On addiction

As I celebrate ten years sober, thoughts on why we become addicted. It's a bigger, older story than you might think.

Before the letter proper, a note about the future of this Substack.

Taking two weeks off over Christmas only made me more excited to come back to this space. There’s so much I want to offer here. I have ideas for interviews, audio storytelling, a guided course on writing from the imaginal realm, more in-depth essays, live Q&As, field research on caves and sound and the senses and imagination.

But I’m overstretched. I’ve been determined to keep this Substack free, so that anyone can read it, regardless of their resources. What that means in reality is that I’m not being paid for this work (except by a very small handful of paying subscribers, to whom I am eternally grateful), and so I only have a certain amount of time to devote to it every week, alongside my other commitments and the need to earn a living.

The old folk tales tell us that you’ll never get your wish unless you say it aloud, so here’s mine: I long to devote myself to this Substack and this community, to do justice to all the ideas floating in my head—to stop treating this as a hobby and respect it as the serious work it is and could be.

If you get something from these letters, and if AND ONLY IF you can comfortably afford it, it would mean the world to me if you would consider supporting this dream by becoming a paying subscriber. You would be helping to support my work, helping me to take this project to the next level, and paying on behalf of others who can’t afford it. At present, I don’t have plans for special content for paying subscribers only, but that might change depending on how the experiment goes.

I know that there are a lot of causes in the world right now that require urgent attention. If it’s a choice between supporting me and donating for medical aid to Gaza, please give to Gaza. But if you have a little extra left over, and you choose to support me, I can promise that the directions I plan to go in, if I can carve out the time and space, directly relate to how we might all access the imaginal realm for the purposes of decolonization and building a better world to come, including understanding how we got shut off from our imaginations and full humanity in the first place.

OK. That’s the end of this little appeal. Thank you so much to each and every one of you for your support, whether that takes the form of finances or the gift of your time.

xxx

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Picture from my days of escalating alcoholism, around 2009

Ten years ago on January 12th, I took my last drink.

Which means that on January 13th—if I make it there; one day at a time; no complacency—I will celebrate ten years sober.

So for the next few weeks, I want to talk about addiction. It’s a good time of year for this, with lots of people working on giving things up: internet scrolling, sugar, WhatsApp, alcohol, shopping, TV, whatever.

It’s also a good time of the world to talk about it, because make no mistake: colonialism and addiction share a common impulse, a common terror, and they produce the same kind of shrunken existence.

Over 15 years of escalating problem drinking and now 10 years of sobriety, I have come to understand addiction as a refusal to accept and experience life as it unfolds. It’s a terror of inhabiting the present moment, and especially (but not solely) a terror of experiencing the loss, sadness, pain, and insecurity that everyone sometimes has to feel in the present moment.

I’ve sat in countless recovery meetings over the years, listening to alcoholics share their experiences. And what invariably strikes me most is how sensitive they—we—are. These are people who feel things acutely; so acutely that at a certain point they—we—felt that we couldn’t cope anymore, and we started checking out. Often, this starts very young. Before we discovered alcohol, many of us found other ways to check out: overeating, undereating, TV addiction, internet addiction, video games, or any of the other routes of control and escape that are available to children. In my case, I was so terrified of being alone with my thoughts that I started reading myself to sleep, falling asleep with the light on, pretty much as soon as I had mastered the alphabet. Later, I see now that I got addicted to internet message boards. Before I was addicted to alcohol, I was addicted to stories and to imagined worlds.

I ended up getting sober while living in New York. I’m honestly not sure I’d have managed it if I’d still been living in England, because the drinking culture is so different here. Drinking, and drinking to excess, pervade daily life. My peers and I started drinking regularly around the age of 14. University in this country is a three-year-long socially sanctioned bender. By the time I hit adulthood, most people I knew drank daily, and though my drinking was always different—I was always looking for oblivion—it wasn’t actually *that* different. With the pub as a primary social hub and blind eyes turned all over the place, it’s always been very easy in England to fly under the radar as a functioning alcoholic.

So why does this country love getting drunk so much? If alcoholism is a condition of being unwilling to live in the present moment, why are the English so terrified of the present moment?

I’ve written before in this Substack about the origins of this nation. About how King Alfred masterminded first a military victory and then a sort of culture war that united England’s many kingdoms—all with the intention of driving out the pagan threat, the heathen wilds, in favour of “civilized” Christendom. I’ve spoken to Tim Flight about his work on the fear of nature in Anglo-Saxon England, when the country as we know it was being born. What emerges from all this evidence is a picture of a profoundly fearful people. A people who lived in a cold, hard land at the edge of the known world, and who felt themselves constantly under threat: from the weather and the unruly living world, from foreign cultures, from hardship and conquest and loss. The whole purpose of summoning a common English identity was to collectively shore up people and power against these threats. In other words, the founding mythos of this country is one of defence and of the need to vanquish any wild elements that might disrupt the land’s hard-won safety.

This is the exact same dynamic we find in the alcoholic personality. The insecure, colonizing nation and the alcoholic alike refuse to countenance risk, pain, and insecurity, instead suppressing and denying them through, respectively, state authority, expansionism, and violence; or the numbing and escape offered by excess consumption of alcohol—a form of violence to the self.

In both cases, you end up imprisoned in a shrunken version of humanity.

Because here’s the thing: if you’re a living being in a living world, there is simply no way to avoid risk, pain, and insecurity. If you’ve been born, you’re going to die, and you’re going to have your heart broken at least once before that happens.

And when you shut down to the inherent insecurity of life, you also shut down to any possibility of joy.

Since I got sober, I’ve experienced divorce and the complete disintegration of a life I’d spent a decade building. I’ve spent six months alone in the woods, grieving. I’ve lost friends. I’ve navigated life-changing health matters. And I wouldn’t change a second of it, because I’ve also experienced transformative joy and a slow, deep, unfolding sense of belonging. And what I know now is that you can’t have one without the other.

It’s no secret that we live in an age of rampant addiction. Quite aside from the opioid epidemic, there’s the proliferation of internet addiction, phone addiction, gambling addiction, and all manner of other new and rapidly evolving ways to check out.

Of course, this is a problem in and of itself. It is a tragedy that so many people are dying or living deaths in life.

It’s also a deeply political problem. Because the way through the conflicts that are ravaging the world—the way to decolonize—is through radical empathy. We have to step outside of the shrunken version of humanity that has come along with colonialism so that we are able to share in the pain and the joy and the needs of other people, human and nonhuman.

And you can’t experience radical empathy—you can’t share in another’s pain and joy—until you can feel your own pain and joy.

So if you’re right now white-knuckling your way through Dry January or some other form of abstinence—if you’ve recognized in yourself a problematic way of checking out, and resolved to give it up . . . maybe get curious about the present moment, especially when it feels uncomfortable. Especially when you most want to escape it. What is it that you’re unwilling to feel? And what joys and potential for collective liberation are you losing out on as a result?

Love,

xx Ellie