We can’t see ourselves from outside.
It’s an obvious enough truth, but a fascinating one all the same. Especially for someone who used to drink a lot. Someone, that is, like me.
Every now and then these days I’ll find myself in a restaurant or – very occasionally – a bar with one of my friends who still drinks. Someone like I used to be. A couple of times I’ve had the chance to watch one of these real drinking friends take their first drink of the day.
It’s a real education.
Here’s what usually happens. The Real Drinking Friend and I usually decide to meet for dinner somewhere. The RDF knows that, while I can’t be counted on to stay out late like I used to, I’m sufficiently comfortable with my sobriety that they can go ahead and have a couple of pops in my presence without me being overly put off. They’ll order a drink and, as the waiter or bartender goes off to prepare it, they’ll be taken over by a feeling of anticipation: A feeling that they’ll usually try to disguise for my sake, but which will be all too evident just the same.
Now here’s the – to me -- interesting part. As the seconds pass and that first drink of the day gets closer and closer to arriving at the table, my friend will become ever more animated and enthusiastic. How have I been? What’s going on in my life? Etcetera. All this makes sense, as the fact is that both the RDF and I are actual friends, and enjoy seeing each other. So why shouldn’t he be pleased to see me, just as I am to see him?
But, at the same time, there’s something wrong; something subtly but unmistakably off-center about the situation. Part of my friend is genuinely pleased to see me. But another part of him – a very significant part – could care less about who’s sitting in front of him. His attention is directed elsewhere.
Then the drink arrives. My friend takes a sip or two. He’s still listening to me, still replying to whatever I’m saying with stuff of his own. But sip by sip, there’s less and less genuine content in those replies, less and less personality and emotion in his face. By the second drink – and certainly by the third – my friend has transformed completely. It’s as if some invisible troop of shoemaker’s elves has, over the course of forty minutes or so, taken my real friend away completely and replaced him with a simulacrum. Someone who looks and sounds like him, more or less, but who really isn’t him at all.
None of which is to criticize my friend, exactly. I don’t begrudge my RDFs their drinks. More than anything, I’m simply amazed at how VISIBLE – how absolutely undeniable and objective and clear to see – this loss of personality that occurs is. There’s nothing theoretical about it at all. A certain essential spark – that mysterious, central something that makes a person who they are – gets kidnapped by alcohol. While the drinker him or herself thinks they are becoming more and more themselves with each drink, the truth is exactly the opposite.
Back in my drinking days, I had a couple of friends who occasionally made the bold and – to me – astonishing suggestion that I became dull when I drank. I did? How could such a thing be? After all, it was drinking that made the world interesting. When I drank, I got in touch with my real feelings, my real self.
How on earth could that be boring?
Though my relationship with it was painful and problematic from day one, early on in my drinking life alcohol really did teach me things, really did get me in touch with aspects of myself and of the world that I would have had a hard time connecting with otherwise. That’s why, after those initial, relatively disaster-free years were long gone, it was so hard for me to come to believe what certain of my friends told me about my drinking. How dull, how predictable, how unappealing I really became when the waiter or bartender showed up with MY first drink of the day.
Alcohol is nothing if not paradoxical. It introduced me to myself, and robbed me of myself. It made me self-confident, able to socialize with people – and made me boring and unappealing. It brought my real, true, essential personality out of hiding – and extinguished the flame at the center of that personality so thoroughly that ultimately I ended up as little more than a rubber-faced robot.
“I don’t know how you do it,” one of my RDFs will sometimes say, as they settle into their second or third drink, their face taking on that impassive, slightly stunned look that I know so well. “I enjoy drinking too much to ever give it up.” And even as they’re saying this, I’ll realize that they believe it. From the inside, they’ll feel like they really are having fun. They can’t see themselves from the outside. Can’t see – at least not yet – that not only are they not really having all that much fun, they aren’t even there at all.