Why comparing is despairing
You might not be the worse drinker you know but, so what?
When I was nine I remember seeing my mum’s boyfriend, Archie, bent over the toilet bowl dribbling and moaning.
He’d been out at the pub all night, stumbled in after closing and headed straight up to the khazi as usual. I could always hear strange, painful sounding noises when he was in there. But on this one occasion he’d left the door open so I could look upon the troubling spectacle of this bloke - a man who lived with us, who I felt some affection and respect for - heaving and spluttering into the toilet bowl like an animal.
It wasn’t the indignity of it that really occurred to me at the time. I was just really scared. I ran downstairs and told my mum what was happening. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s just had too much to drink.”
My mum wasn’t much of a drinker and I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad drunk. But Archie - a charismatic milkman from Edinburgh who had established himself as my mother’s live-in lover and become an entertaining housemate to me but something of a bête noire to my older brothers who were able to see through his superficial charms and identify him as the bullshitting degenerate he was - was the first adult in my life to provide an image of what problem boozing looked like.
You might have thought that Archie’s alcoholic travails would have put me off for life. But, on the contrary, it was figures like Archie - and numerous other hard drinking peers I subsequently met throughout life - who made it easy for me to slip unwittingly into my own drink problems.
As long as I knew drinkers who seemed to be worse than me, I could tell myself I was okay.
I never really felt as if I was one of the worse drinkers in any sphere of my life: in my family, among my pals from school, or the people I met through work, I was never even in the Champions League places of boozers. I’d have perhaps scraped into the Europa league spots some years.
When I was a teenager I made friends with a local piss-head who used to buy me and my my mates beers in the local and regale us with miserable tales of how he woke himself up every morning with a can of super strength cider he kept at his bedside. Only we didn’t regard that as depressing back then; we thought he was a legend.
There was another older pal who used to kickstart his days with a line of charlie off the kitchen counter while his wife was busy getting the kids off to school. One day, his missus caught him and he was so struck by panic that he just ran out of the house without offering an explanation.
I always had mates, relatives or colleagues who would fight, or injure themselves or disappear or just reap havoc every time they went out on the piss. Me - I’d just be on the sidelines laughing most of the time. I was a funny drunk for the most part with a tendency to fall asleep before things got too out of hand.
The point is, I never saw myself as having a drink problem because I was surrounded by people who seemed so much worse than me. I chose to use these people as the benchmark for alcohlism. I comforted myself by retelling stories like the ones outlined above, milking their antics for laughs while creating a flattering contrast with my own modest habits.
But, looking back, my relationship with booze was always toxic. I almost always drank to get drunk, I thought nothing of vomiting at the end of the night, I revelled in the sense of anarchy that drink instilled me with. I got pissed a few times every single week of my life for almost thirty years. It was pretty much my only hobby, my only way of socialising and the only means I had of having fun. By the end, I was unable to have more than a pint or two without the accompaniment of cocaine, and lots of it. Ultimately, I wound up like Archie - a middle aged man with his head in a stinking toilet bowl while his kids fretted outside the door and wondered what the weird noises were.
Comparing myself to other people completely skewed my perspective on my own drinking. It should never have been about how bad I was in comparison to others (especially given that I had grown up around people who were self-evidently functioning addicts). The only thing that should have mattered was how booze made me feel: whether I felt I could control it, whether it was making me happy and how badly it was impacting the life of those around me. Whether I was drinking a bottle of Scotch a day or just a couple of glasses of wine at weekends, all that mattered was how it made me feel. Whether it was making my life better or worse. Whether it was making me better or worse.
Who gives a fuck how much your mates are drinking? That’s their business. As I have written before, the only questions you need to ask yourself are: do I keep resolving not to drink? Do I end up drinking anyway? Does that end up making me feel shit about myself? If the answers to all three of those questions are ‘yes,’ then you definitely have a problem. If the answer to just one or two are ‘yes’ then you probably have one.
I wish I’d asked myself those questions sooner than I did.
Have you bought my book yet?
Ep 88 - George Pointon
George became famous on Twitter for writing hilarious threads of the mad shit his year 2 pupils used to say to him. I got to know him through West Ham - we co-host the You Irons podcast together. I wanted to know about the mental health challenges faced by teachers in today’s troubled education system. George was insightful and smart on the subject, painting a picture that was both scary and inspiring. Listen here
Proper Mental Podcast
I very much enjoyed appearing on the Proper Mental podcast with Tom Davis recently. We talked about my book, drinking, mates, therapy and a bunch of other stuff. Tom is a funny and down to earth bloke, you’ll enjoy his pod I reckon. Listen here.
Some services, links and phone numbers to help you through the tough times
https://www.samaritans.org/ Tel 116 123
@calm 0800 58 58 58
@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/
I loved this piece Sam, so much resonated. Particularly looking back at my relationship with alcohol and realising it was *always* toxic, always, right from the off, 35 years of it. Still get a kick out of waking up on Saturday and Sunday mornings without a hangover.
You make a great point about comparisons and how damaging they can be. The comparisons I usually think about are when we’re all comparing ourselves to each other on social media, and how it can make us feel inferior or down about our own lives. But I recognise a bit of what you say in myself - I’d always feel bad about not exercising and worried about my health but then think “ah but you’re not as fat as that bloke and he’s nearly 60, you’ll be fine.” However you spin it, all that matters is how you feel, and no one else.