Losing An Identity, Yet Not Picking Up A New One

8/9/2015

My identity was wrapped up in my drinking. I was a drinker, and for a long while that was a positive identity to me: it signified I enjoyed life, I was fun, adventurous, edgy even. As the weeks and months tick by I'm shedding both the positive and negative of that drinker identity.

But in the void of that lost identity doesn't seem to be a new identity forming. I don't feel a kindred connection with non-drinkers/light drinkers and I have yet to meet anyone in the flesh that is in recovery. Drinkers have clear edges, you either can hold your own belly up to the bar or not. And once you prove yourself and are in the club, you really can do no wrong...all bad behavior is excused or made into a good story--and you are always welcome into the circle. That part of the identity is what I miss and I don't think sense of belonging occurs in the non-drinker side of things in the same way.

I am wrapping my mind around this drinking identity as being another discarded costume I have worn as part of the process of becoming who I am. It served its purpose, and I really mean that, to get me here...right here...in my life. Maybe there was an easier way to get here, but probably not.

3 Comments

harry link

9/18/2015 02:49:03 am

I completely, 100% agree with everything you have written above, and find myself in a similar boat. Its a beautiful thing to be surrounded by a group of people whose behaviour validates your own, until you aren't surrounded by them, and your behaviour is no longer validated. I like to look at my drinking identity as being a false identity - drinking for me started as a way of nullifying a painful adolescence, and only 10 years later, now that I'm looking to remove the drink to find out what is below, am I finding the real me. having said that, I can get incredibly angry sometimes - woe is me, why me? why can't I drink like a normal person, I would give anything to drink like a normal person. Ironic, seeing as a normal person wouldn't make that statement.

Keep with it, it will come and I hope it does for me, but I get it.

I Will Start

9/23/2015 03:02:22 pm

Hi Harry,

You summarized quite well the swing of emotions that comes with breaking up with booze. It really is a bad relationship that continues to shape us even after the love affair is over.

Another month has passed for me and I still am here, without a strong replacement identity. But maybe that is the key: I don't need a replacement because it is just another restraint. I've been restraining my identity since adolescence. Maybe this is a grown up move: not to have a single word define my whole being.

Responding to your comment helped me think through this further, thank you Harry!

Where are you with all of this?

Harry link

9/29/2015 04:12:23 am

Haha glad it helped, it really can be such a mind f*ck thinking over relationships with alcohol, often leaves me questioning what is real and what isn't.

Currently, i am 25 days sober as I was just tired of always bitching but never making the move - I have always been a 'planned abstinence' kind of boy - 'that party, those friends, that thing' that always required booze in order for me to turn up p genuinely never occured to me to maybe go sober and just see how they was.

So thats where I am now - I'm turning up sober, and trying not to skim over the fine-points of my life. Identity wise I have found a need to fill time that I used to spend at the pub, or navigating public transport whilst wasted afterwards, with something else - so I'm gyming and running more, and did my 2nd half marathon yesterday. I'm tired of only being able to name fun facts about myself that involve drinking (can strawpeedo a bottle of wine in one, can skull a stein of lager in one, featured on bbc news twice etc) so I'm just kind of excited to see where the reinvention can take me.

Like everybody these days (all the cool kids anyway!) I also write a blog so please feel free to check out my story so far - www.speaking-easy.blogspot.com and thanks for sharing, and please keep on doing so! I have been sober for less than a month and its good to know that people do make it to further down the line.

Harry

Losing An Identity, Yet Not Picking Up A New One

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