In the Dark
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| 10/16/2006 |
Alcohol was always a plus-and-minus event for me. The good and the bad were tied together right from the start. But for a long time, the gains simply outweighed the losses.
With one exception. There was one aspect of drinking that was as unsettling to me from the early days of my life with alcohol as it was at the end.
Blackouts.
Some people, I know, never really worried about their blackouts. For five or six hours they’d say and do a bunch of stuff they didn’t remember later, and unless they ended up in jail or the hospital, they wouldn’t give these incidents much thought.
Not me. I experienced my first real blackout at home, on the night of my 17th birthday, and, despite all the others I would have over the years that followed, I never quite got over the horror of it.
Not that anything particularly horrible happened. My mother was there that evening, along with my sister, her husband, and my young niece and nephew. A few bottles of champagne had been purchased for the event, and while I didn’t like the taste of it all that much, I emptied and re-emptied my glass the way I figured an adult celebrating his birthday should. Before I knew it, I started having a pretty good time.
I woke up the next morning fully clothed, lying on top of the sheets of my bed. When you wake up from a blackout, you go from sleep to waking consciousness in a completely different way than you do under normal conditions. You don’t drift slowly into consciousness; you just… WAKE UP, all at once, with the suddenness of a light switch being turned on.
That’s what happened with me that morning. My body – my whole being, in fact -- felt stiff, congealed, and somehow off-center, like a paintbrush that someone had left standing in a jar overnight. I’d felt bad before in my life of course. But this was a new, and revolutionary, kind of bad. It wasn’t simply physical or simply mental, but a diabolical combination of both. The last I recalled, I’d been sitting at the dinner table, drinking that champagne. And then… nothing. Where memories should have been there was, instead, only a feeling of profoundly unsettling absence – like the way one feels when one reaches into one’s pocket for wallet or keys and they’re not there.
When I was well enough to get to my feet, I stumbled into the kitchen and commenced my first-ever Blackout Investigation. I found my mother at the sink cleaning up, and she delivered a line I would hear many, many times again in the years to come.
“Well! How are YOU feeling this morning?”
Apparently my drunken antics had been harmless enough, and – given their novelty at the time – more a cause of amusement than anything else. But I didn’t find any of it funny. Not that day, and not later either. I found it terrifying.
In the years to come, as blackouts became an ever-more-regular event in my life, I became somewhat skilled in the practice of finding out what I’d done the evening before without openly admitting that I myself didn’t know. But I never got used to them – never learned to shrug them off the way some other drinkers I knew could.
Often, the worst blackouts weren’t the ones in which I said or did embarrassing things. The subtle, uneventful ones often gave me the creeps just as much or more. Once, when I was 25 and living on the second floor of a large, old-fashioned rental house, the overhead kitchen light went out early on in the evening. The ceiling was pretty high and hard to reach. I’d had a few drinks already, and decided not to risk finding a ladder and trying to change it.
As it happened, I ended up having a bit too much to drink that night. The next afternoon in the kitchen, still trying to put together the pieces of the previous evening, I reached to turn on the light. Oh, that’s right, I remembered, I need to change the bulb.
Surprise! The light went on. Someone – presumably me – had changed it the night before. How had I done it? It would have been a precarious operation in the best of circumstances, and there was no evidence that I’d fetched a ladder or anything else to stand on. Somehow, the knowledge that I’d performed this task, and yet was unable to tell myself how I’d done it, was as un-nerving – maybe even MORE un-nerving -- as discovering that I’d broken something or insulted someone.
Eventually, I zeroed in on what exactly it was about blackouts that made them so uniquely unpleasant to me. Blackouts gave me evidence – hard, inescapable evidence – that I did not know myself.
To know one’s own motivations, to know why one does what one does… This is one of the most time-honored marks of inner strength, while to not know those motivations is an equally time-honored sign of inner weakness – of mental instability. And there are few people more out-of-touch with who they are and what they are about in the world than someone waking up after a blackout. What I did or didn’t do in my blackouts didn’t really matter because in each and all of them I was acting in a fractured manner. I had lost touch with the real me – the larger, over-arching sense of self which, in spiritually healthy people, keeps all the different aspects of their personality in open and fruitful communication. I had lost myself.
Toward the end of my drinking career, when blackouts were an almost-nightly event, I decided to combat that awful feeling of weakness – of not knowing myself -- they gave me by keeping a nightly journal. Experience had taught me that one never knew when one was actually in a blackout when it was happening, so I decided I’d simply log everything I did all night long, no matter how seemingly trivial. That way, when I woke up the next day and wondered if I’d had, say, some long and embarrassing phone conversation, I’d have a record of it.
I still have some of these journals, and they make for pretty interesting reading.
“7:08. No calls.
“7:12. Still no calls.”
“7:42. All quiet. Mom watching Coach in next room. No calls.”
The best evenings would end with an entry like: “11:56. Lights out. Still no calls.” But, problematically, sometimes I would wake up the next morning and find the final entries written down in an illegible scrawl. What was I trying to tell myself? Once again, I didn’t know. Once again, I was in the dark.
Of course, everyone wrestles with fragmentation to some degree. The poet (and opium addict) Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously said that he was a “hive of selves,” and he meant this in both a positive and a negative sense. “I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman, and there one catches more clearly the idea that this hugeness each one of us carries within ourselves is really a good thing, not a bad one. Peoples’ personalities are like airports: there all sorts of different terminals, each with its own gates, with all kinds of thoughts and emotions and actions coming in and going out all the time. But a person in a blackout is like an airport without a conning tower. Or – to go back to Coleridge’s image – a hive without a queen. With the central self out of commission, the smaller selves run rampant, and we wake to find -- as I did on that first morning of my life as a 17-year-old -- that we are less, not more, than the person we had been before.
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