Class, identity, booze and 'rawdogging'
How I closed the gap between who I am and how I act
Just Good Friends: if you know, you know
I was asked to write a piece for The i Paper last week about class identity. This is a subject I have touched upon quite a few times before on The Reset because I believe that our sense of identity is linked to our mental health in profound ways. The wider the gap between our true selves and the identity we present to others, the greater our sense of mental and emotional unease.
You can read my full i Paper article here
Many of us construct identities in order to fit in. Wanting to be part of a group is one of the strongest human instincts, rooted as it is in a desire for safety and survival. In the UK especially, that’s often about class.
As you will read in the piece, I am of the opinion that your class is defined only by your access to money and security. Cultural tastes and the way we speak are not important - it’s all cosmetic and often contrived.
Class has nothing to do with food you eat or the clothes you wear
There are a plethora of clever, culturally enlightened people among the poor, working classes. And there are numerous philistines among the financially secure middle classes. I am one of a minority of private homeowners on a long street of council houses. I can tell you that I have more interesting and intelligent conversations with most of my neighbours than I do with half of the privately educated wallies I encounter in the media.
I think my sense of identity was one of the causes of my excessive drinking and drug taking: I started getting off my face against my better instincts in order to fit in with the people around me, all of whom were doing the same thing. Soon enough, it became second nature to me. That sort of stuff gets normalised very quickly and before you know it, you’ve been getting off your nut for several decades, acting the twat, making poor decisions and basically not living in the manner your younger self would have approved of.
There was a gap between the identity I presented to others and the real me.
Getting sober was a process that began with quitting drink and developed into an ongoing attempt to rediscover my true self. I basically stopped developing emotionally from the day I started using booze to cope with life. That was around the age of twelve. I was 40 when I gave everything up, so there were 28 years of catching up to do on my mental and emotional health. I had to learn how to cope with stress, disappointment, hassle, joy, boredom, exhaustion and excitement without resorting to the numbing, generic, lazy use of alcohol.
The process is still ongoing, nine years down the line. It will continue until I drop dead (hopefully several decades from now). But there has been massive progress: now, I can enjoy good times fully - from West Ham winning, to dinner with my wife and kids, to Christmas day or whatever - without having the knee-jerk, unimaginative desire to mark it with a few beers.
I can also face challenges and setbacks with more calmness and composure. I panic less, my anxiety is under control and I never conclude bad days with the cliched ‘I need a drink’ response. Because I am aware that a drink would only ever make a bad situation worse.
It’s what some knobheads call ‘rawdogging’
- the practise of taking on challenging, boring or stressful situations without recourse to distractions or sensory indulgences. There’s a trend you might have seen discussed on social media whereby (weird) blokes ‘rawdog’ transatlantic flights by just sitting in their seat the whole way without a book, magazine, movie, music or even any food. I don’t think I would ever take things that far but I do enjoy ‘rawdogging’ life’s emotional ups and downs. I feel as if drinking to relax, celebrate or commiserate is all a bit….babyish.
Anyway, back to the class feature I wrote. I was pretty proud of it but hesitant to share it on social media because, when it comes to class especially, there’s always some arsehole who barely knows you ready to tell you who you are, where you’re from, wher you’re at, how you got to there and why you don’t deserve it. It’s annoying.
That said, I made some points in the article that I thought were very important and so in the end I thought, ‘fuck it’ and stuck it out there on the socials. I’m glad I did because I have since received numerous messages of encouragement and support from people who could relate to the stuff I wrote about. There are a lot of people out there like me, who grew up skint in a working class environment and feel ashamed, reluctant and maybe a little scared to share their story.
A mate of mine said this week: ‘I liked your piece on class. It was a great angle. Where did you get it from?’
The answer to his question was ‘I got it from my brain, like everything else I write.’ Not all of what I write is correct (or even coherent). But everything I write here and elsewhere is the product of my own experiences of life. Class theory and identity politics is not something I have read much about since I was at university learning about Karl Marx thirty years ago. But I have lived in a wide variety of socioeconomic circumstances throughout my life and socialised with people from all different sorts of backgrounds. That’s all that informed my thoughts on class, identity and pretty much everything else.
When I was a younger journalist and broadcaster I often had to shape my output to satisfy editorial policies, reader expectations, advertiser imperatives and what not. The beauty of how I am able to work now is that everything pretty much comes from the heart and the head. In other words, the identity I present to others is much, much closer to the authentic one that lives inside me. It’s a good feeling.
Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times
https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123
https://www.thecalmzone.net
@YoungMindsUK 0800 018 2138
@CharitySane 0300 304 7000
https://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk/
https://cocaineanonymous.org.uk/
https://andysmanclub.co.uk/
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/gambling-addiction/