Running around trying to find certainty

brainworms, ear worms, revenge, grievances, the needle and the damage done

I am not exaggerating when I say that a few days after stopping drinking I often find myself humming a merry tune when I stroll along my charming street with my excellent little dog by my side. I used to always quite like having a little melody to hum (not being a great whistler), and if a tune had the persistence or inclination to linger for a day or two, it was quite welcome.

But when you are in the grip of alcohol, the same little snatch of song takes on a barbed or acidic quality. It grates on your inner ear, or scrapes along the grooves of your brain with a kind insane repetitious compulsion, like a nursery rhyme in a horror film.

The relapse I am just coming out of has not been objectively horribly destructive, but it has been distressing and exhausting. I found myself listening to a song that I had always quite liked

'Johnny and Mary' by Robert Palmer, and it looped and slithered through my brain nonstop for several days. I find it strange, and strangely touching, and very catchy.

But I was fucking sick of it. I think when you are operating on alcohol, you need not be drunk to be affected. Any thought or melody, or phrase can find a purchase on your anxious little heart and lay siege to it. (The word obsession is related to the Latin word obsideo which means to lay siege.)

And a siege, and an obsession, are by nature things that are unresolved. An addiction can never be resolved. Somebody I hated died last year, and I found out about it a few months later. I had often wondered what would happen if this person became sick and asked me for my forgiveness. I had always pictured myself refusing it. I wondered how I would feel if they died without this confrontation and I was surprised to find myself unambivalently happy that they no longer exist in this world, but I did have to think back to the closest thing I had to a last encounter with them, and frame that internally as a kind of resolution.

I had another serious falling out with somebody I had considered a friend about eighteen months ago. I have no desire to be reconciled with this person but I also do not really wish them ill. I have rehearsed conversations about my grievance against them; I have had angry, witty monologues against them with my dog as we walk through the tranquil woods; I have played out scenarios in which I triumph with dignity and panache. I have been kept from sleep by a sudden adrenalin shot of anger against them. And finally I had to realise that there was something about this falling out that was affecting me too much, and that whatever this thing was it probably had more to do with my response to the offense against me than the original offense itself.

Maybe the irresoluble nature of an addiction is a part of what keeps it gnawing at you. I know that more than once in the last couple of years I have come out of a few days' drinking and felt much better but then felt as though I really needed to show alcohol who is boss by having like one civilised pint in the afternoon like a normal person and returning to sobriety.

That's a stupid waste of time, and obsessing over a slight or an insult is also not a great use of a person's mental and moral resources

So you step away from the drink, resign yourself to not getting the buzz of righteous satisfaction you think you deserve from the friend that wronged you, remove the needle from the groove of whatever little earworm is skipping scratchily through the tendrils of your anxious little brain.

And then, when you have abandoned the idea that the melody will resolve itself, you can enjoy it for what it is, and

skip down to the boulangerie for a chausson cerise or whatever with a merry tune on your lips, your little dog by your side.

I recommend this as an almost eternally repetitive groove that is also very nutritious for the soul: