High Tolerance

I am somehow equipped to bear a lot of existential despair, uncertainty, discomfort, emotional pain and flat out misery. It's funny that one of the ways people look at alcoholics is that they are weak, that they drink out of a failure to be able to sustain pain. In fact, my experience was that alcoholism inflicted so much chronic, intense and excruciating pain on a daily basis for decades that it is a wonder I didn't aerate my skull with a bullet years ago. 

So I wonder where this fundamental capacity I seem to have for sustained agony comes from. It seems intimately connected to some weird thread of self-preservation that is at the very base of who I am. No matter how hard I used to try to blot out the awareness of my intolerable condition, I have always redlined suicide as a live option, no pun intended. I think about it, I've even researched it, but actually doing it has never seemed possible to me. I used to think of that as being chickenshit, but now I think it's just a line that's always been there for unknown reasons. Of course, in the utter despair that was the bottom I hit in alcoholism back in March of 2004, I was slyly interested in getting as fucking wasted as I possibly could and "accidentally" not waking up, and there were at least 3 times that I can identify as almost being successful, thanks in particular to a combination of high proof booze, opioids and benzodiazepams.  

But you would think that strong instincts for self preservation would couple up with self preserving behavior and with self love as well as a sense of how to live with more ease and simple happiness. But no. I am prone to sustained melancholy, pain, loneliness and anxiety that doesn't seek any anodyne at all. That's the high tolerance part. 

One thing that has been helping, in addition to the buproprion and counseling, has been that weird cognitive behavioral therapy app I have on my phone, Pacifica. In particular, identifying my mood, listing several specific feeling words and then doing, for example, a reframing exercise. I noticed last night, again, that my self talk is really hateful. I talk to myself in ways I would never tolerate someone talking to someone I love, or someone else talking to me, for that matter. So maybe there's hope for some easing of the excoriating inner landscape I often experience simply by being kinder and more compassionate to myself. It feels fake right now, but maybe behavioral therapy is all about the practice and a sort of outside in, fake it til you make it regimen. I do know that after I let fly with the self-wounding hate talk and then reframed the language, I felt better. 

There have also been times where I have experienced a light, equanimous well being that was not intense nor was it ephemeral, and that I guess the Greeks would have called eudaimonia. These times have only been available in my adult life within recovery and sobriety. They do kind of echo some of the feeling tone of my boyhood. Just rambling around, basically liking myself and not doing much of anything except enjoying the presence of being. It would be okay by me if I could wear life loosely. If I could wear my attachments like a loose garment. And if I could just enjoy consciousness and make friends with myself and my mind. It would be absolutely unfamiliar as a sustained way of life, but I would take it. Maybe it could be like a spiritual and mental retirement. I can't retire financially any time soon, but maybe I could just let go of everything, absolutely, and find a way to spend the rest of my days (however many those are) in peace, ease, simple enjoyment and freedom. 

It seems like this decision would put me into truly unknown territory. To live with the assurance that all shall be well, Julian of Norwich wise, or at least, that even if all shall not be well, what the fuck can I do about it anyway? I just have so rarely truly occupied that space that it is quite unfamiliar to me. 

Life is much more often like. 

another panel from Agony, by Mark Beyer