Happy Hour 11/10/23
(why do we call it that? content alert-discussion of alcohol and dependence)
(any hour that involves coffee is happier, in my experience)
Hi everyone! It’s Friday! For those of us who work 8-5, the weekend awaits! For those of us who work all the time regardless, well? It’s still Friday. Welcome new subscribers and I’m glad you are here! I publish a few times per week, and one article will usually focus on work related dynamics (nonprofits, organizational development, power, leadership, and things unspoken about all of those topics) and one on more personal musings which often relate to the former. I have always had a hard time separating “church and state” when it comes to work, career, and my personal life. I firmly believe the more authentic we can be in all areas of our life, the more successful we will be in those arenas.
Today is a “Happy Hour” which is a Friday post. The name of which mostly came about because I wanted to post the honest type of thing you might wind up talking about with either friends or strangers, and that often happens at the end of the week after 5pm at party or outing or bar. It made sense in my head at the time, you know? Oddly, some of my Friday posts are kind of sad?
Here’s the thing though, Happy Hour does, I think, make one think about alcohol only. Happy Hour usually is something that happens at a bar for cheap drinks and apps, like perhaps a celebration that the week (or the day) is over and it’s time for a damn drink!
Culturally we call it Happy Hour because so much of the work week is sad and/or frustrating????? And while this post could be just about that-like why is work so sad? To get there to talk about work and happier people systems, I need to talk about dependence in a general (and personal) sense first.
There have been a LOT of posts in my Notes feed about addiction and dependence lately, and I’ll hat-tip
for his amazing post for kicking my brain into gear during Sober October (and November). Something is in the ether right now that so many are writing about their personal experiences with addiction and dependence. Certainly the death of Matthew Perry is asking us all to examine our relationship to fame and to substance (and the relationship that forms between the two).That many of us are grappling with midlife dependence epiphanies (and that could range from 30-60 so far as I’m concerned), may mean we are grappling with huge changes in ourselves and our world and our cultures. We are examining what power and corruption means on a global scale, but also what that means in our bodies personally. Addiction and/or dependence are many things, but one thing I think about (not even a theory but in more of a metaphoric way) is that symbolizes a kind of power and corruption inside of us at ourselves and is a hunger for what we’ve not gotten. The addiction has power over and can corrupt our unmet desires to succeed, love, connect, find intimacy, and then replace those desires simply with the addiction (or dependence) itself, whether that be alcohol, drugs, sex, numbing out with TV/social media, gambling, stage time. To me, this means that dynamic can create codependence in human systems that support that dependence.
I’m using the word dependence in addition to addiction because I’m honestly not sure if social media for example can be a physiological addiction (that employs your dopamine) but it certainly can be a dependence? Or frankly, if there isn’t really a difference because our emotional and psychology are connected within us physiologically.
(I apologize for this being an exercise as I think through it. I’m not a psychologist or physician, so again, this is exploration on my part, and I may be misspeaking on the difference between addiction and dependence. Also is my first time really writing out loud things I’ve been thinking about and wrestling with for a long time. Feedback welcome and I’m aware I may be clumsy here.)
My personal story around dependence is that I grew up in a household that involved a lot of alcohol and cigarette use. My father smoked and drank. My mother smoked and drank. This was the 70’s and this was not unusual. After my father died, and my mother moved to be closer to her sister, there was a LOT more drinking and there was also a very tumultuous period of time which involved emotional highs and lows that weren’t quite predictable, and left me feeling quite totally unsafe, and alcohol was always a part of it.
Their alcohol use played into the tumult, but also (in my eyes) seemed extremely elegant, sophisticated, and adult. Rituals, glasses matched to types of drinks or cocktails or wines. Elegant table settings and wines paired with food but then huge fights after dinner. It was a magic elixir which could completely transform (to good or ill) an evening. For myself, while I was allowed to drink at those events (very “European let the kids learn to drink” kind of stuff), I didn’t love it and never got drunk. Alcohol and co-dependence for me are deeply related. My mother was deeply grieving (and utterly depressed and isolated in her grief) so alcohol, and cigs to some extent, were “the only happiness she had” as she often told me when I’d try to get her to stop either one.
What a thing to tell a kid.
The rest of the family also drank, drank away from rage, towards it, to feel “different” I suppose, different than…just being them. Pain, loss, shame, anger, grief, family trauma. All of it were constant companions growing up with a beautiful expensive glass of expensive wine in one hand paired with cheese and sharp tempers all. It was an ongoing dynamic. I was a parentified child and I depended on myself, for the most part, to get through it all.
I didn’t really start drinking until college, but aside from the “party” type drinking, I don’t think I drank that much in my 20’s. What I found was that when I did drink, I felt far far happier than when I didn’t. I finally didn’t feel nervous or concerned when I had a drink, but neither did I pick fights or weep in corners. I could be funnier and quicker witted, and after about one-and-a-half drinks, I felt more “me.” It wasn’t until my 30’s and I had a) kids and b) a mother with dementia and c) a very active improv and storytelling avocation in addition to d) a full time career that I drank CONSISTENTLY. Not too much at any one time, but kind of every evening every day like my coffee in the morning and an afternoon snack, was the nightly bevvie or three.
Deal with the kids situations at school? Perhaps a cocktail would chill me out. Stressed about trying to balance career with theater and grappling with money? Buy some wine on my way back to the house. Sadness over the loss of family because I was mostly just the fuck on my own while my mother got worse and worse and worse and lost more and more of her mind and memory and life just went on and having a parent with Alzheimers and two little kids just meant that you took the fucking edge off with something, and I hated weed and was scared of other drugs in general, and I was just so, so, so brokenhearted about the whole situation, and I felt so, so alone even if people tried to help because all my inner-kid knew how to do was rely on herself.
Bourbon.
(And it wasn’t like the wonderful theater and comedy stuff meant that I had an escape from feeling bad and needed that drink to feel happy. I found that having a drink before hosting a show helped me with the social anxiety I felt. I mean…I could get on stage sober and be fine. But hosting? It was greeting people and talking to them at the door and in the house that freaked me out. I wanted to hide, but a drink helped me talk to people. Like a security blanket. And after a show? I was wired to the sky from performing so I was awake until waaaaay too late so I’d have a hot bath and a goblet of wine (or two) and then I’d feel like ass in the morning and often I’d do it again the next night.)
What I know now is that I was dependent on alcohol, or even the idea of alcohol, for a number of reasons.
One? I probably have had undiagnosed ADHD and also the concurrent PMDD and depression/anxiety that can come with it. I learned, working at a college of Pharmacy, which had a well known addiction specialist teaching there, that many people start on dependence journeys (in short) because their brain is seeking some kind of medication, but alcohol and drugs are the easiest ones to get to, so…my brain wanted to feel different so I found a way.
Two? People (me) self-medicate when things are stressful! Life is filled with stresses and hardships and if the systems around you are healthy and supportive there (I’m assuming) is far less risk for that kind of self medication. The Rat Park experiment in the 70’s examined this dynamic. Very simply put, the more stressed and isolated we are, means we seek relief from that stress and isolation. Without group and community support, we still seek the alleviation of that pain (and if our group and community support involves drinking or drugs??? Well, that’s a problem). A healthier family and community? Less dependent actions.
I was stressed and isolated and acting out in a number of ways in the face of my mother’s lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s and death amongst other things.
Three….UGH alcohol is ubiquitous. Going out for a drink, girls night, boys night, happy hour, cocktails, pre-gaming, gearing up, gearing down, wine-tastings in wine-region, SHOTS SHOTS at parties, Dionysian sexy times and losing (giving away) control. Business meetings, fundraising work often involves events, drinks, wine, etc etc etc. Also, if you aren’t drinking people get weird. Or they used to at least. There has been a huge push in the past few years for mocktail culture and adaptogenic drinks and thank god for it.
Four and perhaps most one of my more vulnerable understandings, alcohol became part of my “sassy brassy comedian wisecracking sexy-wise hostess with the mostess” stage persona, which then also wound up infiltrating my daily persona. I was never an onstage innocent ingenue, beautiful and delicate. I was funny and broad and clownish and also that felt kind of good at times, but bad at times?
To not be beautiful and delicate? To be good at standing on stage in front of large groups of people because your big stupid face and weird brain can make people laugh and laugh and laugh? Drinks helped with the persona and also the anxiety about the persona, but then it became more then that. I worried a lot…Would I be funny without it? Yes. Was I boring without it? No, but was I BORED without it? That’s another issue altogether. I got very bored/sad of me and want to feel different than how the me of me felt. I still need and want a lot of stimulation.
(I know that I can be funny without a drink, but with performing there is either a cost up front or in the back end, which brings me to the addiction/dependence of being on stage, which I will come back to next week, because it’s a thing that needs more examination.)
All the above says to me that human beings are vulnerable to addiction and dependence because life is filled with unpredictability, stress, pain, both good and bad systems that we can’t avoid entirely, systems of oppression and exploitation, family systems that contain strange combinations of love and familiarity along with neglect and isolation, and well life is hard. And even granting most of us human beings the greatest grace, in that we seek healthier outcomes even if the methods aren’t necessarily healthy, we are communal creatures who need to depend.
We are communal creatures who need to depend on each other.
On community. On our families. On our systems. Clean water and air, medical truths, access to food, down time and rest time, psychological and emotional support. Justice. For comfort and safety.
If you start off as a young human who cannot really depend on your own family, not really, like maybe for food and clothing and shelter, but not intimacy and care and emotional safety, you learn to depend elsewhere. And your little self is just too small to handle that much depending so you find support where you can get it to feel…something other than the stress of that stress.
And if you get enough people who have learned to depend elsewhere and they build systems together? Well? You may not get a very healthy rat park. In the best cases, they are decent human systems and you get some clarity and support and maybe work slowly on building humane places for humans to be. And in the worst cases? We find the most toxic systems led by narcissists that attract people who have dependence issues (which I think to some extent is all of us) and that just leads to terrible things and more abuse.
Sometimes maybe you can find ways to build that rat park better, but then you still need to do the work on yourself and depending in a healthy way. Neither co nor counter dependent, but inter-dependent. It’s sort of a wonder that we do as well as we do.
As for my personal relationship to Le Booze, peri-menopause and menopause set in and all of a sudden alcohol kind of started to hurt. It would be fun for 20 minutes and then my stomach would feel sick. It fucked up my sleep (I mean sleep during “the change” is just painful anyway, so alcohol didn’t help at all.
Still there have been a number of years where I tried to…maintain my relationship with alcohol??? Mostly because a) events and dinner dates were less weird and b) my whole persona was attached to it, but then I stopped performing (again that’s a whole other piece about dependence to performing), and also I can admit that I missed being able to “feel” differently in a way that was familiar, even if it wasn’t healthy.
What a weird complex relationship to the self. The less alcohol I have the more I realize how tangled into the pain of my childhood, and young adult years, and my thirties….how connected and tangled too all of it was to performing and the systems I was in and trying to build, and it’s mind-blowing to me that I got through any of it.
Who did I ever truly depend on, my fearful little child-self? Did I feel like performing was the only way I got people to stop fighting, and start laughing, so that I’d be ok? Did alcohol keep me from investigating that earlier? Did I depend on a few drinks each night during my mother’s illness (not to mention a terrible political time in our country? Covid?)? Yes. I did survive it all, and grew two beautiful children, and kept a happy marriage and a growing career, and held space for all kinds of people to do good work. I did that despite it all, despite my own coping mechanisms, and with the support of a key few people.
Can we ever be interdependent on a substance? I’d say no. Because a substance isn’t a person. How much more or better could it all have been without it? I won’t know I suppose, but I wonder.
I can’t seem to finish this particular piece in an elegant way, but I’ll end by saying I drink a lot of coffee now, like a lot. I may even depend on it. I consume a lot less alcohol though, and probably will work towards giving it up entirely. I don’t want to be in a co-dependent relationship with something that might hold me back from good work I can do in the world. I deeply deeply value all the posts I’m seeing right now on Substack from writers speaking so eloquently and vulnerably about addiction. They are teaching me so much and I hope you read them.
And I certainly can rename this day’s posts if Happy Hour doesn’t make sense. But I do think getting to talk to all of you is a Happy Hour indeed, even if what we are talking about is hard.
As always, if any of this resonates or makes sense, I’d love to hear. I’d also really welcome your stories about any of the above, even if it’s disagreeing with me. If you feel like sharing, subscribing or commenting, I’d love to hear from you.
Here’s hoping your weekend is wonderful.