I’m embarrassed about a lot of things.
I’m embarrassed about all the dumb stuff I did when I was drinking. And I’m embarrassed about all the dumb stuff I’ve done since I got sober. I’m embarrassed about the fact that I’ve ended up – absurdly – writing so much about the topic of sobriety. (Can’t I think of anything more interesting to write about? Don’t I know you’re not supposed to attach your name to recovery material anyhow? Etc, etc.)
I did a lot of embarrassing stuff when I was a kid, too. And like the embarrassing stuff I’ve done as an adult, a lot of it has stayed fresh in my head. I can remember idiotic things I said and did, idiotic situations I got myself into, dating back to the first or second grade. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, one of those situations will pop into my head out of nowhere, and cause me a stab of discomfort so sharp, it’s as if I committed the offending action that very day, rather than, say, thirty-five years ago.
Of course, I don’t have a special corner on the embarrassment market. Everybody gets embarrassed about things. But drinkers, it seems to me, are kind of like specialists in embarrassment. They know how to create it for themselves, how to suffer from it, and how to cover up that suffering (only to create more later, of course) better than just about anybody else.
Like many a drinker, I got my introduction to really hardcore alcohol-related embarrassment in high school. I was shy and quiet by nature, and during the first two years of high school I hardly said a word unless I was spoken to.
But as sophomore year gave way to junior year, and I started going to parties on the weekends, that situation changed. I discovered that, while everyone changed at parties to some degree (that was what made them so strangely fun and interesting), I changed a little MORE than most people.
Those changes were a source of considerable amusement to my fellow students.
“Dude, I can’t believe how WASTED you were at Ted’s party.”
“Hey man, you really got f---ed up last Saturday.”
To my horror, people at school I barely knew – or at least thought I barely knew – would stop and talk to me more and more about what a mess I’d been on the previous weekend. It was as if there were two me’s. And the me who got into mischief on Friday or Saturday night seemed not to care a whit how much agony he caused the me who had to shuffle from class to class on Monday.
So it went, from high school, through my twenties, and into my thirties.
Then, at age 33, I did the single most embarrassing thing I’d ever done.
I got shipped off to rehab.
Rehab, for those who haven’t been there, is like the embarrassment Olympics. Suddenly, the most absurd transgressions committed on the most drunken of evenings of high school or college fade completely into the background. One is no longer simply a fool or an idiot or a loser in a temporary kind of way. That loser-dome is now the very definition of one’s character: the thing one is before everything else.
But it was also at rehab that I learned something new about embarrassment.
The best way to describe this something is to reference a scene in James Cameron’s film The Abyss. Toward the end of the film, the character played by Michael Biehn finds himself in a broken submersible, plummeting toward the ocean floor. Down, down, down goes the machine into the darkness. Inside the submersible, Biehn – who happens, in this role, to be a villain -- grows more and more panicked. The pressure on the glass, he knows, is tremendous. It is only a matter of time before it smashes in. Second by second, the scene in the submersible gets more claustrophobic, more crazed. A crack appears in the glass. Then… POW! The black water floods in, and Biehn is gone.
Why do I bring this scene up? Because in a way my whole life leading up to my entrance into rehab was kind of like what Biehn was going through in that submersible. By the time I got to rehab, my basic sense of dignity, of who I was, had been so endlessly besieged and compromised by my drinking and drug-taking that it was all I could do to wake up and go through a day being myself at all.
Then, after a two-week-long period in which every last scrap of pretense that I was anything other than a complete and total loser was mercilessly torn away, I found myself at the doors of that rehab. And…
BOOM! The windows broke, the black water flooded in, and there was nothing left. It was the embarrassment to end all embarrassments. The absolute, bar none, lamest thing that I could ever have let happen. The mortified hangover from which I would never recover.
But the funny thing was, it didn’t feel all that bad. In fact, it almost felt good. It was as if there were no longer those two me’s – the drunken, drugged-up me and the sober, embarrassed me. Because the sober, embarrassed me had been so COMPLETELY embarrassed -- so crushed, as it were, by the pressure drunken me had put on him -- that he had ceased to exist altogether. Not only that, but the drunken, boisterous me was gone as well.
Who, or what, was left? Some new guy, apparently. Some guy who resembled the old me, but who, mysteriously, no longer seemed to give that much of a hoot if he was a loser or not. Being embarrassed about one's actions, I suddenly realized (and to use another water metaphor), was kind of like swimming in the ocean on a cold day. If you dallied about at the edge of the water, hemming and hawing (as I had done for so many years) about this or that embarrassing thing you'd done, it was really uncomfortable. But if, on the other hand, you just plunged all the way into the waters of mortification, before you knew it you got accustomed to the cold. Life went on – and went on rather better than one ever would have imagined it could. It did so because one's true identity -- that mysterious "somebody" who kept existing even after one's last defenses against loser-dome collapsed -- continued to exist no matter what kind of shape one's smaller self -- the persona that one shows to the rest of the world -- was in.
The real self, it turns out, is neither a winner OR a loser, but someone else entirely.