for a second.”
I would know what I had to do — I always did. I just couldn’t make the pieces come together, because I was hungover.
And crying. And puking. And falling.
I lived on a loft, and the stairs to my bedroom were steep and crooked. The steps were old and short. Getting up was no problem. But getting down, I would trip and bash myself bruised and bloody. Sometimes, I wouldn’t bother getting up until the next morning.
Opening your face all over the carpet because you’re a drunk piece of shit is not a story worth telling. But there is something to be said about falling.
Drowning your sorrows is a misnomer. It is filling the void with liquid, hoping to float. To become weightless — just for a moment.
But you’re always faced downward.
I still don’t fall asleep. I have to sneak into it by cloak and dagger. If it sees me coming, it bares its fangs and chases me out. The sensation of losing consciousness rushes me awake with adrenaline and terror.
Instead, I fall in the morning. I fall into consciousness, with a gasp.
Back then, it was unbearable. All of life seemed to happen at once, as the order of events of my memories grew more and more arbitrary. Get fucked up, drink, bleed. Get fucked up. Sleep. Ruin something. Hustle. Get fucked up.
The further I fell, the less I fell anywhere.
One evening, I drew a crude spreadsheet on the wall in blue pen. Seven rows across, Monday through Sunday. Downwards, counting up from one. The plan was simple. I would mark every day in which I drank more than fifteen units of alcohol with an X. Because I truly did not know. I could distinguish the seasons, but they always came as a surprise.
When my makeshift calendar eventually reached the floor, and the average week had four or five crude Xs, along with the occasional curse word or comment (“only spirits,” “wine and vodka,” “stupidbitch”), I still did not stop.
There was no “rock bottom.” Even when I woke up in a pool of my own blood in the bathroom. Even the days I didn’t get out of bed, except to buy cigarettes and booze — and to write my X.
If you reach the floor, you blow through it from momentum. What people call rock bottom is simply hitting yourself in the face hard enough for long enough that you can convince yourself you have hit something. The illusion is shattered every time you fall in love, or fall asleep. You can always fall deeper.
Relapse isn’t “falling back in.” It’s what happens when the bruises on your face heal and the appearance of bedrock fades. If you depend on that to give you a sense of where you are, you then have to go looking for another one.
Why do we fall, Bruce?
Because we are goddamn desperate to believe that there is something solid and real in the gaping maw beneath us, something besides teeth and oblivion. You crave a frame of reference. It seems self-evident that something has to be solid, and it has to be down there, somewhere. It’s no use trying to look up. It’s too bright. It hurts your eyes.
Some feel like they deserve to fall forever for their misdeeds. Some feel too weak to dare attempting the climb. A few genuinely are.
And then there are the poor souls, who are perversely curious to see what’s at the bottom, and get caught up in sunk cost. They always end up the worst of the bunch.
There is no bottom. There’s up, and there’s down. That’s it.
You climb, or you fall.
By Randy