The Ghost In The House

Take a look through my archives and note how many of my posts talk about how heavily I drink. If you will, you might start to assume that I’m an alcoholic. I’m not. Not even remotely, but the symptoms are all there.

After all, 15% of the population now self-identifies as alcoholics. Might as well be trendy and hip, especially if your doctor is willing to tell you need to be part of a 12-step program.

Here are some questions on the standard alcoholic quiz.

Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but only lasted for a couple of days?
Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking– stop telling you what to do?
Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in the hope that this would keep you from getting drunk?
Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble

Did you answer two of those as yes? Congrats. Welcome to the hip and trendy world of alcoholism, where you can talk about yourself and your “addiction” all day in order to get some of that attention you so desperately crave. Hell, maybe you can meet a hot dude in your AA meeting…and then hook up for drinks afterward. Because that’s all it is. It’s a club filled with platitudes and it means nothing.

Unless you actually meet an alcoholic.

We had a ghost when I was a kid. It wandered the halls of our house at night, bumping, and swearing and banging into things. All of the bottles of mouthwash in our house were empty. The ghost did it at night. There would be random holes in the walls and I’d wake up and my mom was crying. The ghost put the holes in the walls and the ghost made my mother cry.

I hated that ghost, but I was only five years old. Who the hell was I to stand up against a ghost?

The years went on. The ghost did things he didn’t remember. Sometimes, the ghost was happy. It would make us French toast in the morning or sausages and French fries at night. But no matter how temporarily nice that ghost might be, I was always afraid of it. Always.

Sometimes, I would wander down into the garage. When I was feeling particularly brave, I’d take a peek at the ghost. He didn’t look like a ghost. He was just a handsome, green-eyed man, drinking an 18 pack of cheap beer while he stared at the wall.

But he still scared the shit out of me. His eyes were so empty and it was clear he’d stopped caring about anything a long time before I got there. He was going through the motions of life.

The end of our ghost came on a night in early spring. I can’t remember the date. I just remember the ghost came raging. The ghost came screaming. He was angry, looking to pick a fight, and my tough as nails mother finally had enough. I remember her picking me up, carrying me out of the house while the neighbors looked on, telling the ghost “If you want them, you’ll have to go through me”.

We went away for a bit. We left the ghost in our old house all alone. I guess that made the ghost rethink his life choices, because the ghost went to rehab.

When I went to rehab to visit him, he wasn’t a ghost anymore. He was my father again. He was a quiet, serious man, who could still throw out a snappy one-liner and could help you with just about any math problem. He could do the mortgage interest in his head and rewire a house in 15 minutes. He’d watch stupid movies with me late at night, crack one-liners as we watched them, and laugh at mine.

But what he’d done to himself, to his family and to my mother, had damaged him. He would never be who he was again. As much as I loved him, I knew he’d never really be my dad anymore.   My mom knew he’d never be the boy she met.

It was a bit like meeting someone after they woke up from a coma. The world has changed, but you’re pretty sure they haven’t. But you have, and all you can do is try to make them fit into your life again.

It doesn’t always work.

My dad was a real alcoholic. He’s not one of your trendy, new age ones doing this for attention. For the first eight years of my life, my father was a ghost. He barely existed, but for the alcohol fueling him. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t my dad.

He was just the scary ghost that lived in my house.  He lost his family over it. My dad spent most of the important years in my life being drunk, then he spent the rest recovering from being drunk. He never got the chance to know me.

That’s a damn shame, because I think he really would have liked me.

That’s what real alcoholism is. It’a disease that takes away your body and turns you into someone else. The booze takes over and you become a ghost of your former self. You do things you regret, because you don’t think you’re really there. To an alcoholic, life is an abstract concept and the feelings of others don’t matter.

It changes you.

It’s not a trend. It’s not something you sign in on because all your friends are doing it or you had one regretful night at spring break. There are no numbers that show you’re an alcoholic. There is no appropriate number of drinks.

There’s only this. Has drinking changed you? Has it turned you into someone you don’t want to be? Do you not even remember who you used to be anymore? Has it gotten to the point where your kids won’t care when you die?

Then, you have a problem. It’s not about how many boxes you check off in some predefined test. It’s not about the number of drinks you have in a day.

It’s about your life and how you feel about it. If you’re showing up to be trendy, to talk about your new drinking problem like it’s an episode of the Kardashian’s, back the fuck away. Stop faking addiction in an effort to be interesting.

Because you’re not addicted to booze. You’re addicted to attention. I only wish there was an attention whores anonymous.

I’m not an alcoholic. Not saying that out of denial, or attention seeking, I’m just saying what I know to be true. I’m not and I’m pretty sure most of these people going to AA aren’t either. They’re feigning it because they’re trendy attention seeking whores.

My dad was an alcoholic. He let booze take over his life. He had a compulsion to drink. When he finally stopped, it was too late to take back everything he’d done.

Alcoholism isn’t a trend. It’s a disease. It’s a disease you never recover from and the people around you…they never recover from it either. So stop treating it like a fucking slap bracelet. It’s not a fad.

It’s life. And sometimes, life really, really sucks.