Insecurity

Over and over again, when I read people's stories about how they ended up with a major drink issue, I hear them talk about growing up feeling like an outsider. A square peg in a round hole, not fitting in.

They go on to describe how, as a teenager, alcohol made them feel - for the first time - 'whole'. Included. Secure.

This is often quoted as evidence for an alcoholic 'type' - people with a hole in the soul.

But, you know what? I look at my eldest and remember all that teenage stuff - trying to get to grips the world and your place in it, whilst dealing with raging hormones and a body which won't stop changing. And it strikes me that surely ALL teenagers feel like that underneath. How can they not?

I used to tell people frequently that my life changed when I was about twenty five and I stopped caring what people thought of me. Is it a co-incidence that that's the age when I started drinking more and more?

Looking back, I'm not sure that I ever really stopped caring - I just found a way to mask it, not to deal with it.

And when you stop drinking, all the insecurities come back. You can find yourself standing on the outskirts at parties thinking "do people think I'm boring? Am I wearing completely the wrong outfit? Are they talking about me?" in a way you haven't done since you were nineteen.

So, decades later, it's time to learn how to properly cope with teenage angst. And I think I'm getting to the solution....

....you have to remember that everyone else feels the same.

Think back to all the 'insiders', the round pegs in round holes from your teenage years. Do you think now that they really had all the answers? How is that even possible at the age of sixteen or seventeen? I bet if you asked them they'd confess to having been as riddled with as many insecurities as you!

And the same is true of most adults.

How many 'perfect' marriages have you admired, only to find out that both parties secretly hated each other and have been having wild affairs? How many friends do you have with seemingly wonderful lives who you know are struggling terribly with debt, or depression, or similar?

I know from this blog and all the e-mails I receive that no-one's life is what it seems to the onlooker. There's Facebook life, and there's reality, and very little overlap between the two.

Learning to judge yourself by your insides, and not other peoples' outsides is the key to serenity, not a glass of vino.

And who wants to be a standard shaped peg in a standard shaped hole anyway? Who wants to be stuck in a gaggle of identikit followers?

Isn't it better to be on the outside leading the way? Like us.

Love SM x

Hole in the Soul

Day 116.

I've read a number of books which describe alcoholics as having 'a hole in the soul'.

Often alcohol addicts talk about having felt different from other people all their lives. They describe a childhood of standing on the outside, looking in.

For these people alcohol, from the moment they first experience it, begins to fill that hole. It makes them complete. It provides the answer to the question they couldn't put into words.

But the hole never totally goes away. They pour more and more booze into it and it just seems to leak out of the bottom. Very quickly, and horribly young, they find themselves completely cornered by the wine witch.

Sometimes there's a specific reason for the 'hole in the soul.' David Goldman from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the US states that "the strongest single predictor for both alcoholism and depression is having been sexually abused or traumatised in childhood."

Ann Dowsett Johnston quotes a counsellor in her book 'Drink' saying "A lot of young girls report that their use of alcohol is not to party. Life is hard, and it's a way to put life in the corner."

Whenever I read stories and statistics like these, I feel guilty.

I have never felt that I had a 'hole in the soul.' I always felt part of the crowd, never different. I had an embarrassingly happy and privileged childhood. Alcohol didn't make me feel complete, or heal a wound. I never saw life as 'hard.'

I drank for far more selfish, and cowardly reasons.

I saw myself as one of life's optimists. My glass was always half full, not half empty. (Ironic really, as in actuality my glass was either totally full or, a few seconds later, totally empty. Repeat ad infinitum).

Life always came easy to me. I had a happy family, top exam grades - without trying too hard, and lots of friends. I walked into one of the best universities in the world, and then one of the top graduate jobs in the ad industry.

I was always upbeat, gliding through life. I didn't believe in drama, trauma or navel gazing. I subscribed to the 'stiff upper lip' and 'just get on with it' school of life.

It's only now I see that I spent my whole life not dealing with any negative emotions or experiences, but ignoring them. I used alcohol not to fill a hole, but just to adjust all the dials to make life that bit smoother and easier.

Feeling stressed? Have a drink! Scared? Drink! Bored? Drink! Confused? Drink!

In fact, my charmed life turned me into a total coward. I stayed with the same company for twenty years because it was all going well, it was easy, I was comfortable, why change? Ditto my refusal to discuss moving the family out of London.

For decades I avoided any situation which might involve conflict, change or - God forbid - failure. I drank not because my past had been too hard, but because it had been too easy.

And now, ironically, I see that in drinking to avoid any negative emotion and quash my fear of failure, my life became the mess I'd so desperately tried to avoid.

I've spent decades not growing, learning or moving forward, but desperately treading water in a sea of Sauvignon Blanc, my head just poking above the water, shouting "it's all going swimmingly!".

But now I'm learning, slowly, how to deal with all those day to day ups and downs. I'm getting braver. I don't fear change so much, in fact I'm started to embrace it.

Onwards and upwards!

SM x