Tag: Ed S.

On Gratitude

Alcohol was the price we paid to pretend that we could feel wonder, when something broken inside of ourselves couldn’t grapple with the fullness of that reality with a clear head and a complete heart.

Dawn is gratitude’s hour. At least for me that’s been true for the past four years. One of the clichés you’ll hear in recovery is that nobody ever wakes up wishing they’d somehow drunk more the night before. The platitudes of sobriety vary in their efficacy, but that one has always struck me as estimably wise, which is to say useful. It’s true: upon awakening, we never wish we’d gotten drunker the previous night, and if there is one imperative which I’ve learned at close to four years of sobriety, it’s to hang on till that morning sun notches its arrival. You might not always be able to make the days count, but you can at least count the days; and no matter how dark the night, no matter how many times the sweet oblivion promised by Sister Alcohol, the awareness that you made it to another clear-eyed morning is its own form of sanctification.

It’s a form of what the poet Raymond Carver, ten years into his sobriety, called “gravy” (others call it “grace”). Carver writes of the simple joy of being “Alive, sober, working, loving, and/being loved.” Rather than the mad scramble or the sinking pit of jittery anxiety, that’s my mornings now.

Equal Parts Shakiness and Shamefulness

Before I got sober there were so many hundreds, thousands, of mornings when I’d startle awake as my hangover shocked my system into consciousness. That blind panic which an old drinking buddy (who knew the score) had christened “The Fear.” Mad fumbling towards a periodically broken flip-phone to see whom I’d bothered by text, the shuffling through of old receipts to fit together the narrative of a hazily remembered bar crawl, the moist, clammy feeling of heavy feet sticking to my hard-wood floor as I booted up my laptop to see what word salad I’d seen fit to post to Facebook or Twitter long after last call. A trail of Yuengling bottles lining a trail from my bed to the couch, where an antique ashtray designed in a faux Byzantine style was overflowing with cigarette butts. Equal parts shakiness and shamefulness.

That heavy, hungover feeling where the physical pain was such that the guilt surrounding the reality of how drunk you’d gotten (again) receded to a sort of personal background radiation, at least until you’d rehydrated and could focus on all of your iniquities before happy hour came, and you could do it all over again. What Caroline Knapp describes in her classic Drinking: A Love Story as the phenomenon whereby all that “you’re really aware of after a night like that is the hangover… You may feel a twinge of embarrassment, a pang of worry or despair, but most of the pain is physical in the morning, so you choose to focus on that.” At its worst, The Fear was a surprise visitor, a guest who came unexpectedly after you agreed to stop by for one or five at the bar after work, or who invited himself to Sunday boozy brunch and decided to stay until Monday morning. It’s a sickening feeling, that knowledge that you’d somehow done it again, even if the rest of what you knew was patchy.

Which is why that hour after I get up makes me feel positively beatified in my new life. In those (often shockingly early!) hours I make coffee that’s too strong and drink too many cups, I take my dog for her morning walk, I listen to The National or The Shins and think deep, contemplative thoughts (or so I pretend). I’m experiencing a type of peace. I’m happy. And most mornings, when I realize the contrast (often helped along by Facebook’s anniversary algorithm), I pause to reflect on a past life, one of painful awakenings and forgotten stumbling. They guarantee that when you quit drinking, you’ll be delivered the life which alcohol had always promised you, but lied about. For me, that guarantee of sobriety has been largely accurate.

The Pull of Euphoric Recall

But sometimes there is that electric pull, a slowing down when walking by a tavern window, hungrily eyeing the bottles of brown liquid behind the bar; or breathing in a bit too deeply when somebody at a bus stop lights a cigarette. Such an attraction to that feeling, to dwell in those moments, is what the old timers call euphoric recall. Maybe a neuroscientist can explain why my brain’s different, the malfunctioning neurons or compulsion for endorphins, but whatever the reasons, the moment ethanol diffuses through my blood, I sit in amazement that not everybody wants to feel that way.

There’s a thrum to alcohol through your veins, a magic whereby at some point between the third and fourth cocktail the very world seems to glow from the inside. And you’ll pursue that glancing feeling until you have no feelings left at all. This is a disease: You’ll make drinking your vocation even though it’ll make you miserable; you’ll head off to hold court at the bar even though you rationally know that you’ve got a better than average chance of getting hit by a car as you drunkenly meander home.

I’ve developed an armor to deal with those moments, and so far, it’s worked well. What polishes that armor, what oils its hinges, is gratitude. I know that that sounds at best abstract and at worst preachy, but gratitude is nothing less than the currency with which I purchase the rest of my life. Explicit in such personal negotiations must be the understanding that, without getting into those tired debates about faith and recovery, I’ve undergone a conversion of sorts. But just as every day I make the decision to not pick up the first drink (and every morning I feel gratitude for at least that fact), so every moment I must occasion that conversion anew. Philosopher Costica Bradatan writes in Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of Philosophers that the “convert is not a new person, but a renewed one… A convert is the impossible mixture of nostalgia and hope, past and future; in such a soul the fear of a relapse lives side by side with an intense passion for the newly found self.”

Reforming your life, living through that conversion, is one thing; being aware, thankful, and grateful for it is what’s necessary to not let it disappear, so that you find yourself sitting with your feet upon the brass rail after twelve pints again. So, what is gratitude then? If it’s just a “Thank You” sent to some higher power, it’s an anemic (though perhaps necessary) thing, for gratitude is not merely sentiment, feeling, or affirmation. Gratitude is an entire way of inhabiting reality; a philosophy, a metaphysic, a method. Specifically, a method of living within the fullness of a moment, an embrace of that shining, luminescent glory of existence that at its most complete undulates with a vibrating glow of wonder. In a word, gratitude is hard. I fear I’m not always the best at it, but of course I go on.

Cheap Grace

The problem, if you’re an alcoholic as I am, is that that particular state is very easy to acquire for the price of a shot or several. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian martyred by the Nazis, often castigated what he called “cheap grace,” and the phrase works well for the feeling you think you’re getting once your blood alcohol level rises. Euphoric Recall? I remember sitting in a pub, hitting that sweet spot between the first drink and intoxication, feeling every nick in the grain of the bar’s wood underneath my fingers, and marveling at the beauty of a beer swag neon sign hung up haphazardly near the liquor bottles. In my mind I was positively divine, for alcohol has always been an apt tool in “turning the volume down,” as the author William S. Burroughs used to put it. If you’re a dipsomaniac, that most metaphysical of afflictions, it’s pretty easy to buy benediction at the bar or liquor store.

When faux-grace is so cheap, it becomes preferable to doing the hard work of actually experiencing the wonder of existence, the joy in simply being. I’m not sure if alcoholism is all about using liquor to desperately plug a God-shaped hole in the human heart, and just feeling the vodka, scotch, or gin rush out into a splash on the other side, but based on how the damn thing makes you feel, I figure there must be some truth in Carl Jung’s contention that alcoholism is a material solution to a spiritual problem. So frightened are we of abandoning our vices, that we fear sobriety will only offer us mundanity, prosaicness, boredom. Eventually we become possessed by our afflictions, at which point they choose not to abandon us. What Tom Waits, crooning in that sandpaper cigarette voice of his, translated from the poet Rainer Marie Rilke: “If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too.” Worth mentioning that he’s been sober for 18 years now.

If gratitude is not just about feeling thankful (good enough in its own way), but is also a precise method of awareness, of presentness in the moment, it’s helpful to clarify what exactly we felt in those moments when we were enraptured with wine, liquor, and beer. Another one of those helpful clichés for me is, and I paraphrase: “When you’re drunk, you always think something amazing is going to happen in exactly 15 minutes from whatever time it happens to be, but of course that 15 minutes is never over.” That seems exactly correct to me; the illusion of intoxication is something where you never actually feel wonder, just the admittedly powerful sense that wonder is about to occur. The horrible irony of the substance itself is that the drunker you get, the less possible it becomes to be present or appreciative for any actual moments of glory.

A Clear Head and Complete Heart

By contrast, in sobriety there’s no need to wait 15 minutes – wonder is available now. To feel the nicks of wood under fingertips, to acknowledge the cracked transcendence of a neon sign, to feel gratitude at every second of our fallen, flawed, limited, beautiful lives is an issue of simply “cleansing the doors of perception,” as William Blake wrote, so that “everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” The irony is that for its reputation, alcohol is a remarkable bad disinfectant for perception. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing of the Kabbalah, said that for believers “every second of time was the strait gait through which the Messiah might enter.” Every second of time is a portal through which awareness, wonder, gratitude may enter. It’s important to remember that, because in forgetting we may return to the easy cheap grace.

Knapp explained it in a more elegant way: “There’s something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons with the numbing distraction of anesthesia, that… shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances…. But from the simple accumulation of active experience.” But to have active experience, you have to be present, “When you drink, you can’t do that.” Existence can be overwhelming – simply being can be terrifying. Alcohol was the price we paid to pretend that we could feel wonder, when something broken inside of ourselves couldn’t grapple with the fullness of that reality with a clear head and a complete heart. We have deep grooves in our souls; fractures, fissures, cracks, and crevices. We are broken grails, but our shards can be held together with that cement which, for lack of a better term, we call gratitude.

View the original article at thefix.com

20 August 2019
Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do.

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”

The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery Movement

The Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”

There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18^th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.

Trying to Make It as a Drunk Bohemian

Easy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19^th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.

To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.

The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat Addiction

In his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19^th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”

What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.

The Myth of the Bar Stool Revolutionary

When I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.

Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”

To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.

Recovery as a Liberation Movement

The fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.

Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It’s all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”

“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.

In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

View the original article at thefix.com

10 April 2019
Academics and Alcoholism

Academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in their alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

I’ve heard it repeated as a recovery truism that nobody is too dumb to stop drinking, but plenty of people are too smart. One supposes that’s the sort of thing intended to be helpful. I’ve no idea on the particular veracity of the claim, though I’ll say that people who are smarter (or think they’re smarter) can certainly generate some novel justifications for their alcoholism.

When I was deep in my cups, after stopping for one drink after class that turned into a blackout which had me checking the soles of my shoes for evidence of which way I stumbled home, I could structure an argument with recourse to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic about how “alcoholism” was a construction of the medical-industrial complex.

After I woke up another countless time cringing as I recalled how I’d embarrassed myself yet again, it was only a short period until I was crafting a rationalization that drinking expressed an idyllic, pre-capitalist, medieval past that was based in revelry and joy.

While noticing that my hangovers seemed to go on a bit too long, or that my hands were a little bit too unsteady, or that I seemed less and less able to stop that second drink from sliding into that twelfth, I could wax philosophical about how intoxication evoked the Dionysian rites, for after all it was Plato in The Symposium (a booze-soaked party) who claimed that “For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet,” and when I was getting my PhD in English what I loved was pints of lager, gin and tonic, and Jameson on the rocks, and sometimes if I was drunk enough and squinting with one eye, I could convince myself that I was a poet.

If I was smart, it certainly manifested itself in the same tired old story as any other alcoholic, even if my justifications seemed clever to me. Because whether or not it’s true that some people are too smart to quit drinking, many academics might enthusiastically agree that’s the case, the better to avoid church basements. Psychologists call this “rationalization”…

Lots of discussion is rightly had about the problems generated by substance abuse among undergraduates, but much less is had about alcoholism on the other side of the podium. Something is surprising about this – the cocktail hour is valorized in academe, especially in the humanities where with cracked pride there is a certain amount of cosplaying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, where the past tweedy imagined pleasures of sherry fueled conviviality run strong. Rebecca Schuman (who is not an alcoholic) writes in Slate about how this “campus alcohol epidemic, one largely ignored,” is often “heralded as an inextricable virtue of the Life of the Mind.”

But for alcoholic academics there are also often darker particulars for returning time and time again to the bottle. The unnaturalness of living in one’s head all of the time, the stress and intermingling of life and work so that it almost always feels like you’re stuck in the latter (and people think we get summers off!), the often incapacitating imposter syndrome. Professors aren’t the only alcoholics of course; there are plenty of alcoholic plumbers, alcoholic nurses, alcoholic accountants, alcoholic cops, alcoholic lawyers, alcoholic janitors. Yet academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in that alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

University of Notre Dame history professor Jon T. Coleman writes movingly of his own struggles with alcoholism in academe, explaining in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education that one of the “most sinister aspects of alcoholism was the intramural loathing it encouraged,” describing how he drank to “mute the feelings of guilt, failure, and panic that came from not being able to control my drinking,” despite having “graduated from college, earned a Ph.D., secured a job, won book awards, and received tenure from a top-tier university while engaging in a habitual behavior that rendered me a dumbass.”

In her remarkable new book The Recovering, Leslie Jamison similarly sees the appeal of annihilation and escape as central to the professorial preoccupation with self-destruction, explaining that drinking “plunged me into a darkness that seemed like honesty,” misinterpreting that “desperate drunk space underground” as “where the truth lived.” As a way of proffered hypothesis, that’s some of what fuels the alcohol problem among humanities scholars, a misapplied radical skepticism that’s suspicious of recovery-speak (which allows for convenient rationalizations). Combine this with the accumulated boozy romance of past generations, and one sees part of what motivates the problem.

Even now I’m hesitant to use the word “alcoholic” in describing myself, chaffing at the “One Day at a Time” folk-wisdom of 12-step philosophy, historicizing and critiquing recovery in a manner that at its worst could easily justify relapse (though it hasn’t yet). But a certain saving grace also is gifted from my vocation, for as an English professor nothing is more paramount than the sanctity of words, and if I’m not an alcoholic, then the word itself has no meaning. One of the bits of hard-earned wisdom I’ve been gifted through the haze is the understanding that if my disease isn’t my fault, it’s surely my responsibility. I believe that had I not been an academic with a drinking problem, I’d have had some other job and identity – with a similar drinking problem.

Even as a personal responsibility, the wider academy, because of its particular culture and history, must also do more to provide support for graduate students and faculty with substance abuse disorders. Graduate student Karen Kelsky in a guest blog for “The Professor is In” writes that the “stigma associated with addiction may be stronger than stigmas for mental illness,” in part because alcoholism is so often perceived as a “choice,” and not a complicated issue of heredity, acculturation, and brain chemistry. Even moderate drinkers face opprobrium in the wet groves of academe, with Shuman writing about how after she decided to quit excessive social drinking, she was “cut off socially” and that as she “drank less and less,” she was “accepted less and less by my peers.”

There needs to be a shift in how academe grapples with alcoholism, and with alcoholics. In the short term, a small start would be to provide alternative possibilities at conferences and symposia that are so often permeated by alcohol. Jeffrey J. Cohen, a scholar of medieval literature at Arizona State University (who is not an alcoholic himself) argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education that those “who arrange conference social events were alcohol is served must ensure that they are not the sole access provided to conference conviviality.”

In the long term, academics need to become more sensitive to and aware of the definitions of alcoholism and addiction. Kelsky writes of how a “common misconception… is that once someone has gone through treatment, they are ‘cured.’” Consequently, non-drinking graduate students and faculty are often shut out of professional opportunities, their self-care interpreted as being the behavior of a scold or a Puritan. With an important awareness of how difference is manifested for various marginalized groups in our culture, too often academics don’t extend the same consideration to those in recovery, or provide assistance for our colleagues in need.

Of course even if mental health and substance abuse care are woefully lacking in professional contexts, most fellow individual academics can and do respond to those in recovery with care and empathy. I first read Coleman’s essay after it was sent to me by a concerned colleague and I was able to recognize the malady, so eloquently described, as my own. I drank for two more years.

My thirst was unquenchable, simply confirming Coleman’s observation about being “Caught in a trap… [with] an inability to break loose.”

The kindness in being sent that essay had an effect, though, part of that arsenal in my spirit that I was able to drudge up after numerous shaky mornings haunted by fear, a little indication in which I knew that the center could not hold, and in which I could sometimes glimpse the awful grace of that thing called hope, which we alcoholics know as a “moment of clarity.” Coleman did break loose, and so have I for the time being, while always remembering that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Three years after my bottom I still work on that first step sometimes, but I find that the organ which made those old rationalizations so evocative can be helpful in actual not drinking. I wake up sober in the morning, and I can reflect on the ways in which recovery bares the mark of the conversion narrative, I can trace the historical antecedents of 12-step groups, I can examine how important issues of race and gender affect how we discuss addiction and recovery. More than enough intellectualism in sobriety; actually, more than there ever was in the tantalizing hum of drunkenness. There can be, as it turns out, as much hope in the classrooms as there is in the rooms, occluded though it may seem, but for that I am grateful.

Ed S. is a widely published writer and an academic.

View the original article at thefix.com

16 August 2018