Shift some ally, add some ally

content/core/005.md

@@ -2,40 +2,70 @@
 date: 2019-08-10
 weight: 5
 tags:
-- brief
-- honest
+- echoes
+- kind
+- snarky
 - earnest
 categories:
-- dad
-- mental health
+- alcohol
 ---
 
-When I was young, back before I knew what mental health entailed, what anxiety and abuse and depression really meant, I was convinced I was having semi-regular mental breakdowns. That was the phrase I used then, because I was unsure of what it meant to have a panic attack.
+When 2007 rolled around, I turned 21. *What if,* I thought to myself. *What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?*
 
-This was before LiveJournal, of course. This was before I was writing on the internet, or even really on the internet at all. This was before you.
+By that point, alcohol was this nebulous thing. I'd roped a few people into getting me alcohol now and then, and it was fine. I'd started brewing and it was whatever. I had beer and it was alright. I went through a mead phase--
 
-> No, it wasn't.
+> You went through several.
 
-Right.
+--I went through a wine phase, and an absinthe phase--
 
-When I [ran away](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/blog/running-away/), my dad found my paper journal. I had kept it infrequently, as something about daily journaling to a seventh-grader felt dishonest, stupid. What could I possibly write about?
+> Don't sell yourself short. You wrote [an essay on absinthe](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/non-fiction/tasting/new-american-absinthe/).
 
-In the journal, I mentioned on a few occasions that I'd had a mental breakdown. My dad called me several times over the next few days after my mom found me, and in one of those calls, he yelled at me about that. "Do you really think you're crazy?" he said. "Do you need to be taken to an asylum?"
+--and a gin phase. That's the one that got me. I had a bottle of Beefeater's, what was to become my gin of choice, and I had an inch of it poured over ice and I was standing in the kitchen. Such a wide open space. The kitchen at that apartment was larger than my bedroom now, and it opened onto a living room the size of what we have now. I was standing tall in that vast plain of a room, staring down into my glass and watching the way the ice melting into the gin created swirls of two different kinds of transparent. I was thinking how it was probably due to the different ways the two liquids refracted light, and then I was laughing, because I was staring down into my drink like something out of a bar.
 
-I told him no. I whispered it. I murmured it. I wasn't crazy. I didn't need to go to an asylum. I just felt like time stopped for me and the world around me sped up. I just felt like I was holding on by the barest amount of friction on my fingertips. The whorls of my fingerprints providing my only grasp on reality.
+*What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?* I thought. I drank every night that week.
 
-> That was me saying hi.
+> Why ruin your life on accident when you can do it on purpose?
 
-Blunt-force greeting?
+I don't think I was thinking in those terms at that point.
 
-> I was quiet as a mouse.
+> Are you now?
 
-I have the words now. I have the vocabulary. I can say derealization, depersonalization, dissociation. I can say panic attack and anxiety and depression and hypomania. I can say *ah, __this__ is what is happening now*.
+Perhaps.
 
-> You have emotions now, is what you have. Those were your mental breakdowns.
+> Maybe you're just afraid of doing anything by accident.
 
-Dad didn't believe in those. Not for boys. *Mood's a thing for cattle and loveplay*, right? Emotions are for women.
+Perhaps.
 
-> He was half-right.
+> You're sounding like me more by the day.
 
-I suppose he was.
+Learn from the best.
+
+> And so you set about with a will.
+
+Like magic. I set forth my will with a stated goal and made it happen. My spell was spoken and washed down with liquor. I drank nearly every day from then on out. I spent thousands of dollars on alcohol over the next ten years. I went through more mead phases and more beer phases. I went through a distillation phase. Magic is empowerment through attention to detail.
+
+> The MEAD principle. Cute.
+
+I drank hard with the choir, and then I left school and drank hard with the programmers. If there's one thing that most programmers do better than computers, it's drinking, after all.
+
+I did some work at a bar, even. Just making [their menu](/emb-menu.pdf) and website for them in exchange for free drinks.
+
+> You mastered LaTeX that way. A very you thing to do.
+
+I did well at it. I still have one of the menus and some of the paper laying around somewhere. I did that until the bartender left and, when I asked for my next payment from the owner, he flipped out at me and threatened to sue me for impersonating him. I don't think I realized Raffi, the bar manager who hired me, was already on his way out.
+
+I drank my way out of one job and through a good chunk of another. I drank until I got better at it than I was at software. I drank myself into burnout. I drank until I collapsed.
+
+> You used up your spell slots. You ran out of will. You had to quit by accident.
+
+I worked to quit, I'll have you know. It wasn't easy. It took meds and some rough nights.
+
+> You were less of a person then than you were when you started drinking. The you who started drinking by focusing on **starting drinking** was more real than the you who collapsed in the kitchen from a PNES and stopped drinking because she was completely empty of intention.
+
+Should I start the daily drinking again, then?
+
+> You're more of a person now than you were when you started drinking.
+
+That, coming from you, is a glowing endorsement.
+
+> You may have been more of a person when you started than when you stopped, but you weren't much of one, even then.