Making peace with alcohol, that is, norminess

Found this among my note drafts. I wrote it last winter, while having a hangover and coming home from a company retreat. It's not bad!

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Once you see it it becomes hard to unsee: the degree to which our cultures and subcultures emerge from the patterns of consumption of specific substances. Perhaps the most pervasive ones, alcohol and coffee, are the hardest to see in that light, because they make the waters we swim in.

I've felt like an outsider for most of my life, and if I think about it, some of the moments where I've felt it most acutely was when people were drinking around me and I wasn't. During such situations I'd often find fellow "others" and exchange smug comments about how "they" cannot have fun without alcohol. But at the same time I’d feel envious about not being "part of it". I'd feel like something was wrong about me, like I wasn't as social as them, as witty, as sovereign.

This dynamic would have real consequences outside of the partying. That sense of being an outsider would persist, and so would that resentment towards the people who somehow were more accepted than me, that had that mysterious charismatic something in the group dynamic.

The answer lies at hand: of course I was an outsider. I didn't participate to their ritual. I wasn't there when the substance did its thing and melded the social fabric together. When people did things that they would later regret (or forget), that would make the stories the group would tell for years to come, I was just a quiet, scoffing observer. Of course I was not part of it.

Whether we emphasize the downsides or the load bearing aspect of a substance tends to depend on our preferences and experiences. I have long overlooked how alcohol brings people together, how it puts our shadows in plain sight, how it helps people go through the hardships of life. It isn't chance that drinking wine is the foundational ritual of Christianity itself.

But let's be honest: Alcoholism and more general alcohol-driven coping and avoidance patterns are a real and serious problem in normie society. The driving dynamic, I believe, is that by completely bypassing feelings of overwhelm, hopelessness and helplessness, alcohol makes impossible the processing of grief and the healing of trauma. This makes a certain category of issues, exactly those that have to do with difficult emotions and a sense of overwhelm, enormously difficult to address in mainstream culture. You don't bring them up in conversation because you don't want to be a "downer". There is no established ritual for them, no way to regularly experience what becomes possible when we face those difficult emotions unfiltered, with no solution, no actionables and clear takeaways, and are finally delivered unto a state of receptive surrender. And so these issues get auto-pattern-patched as the stuff that is part of the rut of life and you’d be wise to just suck up and avoid dwelling on.

So it's no chance that a highly sensitive and thus easily overwhelmed and traumatized person like me had to find ways to transcend that in a different context. I had to find other forms of ecstaticness to provide what I needed most urgently: the safety to veery slowly get acquainted with the overwhelming intensity of the incredinly painful and laborious emotional patterns, long unconsciously stored in my body. In particular, through a long period of experimentation, discernment and discovery, I ended up in a scene that combines the ritualistic drinking of cacao with ecstatic dance.

While I found a new partial home, healing and opportunity for togetherness, my respect for some of the most agentic acquaintances in normieland (despite their unapologetic aversion towards anything weird and touchy-feely - the exact mirror of my scoffing attitude I described earlier) made it impossible for me to think that I had found the right way, and that they were just wrong. I had to go through the process of coming to respect their ritual, their means of transcendence.

In the end of the day, the right approach, I believe, is to give these substances their place in an evolving ecology of ritual consumption. By putting them in relation, we can compensate for their respective weaknesses, and by being more ritualistic, that is, conscious and deliberate, about it, we can obviate most of their shadow impact.

This is the common ground between normies and weirdos: we are all part of different substance cults. This shared underlying cultural grammar can help us bridge that deep sense of difference and incompatibility, and start a dialogue.