Why did you love alcohol more than me?

Yesterday I asked people to share questions they'd always been too scared to ask. One of them was, "Why did you love alcohol more than me?" I've tried, with permission, to answer that question.

There once lived a prophetess called the Cumaean Sibyl who wrote prophesies on oak leaves. She sold her words in exchange for eternal life. She made a grave error with her wish, though: She did not ask for eternal youth, so the centuries passed and passed. She aged and shriveled and became smaller and smaller. In the end, there was nothing left of her but her voice. She was no longer quite in the world.

The villagers put her in a basket and hung her from a tree. Sometimes the neighbourhood boys would stop by to ask what she wanted. Her answer was always the same: “I want to die.”

When T.S. Elliot wrote about the Sibyl, he said,

“I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing.”

I didn’t love alcohol more than I loved you. It’s just that I was no longer quite in the world. I was stuck somewhere between living and dying, and I could not speak, and my eyes failed. The distance didn’t mean I loved you less than narcotics. My body just wasn’t capable of existing in your world.

Addiction isn’t a choice you make. It’s a disease you try to survive. We use because we’ve never learned how to feel safe in this world. We don’t know how to survive our feelings, and we don’t know how to live productive lives. We’re always half-shrivelled Sibyls in baskets crying, “I want to die.”

Your lack was never the problem. Mine was. The story of you and I was never about your failing, but mine. It was never about your value. It was all about my disease, my slumped up body hanging from a branch of some old tree not being able to speak and knowing nothing.

You could say active addiction and love can never coexist. One lives on ordinary terrain. The other lives in a basket hanging from a tree. Addicts simply don’t know how to live on ordinary terrain. It’s something we have to learn over many years of recovery and many hours of back-breaking work.

We can learn, of course. We do recover, but it takes a lot for us to try. The idea of real life and real feelings is terrifying—so much so that most of us go onto the bitter end: “Jail, institutions, and death.”

Addiction counsellors identify addicts' potential for recovery by their “gift of desperation.” The saddest stories often yield the most lasting recoveries because the idea of existing in your world seems impossible. Nine in 10 addicts relapse before their fifth year, but if we are desperate, we have better odds. We are, of course, tasked with the responsibility of working for those recoveries, and so we work.

We learn we were capable of existing in your world after all. This lesson will shock us. If we’d known we were capable of it, our love would have been enough.