What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor?
Sigmund Freud believed and wrote that there are “no accidents.” Coincidences were poopoo-ed under the same assertion. Some people think that Freud was full of shit, some people think that his all-encompassing theories on the subconscious are spot-on, psychology majors love to tell you which of his notions they enjoy a la carte, and most people have no idea who Sigmund Freud is, think every accident is someone else’s fault, and have zero accountability nor epistemic evidence for their opinions. And all of those people will be voting in November, unfortunately.
I slant towards Freud when it comes to accidents—or rather, the consequences of accidents. No, we cannot control everything that happens. We can, however, fortify ourselves to prevent harsh outcomes when accidents happen. A scraped knee—that’s an accident you cannot necessarily prevent. Death by sepsis is not an accident and it starts by having Neosporin and a Band-aid in your bag when you go hiking. Your car being stolen when it was locked, parked behind gates, void of any expensive objects visible through the windows—that’s an accident. Well, an incident, at the very least. Owning a car that skimped on theft protection software? Not intentional. Owning said car in an age where TikTok is teaching people how to easily steal that exact make and model of vehicle? Nah mah fault. Having the cheapest possible car insurance that does not cover vehicle theft? 100% my fault. Choosing that insurance because it meant you could technically be insured but also have a monthly subscription to ipsy? Yeah. I had that coming.
Last week I referred to addiction as useless chaos. Chaos with no substance, no lesson, and no prize. What I was implying is that there is a useful type of chaos. I believe that there is. Chaos can teach. Chaos can humble. Chaos can lead you to places you may not have wandered if your life had remained in a slack tide. If you see enough chaos, you learn how to survive and strive in the chaos. You learn to carry a First Aid Kit and be more selective on State Farm’s Policy Builder application.
Sobriety is certainly a way of surviving and striving through chaos, but sobriety does not award you a clean slate for the years of pandemonium that addiction created. That’s why I say that addiction is useless chaos. You drank, you caused the chaos, you saw the consequences and you drank through those too. You shirked. You drank and you shirked. No lessons learned, no preparedness gained. You know why the Atlantic is riddled with shipwrecks? Because sailors were drunk when they battened down the hatches in the smaller squalls and didn’t know what to do when the hurricanes came. That, or they were just drunk trying to navigate the shoals. According to Freud, there are no “boating accidents,” only drunken sailors.
The concept of “accident” gets used liberally among recovering addicts. Not so much the word, but the complicit phrase, “I didn’t mean to.” Addicts are usually telling the truth when they refer to their drunk actions and claim, “I didn’t mean to,” but if we follow the breadcrumbs… there are about 100 ways that the thing we “didn’t mean to do,” could have been prevented if we had done some of the things that we did mean to do. For instance, you didn’t mean to waste 10 years of your life in the clutches of alcoholism, and you had every intention of seeking help for your drinking problem when your friend/mom/sister/pastor suggested that you do so, but you didn’t—so, you did. More often, we “didn’t mean to” get so drunk that we became combative, or made weird phone calls, or got behind the wheel while intoxicated, or threw up in unideal places, but we did. Every night. So, what happened? Well, what-hah-happened was… we really did not mean to get drunk. Truly. But we also did not resist the throbbing urge for that first 5:00 drink. In fact, we didn’t even consider not having a drink. We just “didn’t mean to” have 20 drinks. And the combativeness/awkward calls/drunk driving/vomiting commenced for us around drink 10…
We “didn’t mean to do it,” but it happened, but it also wasn’t an accident. See? Chaos. Nearly 4 years removed from addiction, I can finally hear it and see it now—the clear choices I could have made differently to disrupt the cycle of “not my fault” actions that were absolutely my fault. But 4 years is not so far removed that I’ve forgotten the time in group therapy when one woman said, “I don’t know what happened… I stopped at a gas station on the way to work at 9am and bought a beer to drink in the car… then, I woke up the next morning in a jail cell…”
My honest reaction was, “Oh my goodness. That is terrifying. I am so sorry that happened to you.”
My response to her would be exactly the same now, but with emphasis on “I am sorry THAT happened to YOU,” so the sarcasm would be apparent. Lady, you were drinking on the way to work at 9am and you don’t see how your actions lead directly to the urine covered floor of the drunk tank at your local sheriff’s department? Really? I’m sure there were stops at bars and additional gas stations in between, but if we travel as the crow flies from point A to point B of your story then there was nowhere else for you to end up! You were a drunk sailor in the middle of a hurricane, looking directly at a lighthouse and saying, “Aye! Let’s park at one of those discoes until the sky water quits falling!” Ya never had a chance, matey.
Again, with all due respect to the affliction of addiction, I am not so far removed that I don’t remember how foggy, frenzied, and victimized I felt during every sober moment of chronic alcoholism and how the only peaceful moments of my life were between drinks 2 and 8. I know what it’s like to start every morning with the intention to be better, then the shift of your intention to simply surviving, which leads to allowing yourself to start drinking, then boom: jail.
It took longer than I would have liked, though less time than you’d think, for me to realize that every accident, every “I didn’t mean to,” and almost every problem that existed in my life or the lives of those close to me could be placed in a cardboard box, sealed, and labeled, Drink No. 1. That was the answer. Freud cannot attribute to the conscious or unconscious, that which happens when you have drunken yourself to a state of not-conscious. You may feel out-of-control during your sober hours, and you may be aware that you have absolutely no control over what you do when you are drunk, but you are conscious and in control when you take the first drink. And you know that the first drink begets a second drink. And you know that the bottom of the third glass looks you right in the eye and says, “fuck it, why change now?”
I cannot say for sure that some alcoholics aren’t just unluckier than others. Actually, I’m sure that I’m luckier than most so there is something to that theory. I do know for sure that if your attitude is that of, “why do all of these accidents keep happening to me?” You will stay an alcoholic forever. If sobriety is what you seek, it’s much more productive to blame yourself and your actions and to believe that there are no accidents than to think you are the one alcoholic who would absolutely be able to drink like a normal person if the universe would just quit attacking you. It’s probably not the universe’s fault that you feel attacked. It’s probably your fault for thinking that you could pour a bottle of Wild Irish Rose into your 7-Eleven cappuccino, get on your 10am conference call and live as if you were someone who rushes to make it home in time for Wheel of Fortune instead of someone who needs to sleep it off in a holding cell.
If it sounds like chaos to live that way, it’s because it is chaos to live that way. Not the good chaos—not chaos that teaches you how to handle chaos. It’s the kind of chaos that makes you think you can just park your schooner at the disco until the rain goes away, not the kind that edifies you on how to weather the storm. Lower the sails, steer into the waves, memorize the constellations so you can figure out how to get back on route after the storm spits you wherever it’s going to spit you. It’s not as easy or as fun as hiding in the dunes and throwing a hurricane party, but it’s immensely more productive. Also, I didn’t mean to make this whole post about sailing, but I made one reference and liked it, so I kept going. What can I say? It was an accident.
