I have had two modes that I have alternated between in my life. In one mode, I’m walled in, hesitant and uncomfortable around others, spending most of my time alone, reading and thinking for hours on end. In the other mode, I’m completely submersed in the social arena, constantly looking for external stimulation, not wanting the party to end (literally, and perhaps metaphorically), and feeling lost when it does. The middle ground between these modes has been elusive. I have never been able to moderate well with much of anything - I’m either completely removed or completely enmeshed. When I’m removed, I feel more like myself - more honest, more comfortable, more thoughtful. When I’ve been in my social modes, there has always been some level of pretense involved - me trying to do and say the things I think a normal person would do and say (and not being very successful at it). Pretense, and of course alcohol. Being comfortable around others has meant drinking alcohol since the day I discovered the substance.
Unlike a lot of people who I’ve listened to share their stories of how things used to be, I didn’t have to get completely drunk every time I had that first sip of alcohol. I could have two or three and then stop. But only if I concentrated on it with all my effort, and focused my attention on resisting the temptation for another, testing my will power and distracting myself with an intense dialog in my head about how I don’t need another drink, how another drink wouldn’t do anything for me, and how I could make it through the next hour or so by hanging onto the lingering effects of the first two. But that only worked if I was at home, or with just a couple of friends, or if I had committed to driving someone else home. If I was at a party, or any kind of gathering with more than a few other people, I would need to drink until I reached the point of feeling like a “normal person”, whatever that was. I look back on the way I drank alcohol as a metaphor for my tendencies in many aspects of life. My preferred way to do things tends to be completely or not at all.
When I worked in an Indian restaurant as a younger person, I recall a strong preference for nights that were either completely busy or completely dead - anything in-between was torture. If the restaurant was busy - every table full, with a line of waiting customers, I ran from table to table, delivering food, refreshing drinks, clearing dishes, wiping down and resetting tables at such a frenetic pace that time vanished, I was able to ignore the persistent voices in my head, work through my hunger, and feel like I was accomplishing something. When the restaurant was dead - totally empty, as if everyone in the city had collectively agreed they weren’t in the mood for Indian, I would talk to my friend Lama all night. We would get deep into conversation about the nature of life, how he migrated from Nepal to America, the stress he experienced living as an undocumented person, and the hopes we had for the future. Or, I would stare out the window while I folded napkins and polished silverware, losing myself in thought as I watched the traffic on the street below. If anyone came into the restaurant, I would be annoyed and feel burdened by having to fetch water, answer questions, deliver food. Why couldn’t these people also have stayed home? Nothing was worse than the slow, tortured pace of the evening when I couldn’t be free from responsibility, but I also didn’t have enough to do to keep me busy.
I have found this tendency has continued into my corporate career. At times, I’ve thrown myself into work completely, working in every free moment I have, making work the number one priority over everything else in my life. At other times, I’ve been completely detached, working the fewest hours possible, and spending hours during the day reading or engaging my mind in some other activity. Not coincidentally, I think, the periods that I’ve been completely tied up in work have also been the periods of heaviest drinking in my life. Being engrossed in work was fun - it meant traveling, shutting out all the other thoughts and challenges in my life, and drinking with abandon. The combination of being busy and being drunk was the perfect escape from facing life in its fullness. Ironically, as I look back, it was those times that I received the most external validation that I was doing the right thing - acknowledgements, privileges, money.
As a lifelong reader with a tendency to contemplate, it’s not a surprise to me that external validation is ultimately an empty and soulless pursuit. But as a person who alternatives between extremes, struggling to maintain a middle ground, I’m also aware, at some deeper level, that isolation is bad. I have become comfortable with my need for lots of alone time, and I don’t think that being alone equates to loneliness. But I’ve also become more aware of my tendency to separate myself from others. My autism diagnosis helps me understand this tendency, which I think comes from so many negative experiences of being around other people over my life. For many years, I saw alcohol as the solution to the problem of human interaction. As long as there was alcohol involved, I could socialize with others. In my sobriety, I’ve been turning more to isolation as the solution, but I know it isn’t a good one. The challenge I’ve been facing is how to avoid isolation without alcohol in my toolbox. When I look inside that toolbox, I realize now that alcohol was the only tool in there. And for about 25 years it proved to be a remarkably effective and versatile tool, adaptable for use in an amazing variety of situations. I think my challenge now, in the second half of my life, is to get some new tools for my empty toolbox.