Sentenced to Life
I decided on my first tattoo when I was 19-years-old. The scene of a dark-haired mermaid, perched slack on a sea boulder, watching as a ship absconds for the horizon. From behind, on her opaque profile, she sports her own tattoo: a skull and cross-cutlasses branding her lower back. It would sit daintily on my left hip in simple charcoal ink, small enough to be hidden by low-rise jeans of the early 2000s.
I told my friend Ray about it, as he sipped his pre-shift drink at the bar where I worked, before commuting to the bar where he worked. Even though I was sure about my choice, even though I had put thoughtful hours into the idea, and even though I was concrete in my belief that I would always want to display a mermaid and a pirate ship on my body, Ray told me to wait.
“If you still want it in seven years, then get the tattoo.”
Seven years?! Seven years. That is the amount of time that Ray believed a person needed to be sure about a decision with a permanent outcome. It seemed like an outrageous amount of time until I thought about how small of an investment seven years was on a decision that would last forever.
Forever is a beautiful concept. Forever is a terrifying concept, too. “Til death” has a different ring to it at a sentencing hearing than it does at a church alter. Personally, I’m surprised that religion has been able to recruit so many people with the promise of “eternal life.” Not every human wants to live for the next ten minutes, let alone for all of eternity. There are eight billion humans on this planet, all with different definitions and perspectives on the meaning of forever.
I haven’t polled eight million people, but I have spent a lot of time with a subset of humans that waffle constantly on their opinion of forever. Alcoholics have a tortured relationship with indefinites. When we are in the trench of addiction, we don’t think about forever at all. It’s not a thing. We know that the way we are surviving is not sustainable. Some of us wanted to die in that moment. Some of us didn’t want to die. Either way, we couldn’t wrap our brain about what forever would look like because we would have to quit drinking to have a chance at “forever.”
As an alcoholic, the price of forever is forever. If we want a shot at forever, we have to quit drinking FOREVER. That fact is what keeps so many people in the ditches, bars, motels, holding cells, and crack houses that their addiction has led them too. Do we want to stop? Of course. Do we want to stop forever? Absolutely not. Forever is too much—too long. Forever scares the shit out of us. Addiction is ruining our lives and we want desperately to stop, but the leap of banishing our life force/coping mechanism/best friend/favorite hobby forever is more than a shaky, dehydrated, hungover drunk can fathom.
Then, of course, there are the arrogant drunks who believe they can best forever. They think they have figured a loophole that the rest of us stupidly overlooked, or that they have stronger constitution than us spindly, sober addicts. Either way, they think that they can simply slow down, moderate, switch to beer, indulge on special occasions… they find it illogical to stop drinking forever when they could just regulate it. They’re either scared or stupid, but regardless, their wrong. They will return soon enough with a black eye and an ankle monitor and say, “hey… tell me more about this whole ‘not drinking again forever’ thing.”
It's not surprising that alcoholics try to negotiate their boundaries, though. Humans are skeptical creatures that need to test their limits before accepting their limitations. I’m sure there are lactose intolerant people who had a final ice cream sundae to be sure that they could never have another ice cream sundae. Some folks with celiac disease forced an entire baguette down their gullet to know that they needed to go forth in life, avoiding bread. The difference, of course, is that consuming neither dairy nor grain will make a person aggressive, slutty, or unfit to operate a vehicle. So, a drunk’s boundary-testing isn’t as defensible as someone whose skepticism only affects their own personal colon.
Of all the great divides between addict-logic and normal person-logic, our hesitation to admit that we need to give up alcohol forever drives the biggest wedge. Normal people see a simple, easy solution to a massive problem: “if drinking is the cause of all of your problems, then stop drinking.” It makes perfect sense to me now that I’m clearheaded and sober, but I sure as hell remember what it was like to not see it so clearly. I can absolutely recall the torment of pinballing between “I need to quit drinking so I can be a better person” and “drinking is the only thing that makes me feel like I can be a better person.”
Imagine that you are stranded in the woods (à la Hatchet) and the only tool you have to assist in your survival is a pocket-knife. Its not a great tool. Its not even a good knife. You need to cut down trees for shelter, you need to be able to hunt, kill, and clean animals, you need firewood: a machete, a hatchet, a chainsaw, or a sword would all be better… but you have a pocket-knife. Not only is the pocket-knife inefficient but every time you use it for the few things it can do, you cut yourself.
Normal person logic says: “Get rid of the pocket-knife. It doesn’t serve you and it’s doing more harm than good.”
Addict (survival) logic says: “Why would I get rid of it?! It’s the only tool I’ve got!”
In the end, yeah, we need to accept that the shitty tool isn’t helping—ditch it—and figure out some other (better) methods for survival. It is evident, however, why we vacillate for so long before we can make the tough call to get rid of it. The rationality is too ambiguous. Why can’t we just put it away and only use it when its really necessary? What if we need it and its already gone? Can’t we keep it for doing “pocket-knife” things if we stop trying to make it do more than it can?
These are all great questions. A normal person could keep the pocket-knife and only use it for “pocket-knife” things. An addict cannot. An addict has to get rid of it forever, or we will keep slicing our hand open while failing to cut through branches and telling ourselves, “This is working.”
I don’t have any tattoos. Seven years came and went and the desire to marque myself with a pirate-mermaid went away. Not because I no longer feel a connection to her or because I was deterred by the concept of forever. The seven-year waiting period made me realize that I am fine with permanence. What I am uncomfortable with is impermanence. I wanted a mermaid on my hip so I could anchor my skin and myself to a time in my life that I can never revisit. I thought that, if I commemorated it with a tattoo, I would always be the 18-year-old girl who ran off to Key West for a year to find herself. I liked her. She had gumption (and a great tan.) I thought I’d never lose her if she was printed in ink and came with me everywhere I went.
Tattoos aren’t even permanent anymore— a few swipes of a hot laser and your pelvic canvas is as blank as the day you were born. You cannot force anything to last forever, even if it’s set in blood and ink. The mermaid tattoo that never was is as relevant as my signature on a marriage license. Ink doesn’t guarantee that a feeling will last forever. There is no medium to guarantee that anything will last forever.
Drinking and divorce taught me the same vital lesson: when something is over, it’s over. I’ve only made the promise of “til death” twice in my life and I haven’t broken either promise. I like that about me. As much as I hate to admit it, the fact that my first declaration of “forever” is now moot only increases my confidence that the second declaration is permanent.
From last May, til death, sobriety will be my first priority. It may take a while for “forever” to get through a drunk’s head, but when we finally get it, we get it. Tattoos, marriages, friendships, deeds, treaties… if it can be removed, ignored, or set on fire, it ain’t permanent. Don’t count on it. And don’t do the math, because if you take stock of how few things in this world are actually guaranteed and permanent, you’ll never feel secure again.
Sobriety is different though. It isn’t written. You can’t touch it. You can’t lock it in a firesafe box. You can’t have it stamped by a clerk and declared “law,” but it has more weight to it than any other promise I can think of. Call it selfish or call it security, but I know what’s at stake and I am not willing to lose it—not for a drink, not for anything. Everything in my life that I want to keep is dependent on my sobriety. No one believes a drunk when they make a promise and that’s why I hedge my bet on me.
Forever is a beautiful concept. Forever is a terrifying concept, too. At first, I couldn’t see the big picture of getting sober forever at the price of never again being able to drink my way out of a feeling. Now, the big picture is all I can see and all I ever think about. I’m perfectly comfortable with permanence when it comes to being sober. Being sober has made me perfectly comfortable with impermanence too. I never needed a tattoo to remind me that I once was a girl with gumption. If anything, I’ve only grown closer to that mermaid who can sit and watch her ships sail away without chasing it, fighting it, or drinking about it.
