Getting Clear – the Radical Choice to Wake Up in a Culture Obsessed with Numbing

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. 
― J. Krishnamurti

When I was a young girl learning how to ride, almost consistently I was admonished to ‘not let the horse know I was afraid’. Supposedly my emotion would set the horse alight with terror, or perhaps worse, said horse, upon feeling my fear, would conspire to manipulate or hurt me in some deviant way. As aspiring young cowgirls and -boys, we were taught to hide our feelings, bypass our emotions. Perhaps nowhere is the projection of a disconnected society more obvious than in this conventional ‘wisdom’ of the equestrian world passed down from generation to generation of riders. Let’s be clear before I move on:  horses are not afraid of fear, nor are they poising to mess you up through your vulnerabilities. In fact, it is not our fear that worries a horse, but our masking. It’s the incongruence that creates the problem.

This cowboy-speak is indicative of ways we project false notions about life in general––in so many assumptions and narratives perpetuated through the folklore of contemporary culture. We are taught to disconnect from our bodies, not show our feelings, present a façade to get what we want, for example, success, or love. We are told how to act, feel, and think in order to conform to a system that works best if we all walk lock-step within certain guidelines intolerant of uniqueness and diversity. 

Living inside such a system makes us anxious, sick and fragile. It’s a system that holds us to unattainable perfection, unbearable pressures, and blames those who cannot, or will not, comply. Every time we contort ourselves or cut off a limb to fit into the square hole, it costs us. We tell ourselves it’s not that bad, or this is just the way things are. Or we blame ourselves for not adapting better. Something must be wrong with me, we reason. To endure the daily cognitive dissonance, we numb and self-medicate through imbibing the myriad substances available to us––alcohol, social media, drama, worry, pills, the news, shopping, or unhinged self-improvement. 

But there is nothing wrong with you. The discomfort you feel, the lostness, the anxiousness, the anger, the relentlessness you sense, is a natural and healthy response to living inside an environment designed to limit or quash your spirit. What is wrong is the way we cope with this environment…ways that keep us complicit in the status quo…and reinforce the illusion that we are the problem, instead of culture itself. The important question to ask ourselves is not, “What is wrong with me?” but “How do I get free?”. 

Lately, I’ve been spending time with the concept of sobriety. I’ve been on a sobriety journey from various toxic elements for a few years now: alcohol, relationships, habits. And during this time, I am learning that sobriety is a powerful means to freedom. 

It’s helpful to think of sobriety, or being sober, outside of just the alcohol context. At its root origin sobriety means to come to one’s senses. I love this definition because it summons us to reconnect with our bodies, open our eyes, get clear, and shake ourselves awake from a trance. There are so many ways that I can practice sobriety: I can refrain from care-taking and fixing; I can abstain from self-doubt; I can quit imbibing media that makes me feel old, fat or inept. I can decline drama. I can just say no to relationships that make me feel bad about myself. 

Candidly, the most impactful sober choice I have made to date has been to stop drinking. Though I never drank excessively, I did drink habitually. And though I veiled the drinking with lofty platitudes of ‘wine pairing’ and discerning between local craft microbrews, something niggled at me. Something felt incongruent about my nightly ritual. 

I found that the ‘either / or’ binary of drinking (either you are an alcoholic – and sick, or you are not – and normal) kept me unable to evolve past a pattern. I didn’t drink enough to qualify as ‘having a drinking problem’, so the messaging was, ‘You are good to go! Just carry on and have fun!’. Finally, I circumnavigated the argument altogether and asked myself a better question: Is alcohol dimming my light? The answer was easy: Yes. 

The definition of sober is to be not intoxicated. The Latin root of intoxication is to be poisoned, or a poisoning. So sober means to be not poisoned. The truth about alcohol is that it is, in fact, poison. Alcohol is not like poison, or close to poison, it is poison. From Wikipedia: 

Ethanol, also commonly called alcohol, ethyl alcohol, and drinking alcohol, is the principal type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeasts. It is a neurotoxic, psychoactive drug. Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a slight chemical odor. It is used as a chemical solvent and in the synthesis of organic compounds and as a fuel source. Alcohol is an example of a chemical carcinogen. The World Health Organization has classified alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen [chemical mixtures and exposure circumstances which have been classified as carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). This category is used when there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans]. 

I eat organic, I’m gluten-free, I don’t put anything on my skin I wouldn’t eat. I drink apple cider vinegar and lemon juice each morning after doing yoga. I meditate. I avoid palm oil at all costs. I read labels. I love kale smoothies. Why the hell would I ingest rocket fuel? The answer––I had completely bought into some strange collective narrative normalizing self-poisoning.

The Madmen series recounts the days of the cigarette campaigns in the fifties and early sixties, when actors donned white coats, posed as doctors and declared reassuringly, “I do it! You can do it too!” In those days people learned to enjoy smoking through what was called engineered compliance – the deliberate influencing and manipulation of messages to normalize a behavior. Now Big Alcohol has you in its crosshairs, spending close to 7.7 billion dollars a year to convince you that ingesting poison is a good thing, a normal thing. As a part of those billions, even wellness gurus such as Gwyneth and Oprah actively accept sponsorships from the makers of the hard stuff like tequila and vodka. Hey, if Gwyneth drinks gourmet premium vodka, it should be ok, right?

As Mark Twain wrote, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

I’m not sure what woke me up to getting clear. I went from delightfully enjoying a weekend glass of Pinot to being utterly revolted––seemingly overnight. I think it was learning that I was being manipulated to imagine that I was choosing, with my own empowered free will, to treat myself to an adult beverage. When in fact my compliance was being manufactured by some dudes in an office somewhere. I was being deliberately groomed to be complicit in a toxic culture, to serve corporate interests. That made me mad––mad enough to dump several expensive bottles of wine down my drain and not touch it again. Now, each day my choice to be sober is a purposeful disobedience against the System. 

I didn’t always drink. I seldom drank in college––preferring to be clear at the tailgate parties, conscious at the frat houses. I never liked the fogginess alcohol brought on, or the bad feeling it gave my body. I hated how I felt the next day. So it was not my thing, that is until I became a single working mother. Mothers are one of the most targeted demographics. It’s no wonder, as mothers our lives are unmanageable. The challenges we face––economically, spiritually, emotionally––to raise children in an increasingly unsafe world are unfathomable. I remember starting to rely on the mind-numbing effects of a nightly glass of wine to get me through the “second shift” after work, i.e., dinner, homework, bedtime rituals, and three more hours of office work after the kids went to sleep. I drank to escape, if only for 20 minutes, the Sisyphean ordeal that had become my life.

Here's the truth: to be sober, we must create lives we don’t want to escape. 

I don’t believe we can stop anything that helps us cope, be it alcohol, or compulsive shopping, or TV or whatever, if we are continuing to lead lives that force us into impossible circumstances. If we are in a terrible marriage, or enduring a crappy boss in a thankless job, or living in a soulless subdivision in a dismal apartment with crumby friends, then good luck trying to quit the only thing that gets you through the day.

Sobriety is both an ending and a beginning. When we choose to be sober, we are actively choosing to end the poisoning––by ethanol, ideas, beliefs, habits, narratives, bad relationships, and other light-dimming, spirit quashing substances. And we are also actively beginning the creation of lives worth living. Lives within which we want to be clear. 

This essay is not about quitting alcohol. You may not be inclined to do that, which is one-hundred percent fine. It’s about starting to dismantle the self-abuse in its many forms. If you find yourself reaching for something––anything––so you can get through the day or night, I invite you to ask yourself these questions:  

• What do I need to change in my life?

• What am I no longer willing to tolerate?

• What is too small for me?

• What am I avoiding?

• If I told myself the truth about my life, what would I say?

• If my emotion / feeling / sensation that I want to numb could talk to me, what would it tell me? 

• What am I masking or numbing (with this drink, pill, screen, etc)?

Living the sober life––getting clear––is about returning to our senses and unlearning the habits of self-harm. It’s about being congruent. It’s about giving yourself the life you deserve, being the person you deserve to be, and living according to your own rules. It’s about staying awake at the wheel inside a culture that would prefer you fall asleep. It’s about declining to engage in things that diminish your light, whatever they are. 

Getting clear, is getting free. And getting free is the beginning of a whole new, amazing adventure.