Beer and Recovery

This is a sequel to this essay, which I wrote for Arc Digital two years ago.

The defining characteristic of anorexia is eating far too little for far too long, but behind that process is a desire for control. When I realised that I had to “recover” I decided that I was going to control my recovery down to the last detail.

Let me get something out of the way. This is probably not an optimal way to recover. I am not recommending it. But for me it must somehow have seemed essential. Perhaps it was.

So, I worked out that if I ate X amounts of calories I would gain Y amount of weight. I pondered what would make a healthy balance of macros. I planned out every meal I intended to eat. Breakfast. Snack. Lunch. Snack. Dinner. Snack.

I ate meals at the same times every day. In general, I ate the same meals. I ate so many lentils that I might have single-handedly kept the Saskatchewanian economy afloat. I ate so much tuna that I could have started glowing. What led me to decide that cooking porridge at 1am every night was a good and healthy habit to adopt is beyond me but it made sense at the time.

In a way, it worked. I did gain weight. The most principle of recovering from anorexia is eating food. I stopped feeling cold all the time. I stopped getting weird down across my skin (a symptom of malnourishment). Mentally, too, I had enough energy and curiosity again that I could finish my degree and take up a couple of hobbies.

But I hadn’t quite recovered. I’d recovered just enough. There is such a thing as a high-functioning alcoholic and I suppose I was a high-functioning anorexic. I ate just enough to be just big enough. I still wasted a lot of time thinking about food and a lot of opportunities because they did not cohere with my regimen. (I also never would have coped if I had not been able to live with my parents.)

Yet I had to do something with my life, so I went abroad. A total change of surroundings seemed attractive. It was! Still, I had not left my neuroses at the border. They had come along for the ride, and loitered in the background – a dull, dispiriting and depressing presence.

I had come full circle and begun to hate myself for how weak and thin I was, but I worried that if I loosened my grip over the one part of my life that I had mastered, everything would collapse.

What changed me was drinking. That sounds perverse – and it is! – but I don’t mean the consumption of booze itself as much as the social ritual. On one of my occasion trips to a bar – where I would have one drink, do some writing, and go home – I made a friend who, by happy chance, was a barman. If you move abroad, making friends with a barman is a “life hack”. They can introduce you to everyone who comes into a bar.

It was great! In a week, I met more people in Poland than I had in a year.

In practical terms, drinking blew apart my claustrophobic little existence. Counting calories was futile when I could not quite recall if I had drunk five pints or eight. Getting home at different times at night - or in the morning - meant waking up at different times as well. My system of self-control broke down amid alcohol-fuelled upheaval.

More significantly, I was having fun. Sad as I’m sure this sounds to people who, quite sensibly, got the drinking bug out of their system in their late teens – and it was! – I had never had such fun before. Why had I been so intent on adhering to a strict and miserable routine when spontaneity and randomness were so much more enjoyable?

Well, you cannot keep that up for long. With drinking, one either becomes so random and spontaneous that one ends up in hospital or prison or it becomes a strict and miserable routine itself (with the same ultimate destination). My friends and I danced merrily towards the edge of alcoholism but got swept away by more-or-less adult responsibilities before we could transgress it. Thanks to our guardian angels for that (and perhaps a narrow, deeply hidden seam of common sense).

Again, I want to make a clear point of saying that this was both a long and dangerous route to recovery. The last thing I want to do is hold up my life – or, indeed, any aspect of my life – as an ideal to be followed. Yet I do not think that it is irresponsible to say that getting over serious mental illness demands finding that which makes you feel glad to be alive. That is not something we can be taught. It is not the natural state of being, all divergences from which are abnormal. One has to find it for oneself.

Of course, what made me glad to be alive was not the booze but the people and the places I enountered at the time, and the confidence I felt when I was around them. Still, that was what it took, as silly as that it is. I feel bad even writing that. Yet prose should not obscure the messiness of things in pursuit of the elegant and educative. A lot of experiences, good and bad, don’t turn out like a teacher, a priest or a poet would like them to. They simply are.

Now, seven years on, I hope that for all my faults I am not especially vulnerable to extremes of asceticism or hedonism. I value self-control again, especially when it comes to work, and beat myself up a bit if I am not as productive as I could be. But when I was sick that control existed for its own sake. It had no output. Now I can direct it towards unusual and exciting creative and professional opportunities. There are people who work a lot harder than I do, on far more significant things, but I hope it is not glib for me to say that if we are going to be tough on ourselves it should be towards the creation of some product, not mere pain. As for hedonism, well - that has its place occasionally. But I’m 31.