The Dullest Word in the Book
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| 9/14/2006 |
Back in my twenties, pulling myself together after a particularly catastrophic evening of drinking, I’d occasionally ponder the concept of staying sober for a while. Nothing too unreasonable, mind you, but maybe for a few days, or perhaps (though this was stretching it) even a week.
Whenever I did, one of the biggest hurdles I immediately faced was that word itself: sober. A look in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology reveals the following: “Temperate in food or drink; not drunk or drunken; grave, serious, sedate; subdued in tone; restrained in thought.”
Ugh. Who in their right mind would want a life characterized by a string of adjectives like that?
On those rare occasions back then when I would manage to put together three or four days without drinking, I quickly discovered that the world without alcohol – the sober world -- was indeed exactly the sedate and severe wasteland I had expected it to be. Dull. Uneventful. Anemic... Dry.
A friend and fellow addict, referencing Dean Martin, summed up the project of sobriety for me as well as anybody ever had around this time. “Imagine waking up in the morning,” he said, “and having that be the best you’re going to feel all day.” Amen. Taking booze out of life was like draining the oil out of a car engine. Life without it just wasn't a workable event.
Even worse than what happened to the world, though, was what happened to me. One of the less remarked-upon but most important qualities of drugs and alcohol, in my opinion, is the sense of substantiality – of existing, of being a real me – that they give to a person. When I drank, I could look inside and feel that I was real. It really was an almost physical sensation.
Early on in my sobriety, I ran into the following lines from a writer named Georg Kuhlewind: “If the experience of the soul were as strong as the sense of touch,” Kuhlewind wrote, “then people would have no mental problems. They would feel that they exist. Uncertainty on this point is egotism, and is the source of all our anxieties.”
That passage fascinated me when I first discovered it, because it summed up exactly what booze and drugs had done for me. When I drank or took drugs I felt… real. And when I stopped drinking or using, not only did the world become flat and uninteresting, but I did as well. I’d look inside myself, and not be sure that I was really even there at all.
It was only after I entered recovery that I discovered another interesting new term – or at least, a new use of an old one:
Dry.
What I’d actually been, during those short stretches of abstinence in my 20s, wasn’t sober at all, it turned out: it was what recovery literature calls being dry. If I wanted the world to feel interesting and alive, if I wanted to look within and feel like I was a real person, I’d need to do more than just stop drinking. I’d need to change my entire approach to the world and to myself. In particular, I'd need to see those more interesting and depth-filled aspects of the world, and of myself, as a kind of quarry that needed to be actively sought out.
Which gets me back to that bit of wisdom of my friend’s about waking up in the morning, and the danger of that being the best he’d feel all day. When I first heard it, I somehow missed the complete -- and appalling -- passivity at work in this remark. Whether we’re looking out at the world or inward at ourselves, sobriety in the positive sense – as opposed to those dispiriting definitions in the dictionary – turns out to be about bringing a certain energy and willingness to life. To be sober in the positive, non-dry sense is to be willing to meet the world halfway, rather than waiting for it to wash over us. It’s about adding something to life, rather than complaining about what life has failed, in our estimation, to possess in itself.
There’s really nothing restrained about it.
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