what i talk about when i talk about drinking
I stare at the light on the ceiling. I am lying on the bed with my feet on the ground. Another New Year’s done and dusted. I want to break up with her. I stare at this light and lampshade and allow for the darkness to ebb and creep its way in to me. I stare at the blistered ceiling. It’s so boring. The light is too bright. The lampshade is boring. There are no interesting features to look at on this ceiling. It’s all so boring. And tiring. Tired of this. Tired of it all. I mutter to myself, try to turn over but I can’t. I haven’t brushed my teeth. My tongue licks the light film on my teeth. I will break up with her. I won’t even text her, that will show her. I’m so tired. Let’s try sleep and forget this all happened, another day of it tomorrow. Emotions try to flood around my feet on the ground, but they’re numbed and impotent, they’ll stay down for a few days, a few weeks, a few years maybe. How much longer can this go on? I walk with wet feet no problem, wait until it’s up to my shins, my waist, my neck. I’m so bored. I’ll text her, don’t be mean. I’m so tired and lonely. But I’ll wake up fine tomorrow just you wait and see. I’ll wake up and forget all about it, just you wait and see. Tomorrow will be fun, tomorrow separates the boys from the men. Drink with no context, no destination. This light is so bright and yet so dull, why can’t I stop staring at it, I can’t make it interesting. There isn’t even anything interesting in the shadows it produces. There is no beauty in the mundane here, just boredom in the mundanity. I’m so bored and tired. I probably won’t even text her tomorrow, that will show her. I need to go to sleep. Why am I still staring at this fucking ceiling. Is anyone else feeling like this. I feel completely alone in this house. I’m so tired, I need to sleep. I shift myself over, just enough so I can half lunge to turn the light off. Thank fuck those boring shadows are gone. I struggle my trousers off, shimmying my drunken legs to get them off me. The belt rattles while I struggle the pants off. I’m too lazy to take my socks off. One last look at the phone. Did she even text me. I won’t text her at all tomorrow. See how she feels. I roll on to my side and feel the all too familiar feeling of drink induced fullness and nausea. I hope I get to sleep soon. I’m so tired, I need to sleep. I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll break up with her, you’ll see. The 1st of January tomorrow, this year will be different. What are you talking about just go to fucking sleep. Christ I’m full of drink, I hope I can sleep. I can hear the shitty nightclub speakers in my skull. I love her, of course I’ll text her tomorrow. I’ll text her now. I squint and see many screens in front of me. She didn’t even text me back, fuck that, I don’t need this, it’s over. I won’t even bother texting her tomorrow, I’m so bored. I need to sleep.
*
I’m in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive.
Drink caused thoughts to refract through a cracked lens in my skull. At first it subdued them, numbed them, but it can only keep them at bay for so long. Bounding and rebounding slowly around, my brain could then eventually only strain to allow for sad and cruel ones in this space. I had no ability to control or harness my emotions, so they leaked out of me in all the worst ways possible. I found it difficult to disentangle what I was feeling emotionally, whether it was from drinking or the ever lengthening hangovers, or whether this was just my emotional baseline state. Was I depressed or was it drinking? Did it matter? Drink puts its own spin on my emotions. After nearly two decades of drinking, I decided to leave drinking behind me. So all that was left were the remnants of me, whatever I was now without drink.
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Drink was intrinsically tied to my sense of self. It was around my whole life and then some. Always in the background as far back as I can remember, and then very much to the forefront where it was set to remain. I loved drinking. I loved every aspect of it. The person it allowed me to become, the self it allowed me to inhabit, the power I felt with it in me. I loved the large filter it allowed me to bypass freely in my brain, I loved the sheer brash ignorance of it. When I discovered this little social tonic nearly twenty years ago now, it changed everything for me, I could just do and say dumb shit and not think about it. I loved the culture around drinking, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Charles Bukowski, John B Keane. Romanticising alcoholics was a pastime of mine, romanticising being known as an alcoholic writer, romanticising romanticising romanticising. Bullshit. I even romanticised hangovers, and the delirious netherworld state they allowed me to cocoon in. I loved it all, the gulp, the glush, the blur, the beautiful blur, the once beautiful blur of it all.
When I stopped drinking I wouldn’t have called myself an alcoholic. I still wouldn’t. It feels like an incredibly loaded term to me. I didn’t drink every day. I never drank alone. I didn’t crave a drink. or at least that term doesn’t resonate with me. To crave a drink. To have cravings. The first thing to note here is I am an incredibly stupid person, who is seemingly unable to learn from inherent wisdom. Clichés are clichés for a reason, but I either can’t understand them, or simply refuse to. Maybe I need things to be so literal it hurts, any sort of abstraction and I’ll find a loophole away from it. So did I crave drink? I have craved before. I have craved a cigarette, now that is a craving. Craving to me feels like my body will not relax until it gets what it craves. Like you’re not in control. Your physical self propels you along and will do anything in its power to get what it craves. That’s craving to me. Have I felt that with drink? I don’t think for the actual physical substance I have. What I was “craving”, okay let’s stop using that term. What I was searching for, what I needed was release. I love to talk, I love to talk shit, I love to talk fucking incessantly. The gatling gun of words rattling out of my mouth felt like a huge relief to me. A relief to not have them just swirling around inside my skull anymore. Drink gave me the ability to talk shit with anyone, pour me up a drink and sit down, I’ll fucking talk. Without a drink I felt more rigid, especially in groups. But with a few, hey presto, let’s chop it up. I am loose, I am free and I can flow. It felt like stepping into a better version of myself, it felt like stepping into the real me, the me I wanted to be. Gregarious, confident, smooth, quick witted, charismatic and attractive. Not the quiet overthinker lacking confidence, not that fucking loser. Drink released me from myself, and it was bliss.
From the text above you can already see some patterns, negative self-talk, unhealthy coping mechanisms, an inability to sit with myself and my thoughts, loathing myself to the point of needing to escape myself, to inhabit a better me, what I thought was the real me. But how could I know who the real me is? Is it me after a couple of drinks? How could that be when it is so infrequent? Or at the very least, quite infrequent? Can I only access the real me once or twice a week? Or is it that since I’ve been a child I’ve never actually known the real me. From the age of around fifteen years old to my tender thirty-four I’ve been regularly drinking, probably on average once or twice a week in that period with some breaks. My whole adult life. So is the real me the one in the perpetual drinking cycle? Drink — hangover — feel okay — drink again — hungover again. A constant sine wave oscillation for nearly twenty years. Or is it the one who is not in that cycle? That would tell me the majority of my life, I haven’t been the real me. That’s a bit daunting, have I never known myself? That’s probably too dramatic but c’mon, we’re in the business of entertainment here right?
Anyway, since stopping drinking I’ve been searching for a similar story to relate to, for people like me, for people who are experiencing what I’m experiencing. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but I just can’t quite find it. The stories are either too fucked up or too mundane. As I said, I don’t consider myself an alcoholic, I wasn’t drinking constantly or getting myself in really fucked up situations. I wasn’t living a crazy life of excess and recklessness. I didn’t have one night where it all went south. I was just sick of it. Tired and bored. Scared of the vicelike grip it seemed to have on my life. When I read people’s stories they either felt too wild or too perfect. An alcoholic trying to piece their life back together, or an instagram influencer telling you their life has never been better since cutting alcohol and their toxic friends. I feel a bit queasy writing this knowing where my allegiances more closely lie. The instagrams are too perfect, all talking of benefits, how life will be so much better etc., they’re too dull, too simple, too clean cut. I have often felt completely insane in the last few months. Ticking off the days just waiting to feel better. Wondering when all these magic benefits are going to arrive. I’ve felt emotions I am simply incapable of dealing with, emotions I just cannot wield, emotions I seem to be finally facing up to for the first time in my life. Without drink there is no safe refuge to hide. So while it may be a narcissistic pursuit, I have not seen my side of the story properly reflected to me yet. Maybe I have finally found that internet niche, maybe I’ve finally fucking found something I’m looking for. Writing about the trials, tribulations, insanity and boredom of not drinking. Great. Fucking great, shout out to whoever is in charge of my destiny you ironic piece of shit.
So if you want some incoherent and unstructured ramblings of an incredibly emotionally immature and stupid man on a weekly basis, scrambling around in the dark to try to “find himself”, trying to piece together some sort of coherent identity after shunning the glue that kept the last one together, asking the big questions like “when am I not going to feel insane?”, struggling to overcome life’s most basic problems and who most certainly isn’t going to try to sell you some positive bullshit on the no drinking front? Then hi, I’m Johnny Knoxville. Welcome to Jackass.
Originally published at https://ajdubhda.substack.com on June 29, 2026.
