A couple of years ago I was staying at a friend’s house with my then-girlfriend, the now-famed N. I was a lot drunker than I had intended, as was usual at that time. When I woke up, I realised I had wet my pants. That was, embarrassingly, only the first in a series of such incidents at the time. That’s embarrassing, sure, but that’s not the painful and shameful thing to admit.
That is this:
My jeans were dark and the stain invisible. Rather than go home and wash up, like any normally mortified person would, I went along with everyone to the pub and had drink after drink, sat there in cold trousers. I even went for lunch (with, of course, a pint) in the same clothes. I didn’t care about anything except my next drink. I didn’t care about anything else, not my girlfriend, not my friends, not the actual lunch as I made it try to taste like something. I only wanted to be drunk. That achieved, I got home, took off the clothes and drank some wine, failing to shower.
I don’t know what on earth has made me share this story. It is one of the things I return to when I feel ashamed or guilty about my alcohol abuse. One of the things that makes me feel most like an alcoholic and ****, there I’ve said it.
Soon after, like days later, N and I broke up. I never got to talk about it with my counsellor, nor the final violent incident that led to the break up. I never got to tell him how far I was slipping. He would have known the right thing to say and I would not have liked it, and perhaps we would have parted on bad terms so maybe it’s a good thing.