“The past keeps knock knock knocking on my door, and I don’t want to hear it any more.”
- Lou Reed
There are doors you don’t want to open. There are doors you want to close.
At a certain point, life is just a series of relationships. With people, with ideas, with habits. And you hope to have collected more healthy relationships than unhealthy ones.
Around the time I quit drinking, I felt nothing but tired. My relationship with alcohol might never have reached the point where I needed to attend meetings, but it was drifting towards unhealthy. If you do anything for more than twenty years, you can probably call it a career. I’d been drinking heavily since my early teens.
And my unhealthy relationship with alcohol went back even further than that. There’s a story in my family. The man who donated sperm to my existence wanted alcohol to be my first word. Coaching me as I sat in my high chair, holding up beer in front of my face and enunciating “al co hol.” And, so the story goes, it worked. Mama. Dada. Acyho.
Half the stories in my family aren’t true. I hope that one isn’t. But it doesn’t matter, really. The point is, it was the story I was told. The version of me I grew up believing in.
There are things about yourself that you come to realise aren’t about yourself at all. Habits and patterns handed down to you. They’re not your fault. But once you become aware of them, it is your fault if you keep them going. It’s okay to absolve yourself of the shit that isn’t on you. It’s not okay to keep repeating it.
I used to be deeply scared of myself. My unhealthiest relationship was the one I had with me. By my early twenties I was self-destructing with drugs. Then a way-too-young marriage.
All the baggage takes a toll, if you let it. To quote Paul Westerberg, “by your mid-thirties, you feel unholy.” Somewhere in there, I was feeling old. I was feeling tired. I’d made the jump to my dream job, working full-time as a writer. But that brought with it a whole different kind of pressure, and one I had to let go of. A few years working as a bike courier was good for putting me back in touch with my inner irresponsibility, but I was still holding onto ghosts of myself.
I was forced to reassess two old relationships in the last year. One of them sent me spiralling into a bout of introspection about the person I was in my early twenties. The mistakes I made. The people I let down. The other? Well, that woke me up to some of that other shit that wasn’t my fault.
The result was that I learned to forgive myself for a lot of things I’d been carrying around. The person I thought I was? Not my fault. The person I can be now? That’s on me.
I’ve been working in a new day-job lately where my co-workers are all a lot younger than me. And they all see me as much closer to their age than mine. I’ve had to show them ID to prove that I’m staring at forty. I know a few years ago, working in a different job, surrounded by people my own age, they all saw me as prematurely old. Forgiving yourself takes miles off the clock.
I’m sleeping more. And better. I get tired in the evenings, and quite like being in bed before midnight (when my job allows.) I’m waking up earlier. I can’t seem to waste a day in bed now even if I want to.
I’m heading into my forties with debts I can’t pay, a writing career in critical condition, and an income that would be more suited to a teenager earning pocket money at weekends. The world is a garbage fire, and we’re about to hit the biggest recession of any of our lifetimes. But I also head into the new decade looking, and feeling, younger than I have in years. With alcohol a distant memory. And with the new -to me- idea that I quite like myself.
Forgive yourself for the shit that’s not your fault. Fix the shit that is your fault. Drink a lot more water, and probably a lot less alcohol. Everything else falls in line.