It is an unusually cold December morning. The thermometer says it is -21C. The sky is dark blue. Here and there a star flickers. It has been more than 16 years since my last drink – my wife and three children have never seen me touch alcohol – but still I remind myself every morning that waking up refreshed, relaxed and with the people I love is not something to take for granted.
Everything is white. The trees seem to be covered in icing. I hold my five-year-old boy’s hand and lead him to the car. We are on our way to preschool. This is all perfectly ordinary to him. The snow squeaks under our feet. It sounds like we are walking on potato starch.
The first time I got drunk was a bright summer’s night in a northern suburb of Stockholm. I was 13, hanging out with my mates from the high-rises. We had got hold of a couple of six-packs and forced the lukewarm beer down our throats. After a while I felt a rush of wellbeing. I had always felt left out and here, suddenly, was a feeling of pure belonging, an unexpected and undeserved joy. I gave a birch tree a heartfelt hug and felt deeply understood. I decided that come what may, I would continue drinking.
It was a blind love. In my intoxication the world opened up to me and I wanted more. And in the run-up to Christmas and new year it was even more glorious because then everyone else was drinking too and my own drinking seemed, for a short while, quite normal.
In my early 20s my first novel was published, and for a few years I felt like I had cracked the code. Perhaps I could actually make this work. Writing by day and drinking at night – a seductive combination for someone who wanted to be seen but didn’t dare to reveal his true self. Could it get any better? I had always kept my jar of emotions firmly shut. Writing and drinking cracked it open and I felt free.
But as the repercussions began to hit harder, I lost control. The alcohol that had once been my gateway to companionship was now leading me into isolation.
The preschool is a short drive out from the city and on our way the sun comes up. In the passenger seat my boy is eating his ham sandwich and a clementine. A faint waft of citrus fills the car. There is something in every move he makes – the way he raises the sandwich to his mouth and slowly chews – that makes me happy. It is not that I’m sentimental; rather, it is a feeling of pure presence, of not wanting to be anywhere else.
Alcoholism is a public disease and yet those of us who suffer from it are often stigmatised, filled with shame and guilt. Many deny their problem obstinately and bear their misery to the very end. Writers are said to be more likely to abuse alcohol than the population as a whole. The old myth about creative people tending towards addiction seems to hold true. Or is it rather that addicts are more likely to be drawn to the artistic professions?
Drinking culture in Sweden is strongly defined by alcohol prohibition and regulations. Systembolaget – the state-owned alcohol retailer, which is the only place you can buy a bottle of wine to go with your dinner at home – is still closed on Sundays and bank holidays. Alcohol is expensive. And yet there is nothing more Swedish than boozing yourself into a stupor at new year or midsummer and, for that matter, any other holiday.
Maybe alcohol gives us the courage to approach each other in these northerly latitudes. That was certainly the case for me.
Alcoholism is a disease of loneliness. It is a journey of escape and self-deception, of self-centred fear. A fixation on “me”, on the glass dome over existence that makes you feel alone even when you are surrounded by others.
That is why I loved to drink. The alcohol softened something hard in me. For a fleeting moment I was free from the sense that everything in the entire universe existed in a circle and I was standing outside looking in.
My greatest fear was that the alcohol would not be enough, that it would not do its job and that who I was, all my frailty, would be revealed. I was afraid that the trivial secrets I carried inside me and was prepared to take to my grave would become known and that I would be left alone.
And the flipside of the momentary communion offered by alcohol was, for me, just emptiness.
Although I no longer drink, the fears remain. But they have changed. Now it is the fear that I won’t have enough money or get enough sleep. Fear that I haven’t got enough friends, that my career isn’t progressing as I had hoped or that I won’t be able to write any more books. Fear that I won’t be good enough. These fears that alcohol once kept at bay now bloom like thistles in a summer meadow.
This is the essence of this disease of spiritual failing: never getting enough of what one believes one needs. But there is no separation. It is impossible to stand outside of the circle. That is just a lie I embraced to protect myself. Everything is part of a greater whole. How could it be otherwise? And still my ego tells me to snatch at love and guzzle in secret, that there is not enough attention for everyone.
The alcohol was just a symptom. I am the problem. After all, I was always sober when I started drinking. I went looking for the opening that alcohol provides, but whenever I opened the jar, the lid was screwed back on, tighter each time and eventually so tight that it could not be opened again. And there I stood, confused and in the midst of a loneliness like no other.
I was terrified when I gave up my fight against alcohol, because I knew no other way. But there was a way out, an unexpected clearing in the forest that only somebody who was as lost as I was could discover.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is togetherness.
As I walk to the preschool gate with my son he lets go of my hand, rushing ahead in the snow while I crunch slowly behind. Just before he vanishes around the corner he turns around and looks at me. Columns of breath rise from our mouths in the cold air. For him it is natural. For me it is an unexpected and undeserved joy.
Gunnar Ardelius is a Swedish author
