Alcohol, Socialization and Me.

I’ve never been very social. In elementary school, I was a total outcast – listening to The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees when LL Cool J and New Kids on the Block were all 10-year-olds were allowed to like. Imagining worlds all my own at recess where I could do whatever I wanted, whilst all the other kids mocked me from their positions in carefully orchestrated, structured group play. My own intense desire not to be different in this way made me feel like even more of an outcast than my middle-class WASP peer group actually revealed.

By middle school, I was a bully magnet. I got picked on so often by so many of my peers – physically and emotionally – that I was thoroughly, persistently miserable. By 10th grade, as I started rebelling against my parents, I found myself a few fellow rebellious outcasts with whom to share my free time at school, but they weren’t very close (though at the time, being my only friends, they felt like the most important people in the world to me), and I never saw them outside of school. Once I graduated, I only saw them occasionally and casually, and never really again as friends, with the sole exception of a select few with whom I clung to despite cracks in the makeup for a couple years.

I was totally friendless through the five years I spent in college full-time. It was only after I moved out of my parents’ house and started going to bars and clubs for the first time that I actually had a routine social life and a wide group of friends whom I saw regularly – really for the first time in my life. This period of my life lasted a scant couple of years, and yet remains my model of a “normal” social life to this day.

Once I left Fresno and moved to San Francisco, my social life returned pretty much to what it had been before – absent, except for failed attempts. I tried a few times re-creating it by going to San Francisco bars, but in general these experiences brought me right back to elementary school. I was a total outcast at these places. A loser who was out of his element among kids way cooler than he, who all had the right body mods and knew all the other cool kids. I was way out of my league in San Francisco bars.

Combine this with the fact that I knew no one in San Francisco except my partner and his friends, who were either sober or “done with” the bar scene, and it’s easy to see why this phase of San Francisco night life experimentation lasted a scant few months. I never met any new close friends during the entire three years I lived in San Francisco. Despite this, I continued to imbibe frequently and perpetually longed for my trips back home to Fresno where I could hang out with my old “friends” at my old bars.

This pattern held depressingly over me – the idea that my socialization was to be restricted to my partner, his local friends, and a group of ever-distancing bar-friends in a town far away – until June 2004, when I stumbled onto this essay by Kurt. Presented as an argument – as analysis, using logic and literate reasoning skills, it was not the ideological dogma of every other attempt at justifying sobriety (or, as I prefer, avoidance), but something in my language: the rational. It made me realize that sobriety was the individualistic choice one could make when facing our drug-pushing society. My alcohol use was not me. My alcohol use was enabling my socialization, and my socialization was not me – me was the me that existed when I had no friends and had no socialization.

Alcohol, for me, was the method I used to become a person who could successfully socialize. Nearly two years after the social life it had enabled had effectively ended, I realized that even if I could reproduce my successful socialization among the cool kids in San Francisco (highly unlikely as it may be), creating such a personality and such a social life from the building blocks of booze was an enforced personality – not the loner, outcast misfit which was the real me. Friendships based on bars and clubs were friendships between one drunk person and drunk me – they rarely went beyond that scope – similar to the outcast-fellowship I enjoyed during school hours at high school. My friendships were friendships of convenience. But worse, unlike in high school, these were not even friendships between myself and other people, they were between a fake me and fake other people, created and maintained by a drug.

Being that social person was in no way contributing to my career or my one important interpersonal relationship: that with my partner. Nor was it bringing me any important social relationships outside the imbibing environment. Why should I continue to pursue that socialization at all? What selfish, productive, life-enhancing end did it serve to me?

So I stopped it.

Years after, when the issue arises, I will say that I am a sober alcoholic. No, I never went through rehab or AA or got a DUI or hospitalized or arrested or anything. I never hit “rock-bottom” - I never really committed any egregious acts of drunken assholism, never destroyed family relations or romantic relationships over alcohol. But those are not what is required for alcoholism. Rather, alcohol was the only way I have ever felt “normal”. Before alcohol, I was friendless and bored most of the time. After I quit alcohol, I was friendless and bored most of the time. I saw the normalcy of friends and parties and bars and music from the blinkers of one who had been deprived most of his life, and as such I continue to crave that life I knew for such a short time – that fake life that required a drug to realize.

But even moreso – as I’ve taken the sober path for the past few years, I have found just how much an outcast I remain. The uncomfortable moments at the nice restaurant when I don’t want to see the wine pairings; the lost links and failed potential friendships when I am not interested in joining people at bars; the air of general offence and discomfort when I want to toast the bride with ice water. The lingering isolation when I really want to experience lights and people and the night air – but know that I will not fit in, because I will be me, rather than drinking me.

These days, I am almost totally isolated, it seems. I have few friends and hardly ever do anything social. I make people feel old. I caustically snarl at people and put a rather pungent dark cloud over any social situation in which I’m inserted after not too long a time. I don’t feel socially normal because I equate such normalcy with those few short years that I spent utilizing alcohol for socialization. I don’t equate the vast majority of my life with normalcy. To me, normal was not only the fact that having lots of friends equated to possessing a social personality that was alcohol-induced, and possessing friends with such personalities; it also related to the fact that the few casual acquaintances I have met since I was outside the bar and club setting, where the potential for friendship exists, rarely form, because their own social lives involve mutually accepted routine inebriation.

I won’t necessarily say that the “average” (normal?) person depends on alcohol for their social lives, as I did (though I won’t necessarily deny such is true, either), but I will say that the social lives of those who have used alcohol would be radically different without it, and that’s one of my torments. I wish I could have experienced my life without that brief period of normalcy – in hopes that it would have made me more capable of focusing on the years ahead of me without those fond memories of friends and parties and normalcy.

In any case, when one’s concept of feeling “normal” is tied to the use of a specific substance (or to the environment and situations related to that substance), one is an addict. Thus, I’m a sober alcoholic. Combined with the fact that I live in a society where the use (and often the abuse) of this particular drug is not only tolerated, but quite encouraged – especially in the more liberal, urban circles I inhabit, and it seems fairly logical that avoiding alcohol could lead one to feel abnormal. With the exception of Baptists and Mormons, who use dogma and ideology to combat the use of drugs, alcohol is seen generally as a social good, the use of which parents encourage in their children. Moderation and temperance are always married to this encouragement, but it is the one rare instance where avoidance of a drug is frowned upon, at least on a rational, logical level.

To draw some sort of moral here, there is a significant sense within me that I would have been a more together and grounded person had I never used alcohol. That’s why, even though the concept of acute physical or psychological addiction was not especially an issue in my time as a user of alcohol, I feel I must avoid it totally and completely like any other addict. That one beneficial nightly glass of wine is NOT a good thing for me – it’s poison. I don’t want to be moderate in my use of poison, I want to annihilate it.

Which brings us to value judgements. Do I judge those who continue to use alcohol? You betcha. Why?

Jealousy. I have touched normalcy and felt its warm glow. They have it and I do not. I can’t have it without addictive and destructive drugs, and they can tolerate those drugs and reap the rewards. So I’m jealous.

A superiority complex. The fact that I turned my back on alcohol without needing a life-altering crisis or overdose is quite appealing to me. I also feel that being an outcast – lacking the normalcy that I actually quite long for – makes me better. I assume its common to get an ego high from avoidance, otherwise so many social groups wouldn’t encourage one form of it or another. I don’t deny this, but it also doesn’t diminish the fact that such an ego high does exist, rising subtly over the discomfort and embarrassment when I refuse that fancy wine pairing, and blaring over the mountains as I watch my parents get drunk and obnoxious every time I see them. It’s something that reinforces my oddity as I refuse the invitation to go out and meet the new friend in favor of sitting at home at the computer and thinking to myself, “at least I’m not at the bar like those losers”. You know I'm better than you.

Safety. I wish I had never used alcohol. I wish I could find other people who had never used alcohol, but for the reason that, they never wanted to be normal. Never wanted to be a part of this great social lubricator. Someone recently recommended that I should go to an AA meeting when I’m at my low points in this continuing avoidance. But I don’t really want to share experiences of normalcy – I want real fellow outcasts, not recovered normals. I want to find people out there who never saw bars and clubs (or churches or ‘meetings’, for that matter) as methods of socialization, but who recognize them as methods of addiction (or codependence).

Thus safety is my dogma. Alcohol is not safe. It’s no different than acid or crack or heroin or Ritalin. Its purpose is to change you. I want to be a freak – and alcohol makes me normal. I want to be me.

Is my motivation in life to be an outcast? To fail at socialization, to not belong, to be friendless and bitter? Maybe. Maybe the fact that I only felt normal with an alcohol-based life, and the fact that I don’t want an alcohol-based life means that I do not want to feel normal. I’m comfortable with that.