(This was written quite drunk, in the ascending from very drunk. I’ve fixed the punctuation and spelling for intelligibility, but left it almost entirely as was.)
There’s a bottle of whiskey on the floor by my desk. I’ve had remarks that this is definitely for reasons of dandyish affectation, presenting as I’d prefer to as an elderly academic type in tweed with a complaint of the upper thigh for which a remedial and highly expensive armchair is somehow requisite. Some of my closer, more worrisome friends assume it’s suggestive of a more self-destructive quality, (a manic-pixie shade of darkness perhaps, if I were to be uncharitable to some male friends), in any case an elusive vice which attenuates a self-fashioned air of the just-visible, the performed repression. I hate this: there’s too much of it about, that particular flavour of vain self-sabotage that stands in the place where a personality should be. There is, unfortunately, some truth to this: I wish there wasn’t. It’s a vulgar quality to my personality that I enjoy the sense that people think that I am strong enough to struggle with something that I wouldn’t debase myself by showing them. But this is not entirely it; I drink too much and reveal too much for either of these explanations to be satisfactory.
I’m writing this half a bottle down a fine Lidl vintage of some insalubrious-piss coloured Scotch, and having passed the first two more unpleasant stages of this sort of evening, I feel a need to investigate why exactly I do this to myself. Why I close whatever more interesting, cerebral project I’m working on, shut my laptop like a day I know I’m abandoning having done around half of my lowest estimate for the day’s work, and pour myself a slog of off-colour, medicinal-tasting spirit which purports to be from Scotland, but which I can only assume has been created by the organic distillery of a slightly ulcerous urinary tract. Why I acquiesce to experience the most depressing possible hangover the next day: the completely debilitating, ibuprofen-at-6pm kind of hangover which is rendered about six times more acute because you know that you have absolutely no good memories to make such a thing justifiable.
I have another piece in me about how I think hangovers are the currency of the realm. This is a recuperative one, I think, and there is truth to it: I have many memories which are fig-scented and of unparalleled loveliness of days written off in aid of multiple breakfasts and conversations predicated on the exchange of grunts, inexplicably hysterical nonsense-speak, suggestions of better uses for the hours you all know will pass without a bra on. This, however, is not that piece, because I’m quite drunk and I’m listening to that Blur album that you only listen to if you live in London and are on a bus after a break-up with a girl that has a too-short fringe because she does art history.
I know I will have to write off most of tomorrow because of what I’m feeling now. It is not happy. But it is a pleasant sort of heavy which gives one the illusion of being self-possessed. When being happy feels more like hard work than it used to, the most you can hope for is to be, at least, an individual. If only to myself, I feel finally interesting again. But I will get to that when this Blur song has finished.
Approaching an explanation of why I drink so much, why I have smuggled bottles of my mum’s beer to my room since I was 14, requires an assessment of the places I have passed to arrive here, at this open word doc. This has, over the years, been a notes app, a post it note – more rarely, its been a phone call. I am, unfortunately, in love with all stages of it. When you drink with other people, the more melancholy stages are costly. The more abject stages even more so: it is generally unpleasant to be around very drunk people, but even more so if it comes with the implication that there is a wealth of emotional labour that needs to be done that the person will never instigate unless their mascara is running and they smell of a cheap slightly alcoholised body spray with a name like ‘Shh…Floral’; people who will only ask for help when they’ve done the interpersonal equivalent of shitting themselves. But these stages are all that is really left to someone who has been drinking since before they knew that drinking in that way was psychologically suggestive. Tolerances change, the frontier between pleasantly tipsy and affrontingly loud and just-coherent is meteorically quickened by the nervous tip of the wrist.
I read a great piece whose author I now forget about drinking and childishness – it was probably one of those eloquent left-wing twitter women that we all have a crush on whose selfies incur about fifty replies from men who are too woke to be horny – which expressed precisely the embarrassing realities of disordered drinking. She suggests in the piece that getting very drunk is an interesting impulse, gesturing as it does towards a desire on the part of the drinker to put oneself in a state where you have to be looked after. It’s a willing admission not only of absolute submission and vulnerability, but an acceptance that no one is under any illusion that you are a victim. Every party knows you to be responsible. It is absolute candour: it’s saying “I self-destruct. Watch me. Help me.”
I want to make this piece explicitly about abjection, because it already is abject, which I think can be usefully differentiated from the childish. Simply, when I was a child, I was happy. I was an immensely popular 3-year old, and sustained the qualities that made that the case much further than was ever really going to be sustainable (it worked until about year 12, then impishness began to lose its novelty). The thing that defines the place I enter before this heavy-eyed, slow-breathing proto-hangover which has yet to reach only the finger tips and the frontal lobes, is adult ugliness. It is the acute and totally certain sense that you have split your skin by growing so quickly you don’t remember when or how you became this hulking. It’s a licensed lunacy. Here, you can scream because no one is looking after you, because no one has any idea what it was like to suffer as you did. It is an atemporal misappropriation of past trauma into the fabric of the petty inconveniences of adult life. It is not childishness. It’s a splitting at the seams so obscenely out of time, that only the language of childhood will do – because we do not know how to say things as animals do. ‘It’s not fair.’ ‘No one will ever love me like I have been loved.’ ‘My skin is too much and not enough to hold this fatty feeling.’ ‘I am alone. I know I am not alone. I am alone.’
All of this is sanctioned. I can scream this at my desk with my laptop closed, my phone unreachable by foreign agents and my door safely and needlessly locked – I have generally decided in this state that tomorrow I will be as a secluded nun. No one will see or know me, I will build a new life for myself in this room. (I am invariably drawn out for breakfast, or a door’s knock, or needing to wee. I never remember at this point that an ascetic lifestyle is not possible where there isn’t a chamber pot.) I think this is why drinking in this way tends to afflict people of my disposition: those who live under the burden of an entirely self-imposed vow of silence in the wake of the emotionally crippling, and consider this imposition an unconscionable injustice. Abjection is an outcry against one’s own principles, a revolt against how you yourself have chosen to fashion yourself. Perhaps this is why I have fallen in love with hangovers – for their righteously punitive quality. Perhaps this is why I love the warming taste of £10 whiskey, even if I never reach the stage at which I am presently, the stage I pray for in a pub with fifteen people around whom I should by rights feel more comfortable – because the stage before, the rash-scratching rage against that corner of the mind which is thirteen in a too-big body, which voices the grievances which become heavy and political in a shut vault, is itself a freedom.
Eventually, these states lead to confessions which put to reasonable prose that which is unreasonable. I should be reading a book. It is 3:27. I should be sleeping. This playlist is diabolical: Radiohead is playing. ‘Nude’. Men on tinder with disposable print-outs as their first and penultimate profile pictures would go hog-wild for this scene, if I had left my makeup on. But when I am at my least interesting, it’s at this time that I rediscover in visceral technicolour, snotty and singular, the importance of becoming civilised again. Of picking yourself up from the oil spill of any feeling you could pin the wet landslide upon, and moulding yourself from butter into a person that deserves to be spoken to. I finish the last slog. I wipe my eyes, forget the lardy midriff that announced itself earlier like a ledge. I write something.
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