Poverty Safari, page 19
The midday sun caught in the drapes, dust dancing in the beams breaking through the tears in the fabric, as they hung there lifeless over dirty windows. The room filled with an amber glow that gave the illusion of warmth. A belt tightening around a forearm before a syringe is plunged in. Most people will never witness such a thing let alone see their own mother do it. Most will instead ponder how people could allow themselves to become so bent out of shape that this kind of life could ever seem appealing. In fact, the best some of our commentariat could come up with at the time of Trainspotting’s release was a debate about whether it was too vulgar and whether it glamourised drugs. Talk about missing the point. But like many of the films and music videos that depict violence and drugs in hyper-realistic ways, Trainspotting provoked mixed feelings in me because it evoked my past. A past from which I was struggling to escape, sat there in my friend’s house in an edgy euphoria, as the dawn raged against the back of those wonderful orange curtains.
The first time I took ecstasy was the first time in my life I had ever been free of fear. As the drug washed over me, cleansing me of resentment, anxiety and self-concern, all I can remember was being deeply preoccupied with the happiness of others. I had never felt so emotionally free, mentally agile and socially uninhibited. This was a peace I had never known. We talked, laughed, drank and smoked long into the night and when dawn broke, the adventure continued. My friend, who’d given me my first pill, was a purveyor of substances and as the morning kicked in he seemed to know exactly what we should do and, more to the point, what we should take. We returned to his house where we sipped on ice-cold beer, chain-smoked and listened to the audio of Night of the Living Dead. We imagined that we were the last two people alive in the zombie apocalypse and that the infected, swarming around outside, might break in at any moment and sink their teeth into our flesh. It never occurred to us at the time that we might be the ones coming down with something.
One of the reasons people become hooked on drugs so quickly is because coming off them is such a soul-destroying experience. And that’s before you even become addicted. I’m not even talking about withdrawal symptoms. The term ‘come-down’ doesn’t do it justice. ‘Come-down’ suggests there is something gentle or gradual about the experience. In truth, it’s like breaking up in the atmosphere of a planet composed entirely of fear. Your ‘come-down’ is relative to the grandiosity of whichever delusion you were trying to sustain. Some people don’t get bad come-downs because they are not running away from anything when they get high. For them, getting high is just an extension of their contentment. But for me, alcohol and drugs were a ticket out of my own head, an escape from a racing mind ravaged by anxiety, fear, resentment and insecurity. The hypervigilance that had helped me navigate my difficult childhood was now turning like a screw in the back of my waking mind, making it almost impossible for me to feel relaxed. Drugs relieved me of this burden. They soothed those difficult emotions. They did exactly what they were designed to do: they killed the pain. And they were so effective that life without them quickly became too difficult to bear. Before long, a life without drink or drugs was too abstract to contemplate.
I remember the very next week after my first ecstasy experience, being unable to settle as we waited in the corner of the nightclub for the dealer to arrive. The place felt empty and cold, the people aloof and distant. Some dealers are young and dweebish, others are hard and unhinged. But once you’ve developed a drug habit, none of that matters. You will go to whoever has the drugs, wherever they may be, no matter the risk. From the bleak high-rises of a Paisley housing scheme to the luxurious tenements of the West End, no hour was too late and no price was too much when we needed to get high. Recapturing that feeling of pure, unfiltered connection overrides all other concerns.
‘What if he doesn’t come? Where else will I get pills? How can I enjoy myself without them?’ These became the questions preoccupying my every thought. Only a week before, I had tried ecstasy for the first time and felt like I was going to die of depression when I came down. But the second I recovered, all I wanted to do was get high again. It was as if my mind could not retain the memory of how horrible I felt afterwards, or the peripheral cost of going on a three-day bender. Without drugs, it was like the colour had been drained from the world. Without alcohol or drugs, I felt alone and afraid but when I knew they were on the way, or they were pumping through my system, the breaking dawn, a piece of music or a friend’s unsolicited kindness would set my soul on fire. When you’re high, you suddenly realise that all you ever have is the moment you are in. That nothing beyond that moment will ever exist. Contrary to many of the myths about drugs, they can have a profound, value-changing impact on a person’s perception of themselves and the world. But that undeniable utility is, like all novelty, time-limited. There comes a point when there is nothing left of value to extract from the experience, when the drugs begin to insist on themselves regardless of how they make you feel. And as the reality you are running from gets more chaotic, and the delusions you are willing to entertain begin to deepen, you become isolated in the community of drinkers and users where such behaviour is acceptable. Things that would have shocked you in the past, whether it be lying to people or stealing money, become routine as addiction and the dishonesty that feeds it leave you morally deformed.
I recall one dreary Sunday morning, walking with my friend on the obligatory off-sales run after a night of partying. Somehow, no matter how much alcohol I purchased the night before, I would always run out at about the same time in the morning. We shared a tin of lager and chain-smoked while deeply engrossed in conversation. Having been up all night taking MDMA, mushrooms and then ketamine, we decided to drop a jelly before leaving for the shop. I realised it was kicking in when I tripped, fell into some bins and started laughing. This family of drugs (opiates) was my personal favourite because they made me feel really mellow and chilled out, able to think clearly and express myself precisely the way I wanted to. The fire in my chest petered out, the butterflies in my stomach fluttered away and I became acutely aware of how every muscle in my body was tense and knotted. My entire posture completely changed when I was on these drugs. They gave me a sneaking glimpse of the kind of person I could be when I wasn’t anxious or stressed. When I took these ‘downers’ I found it much easier to complete simple tasks like housework or running errands, things I’d normally procrastinate over because they filled me with anxiety. When I was on downers, I found it much easier to make phone calls and open letters. All the things I veered away from – or ignored completely – because they stressed me out, were a lot easier when I was high. I realised that I enjoyed being among people and that I wasn’t as reclusive as I had believed. I also realised that opiates and alcohol were a nice mix.
But that Sunday morning was a good example of how a person can cross the threshold into a far more dangerous place, while still believing they are okay. Having just fallen into a bin, helped up by my friend, we were now waiting in a close, next to the off-sales, having arrived ten minutes early. We continued drinking and smoking, all the while believing ourselves to be upstanding members of the community. I think I even pissed in the close before we left. While we were all wrapped up in our fantasy of being two nonconformist renegades, valiantly swimming against a stream of wage slaves, we couldn’t see that we were really the walking dead. We had no insight into what we had become. There we were, stood in someone else’s property, having forced the door to gain access, talking loudly, smoking cigarettes and urinating, just to pass the time before getting our next cargo. Had I walked past people doing the exact same thing, my first reaction would be to judge them harshly and assume they were just junkies. But when it’s you, there’s surprisingly little awareness of the reality of what is going on. When you’re stood there, you have a rich and textured context for yourself. It never occurs to you that you might be the junkie, or the ned or the selfish, dishonest, absentee brother and son. It’s always someone else – never you.
The reality of my life was in stark contrast to the delusion I was entertaining. I had no job, had dropped out of education completely and was going weeks and months without contacting my family. I was on state benefits, preferring to delude myself that I had a mysterious mental illness when the majority of my problems were directly related to the fact I was a drunk and a drug addict. I was showing very little concern for anyone outside of my own narrow circle of drinkers and users and when my wee granny used to phone me, saying she was worried, I would get irritated and chastise her for interfering. Once I even accused her of taking her loneliness out on me. When it came to my friends, who never challenged my drinking – at least not at this point – then I had all the time in the world. But everyone else in my life was an afterthought, just like my responsibilities. My sense of victimhood closed me off from reality behind a wall of delusional self-justification. But had you told me that back then, I’d have gone through you faster than a bottle of Buckfast on an empty stomach. It was disorientating to confront the possibility that I was beginning to resemble everything I used to hate – so I didn’t.
Instead, I burrowed deeper into the trenches of denial. At one point, I accidently smuggled drugs into a prison without even realising. The Valium, lodged in the lining of my trousers, wrapped in tinfoil, kept setting off the metal detector at the main gate. With a queue forming behind me, and unable to ascertain what was triggering the alarm, the guards let me through. On my walk into the prison, where I was due to work with young people with drug problems, I located the pills by sheer chance. But rather than shock or anxiety, or some semblance of self-awareness about the multiple dangers I was in, I felt a massive sense of relief and immediately ran to a toilet and took them all. Other times I would drink on the job, vanishing for five minutes here and there to take a swig of booze in a nearby toilet. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if I was working in a warehouse, but most of my work was in the community with young people to whom I had a duty of care. The fact I couldn’t see what a terrible example I was setting – and what a complete fraud I was – was perhaps a clue to the true depth of delusion one must entertain to continue feeding an addiction.
One day I received a call informing me that my granny had been rushed to hospital. I was working on a BBC programme – funnily enough, about young people binge-drinking. After work, I visited her in hospital and straight away I could see she was in a bad way. The next time I visited, I took a letter in which I had written my final goodbye to her. Nobody really knew what would happen but I had a feeling she didn’t have long left. A few days later, we were told that she was going to be okay. Everyone was delighted with the news. But a few days before she was due to come home she contracted a hospital infection and became critically ill. Doctors advised the family to make their way to the hospital as soon as possible to say goodbye. But I didn’t go. Despite the song and dance I had made only four years prior about not being able to hold my dying mother’s hand one last time, here I was being given the option to sit by my granny’s deathbed and say my piece. But I didn’t go. This was the woman who practically raised me, but as she lay dying in a hospital ward, I was cowering at home, hiding behind a bottle, making excuses to explain why I could not attend. When the truth was, I didn’t go because it would have meant I had to stop drinking for an hour.
That is the nightmare of addiction. And right at the core of it all was no longer simply pain or emotional trauma, as I often told myself, but a deep and malignant selfishness and lack of concern for the needs of others. An inability to see beyond my own pain, my own narrow worldview. Even my politics became no more than an extension of the personal resentments I used to justify my behaviour. I wouldn’t get sober until I accepted that much of who I thought I was, including some of my deeply held convictions, were, in fact, self-serving and delusional – if they had even existed at all. Veering so close to self-destruction, I would have to become willing to confront the unthinkable idea that who I thought I was and what I believed about myself and the world was false.
29
The Moral Landscape
WE LIKE TO take a lot of credit for our beliefs – even the ones we inherited that we did almost nothing to obtain. We wear those second-hand values like badges of honour, signalling to those around us that we are informed people of substance and principle, as opposed to that other sorry lot. That other lot, whose only function is providing the perfect absolute against which we, the enlightened, define ourselves. A slew of terms like ‘loony lefty’, ‘Tory scum’ or more recently slurs like ‘social justice warrior’ have become commonplace, deployed to reduce the groups with whom we disagree to a more manageable size. Dismissing challenges to our beliefs is as reflexive as blinking or breathing, because an unchallenged belief is easier to retain. Sticking to our guns, at the expense of all other considerations, appears to be the aim of the game.
But what if you are privately reconsidering your position on an issue? What if new information has come to light? What if some life experience has profoundly altered your perception or what if your interests realign? Maybe you’ve gone through an intellectual growth spurt having recently escaped the cannabis-scented smoke plume of your inebriated, cliché-ridden 20s? Maybe you’ve met a new partner or managed to escape the gravity of a toxic social circle? At various points in life, change becomes unavoidable. Where we exercise choice is in the extent to which we resist it. We all know what sticking to your principles looks like, but what about the process of coming to terms with the fact your beliefs have changed? That you are growing up and becoming a different person. Some people have children and others have near-death experiences. Some get offered a new job and others meet their soulmate. For me, getting sober, learning to stay sober and understanding why I was so unhappy has been a profound and life-altering process. So much so that it would probably take more effort to pretend that I haven’t changed than it would to simply embrace all that is different. Though I’d be lying if I said I’m not aware that this has placed me at odds with many people I used to call friends or allies.
When going through such a fundamental shift in your thinking, everything in your life is on the table for review. Everything you think you are and everything you thought you used to be. This root and branch assessment, which I resisted stubbornly for years, was something I eventually had to submit to in order that I learn to live sober. And you can’t truly know yourself without understanding what motivates your politics.
What I began to realise, as I peeled back the layers of pretension and self-justification laid down over a period of ten years, was that my political principles were not quite the beacon of selfless integrity and virtue I had long imagined they were. Quite the opposite in fact.
I’m sure I’m not just speaking for myself when I say that my left-wing beliefs were something I inherited, much like one inherits a title or a religion. While many of these beliefs have served me well and have benefits for wider society, had I been born and raised in a community where another ideology was prevalent, like Christianity or Conservatism, I’d likely have adopted that instead – and felt as strongly about it.
The fact that our beliefs are as much derived from blind chance as from choice or integrity doesn’t stop us walking around with an unearned sense of moral superiority. Or is that just me? Difficult as it is to admit, if most of us really examine our beliefs beyond the platitudes we spout in public and read between the lines of our own hubris, we are likely to find several elements of pretention at play. Values we claim are for the benefit of others are often, conveniently, also for the benefit of ourselves. Take socialism, for example. Socialism, as far as I understand, is about providing a decent quality of life for everyone in society. But if I’m honest, that wasn’t always my main motivation for being a socialist. Not really, if I genuinely examine my motives. Really, I just didn’t like being poor. I felt excluded by society and culture, blamed the middle class and decided I wanted to rearrange society so that I wasn’t at the bottom. I may have entertained the notion that it was about the wellbeing of other people but in the privacy of my own mind, it was about improving the conditions of my own life. It just so happened that there were lots of other people who wanted the same thing and our individual self-interest aligned, creating the comforting illusion we were engaging in collective altruism.
Yet I genuinely believed that because I was a socialist, this meant I was more moral and compassionate than, say, a social democrat or a libertarian. Essentially, I adopted the first set of beliefs I was exposed to and never bothered to investigate any further than my native ideological plantation.
Social media has given us a public platform to transmit our beliefs. Our threads and statuses, where we announce our opinions and condemn ‘that other lot’ are now logged and retrievable for all time. Everyone appears to be very sure of what they believe and that their beliefs are the right ones. But one thing you don’t see a lot of on social media is people humbly announcing they were wrong about something, or that they have committed the cardinal sin of changing their mind and renouncing a false belief. The fact it’s so rare to see people change their mind is probably why not that many of us do it. Or, at least, admit to doing it. We don’t even know what such a process looks like, so entrenched in our worldview have we become. But secretly, haven’t you ever pondered the rationale of the people you think are wrong? Haven’t you ever felt that niggling doubt in the pit of your stomach, despite having just doubled-down on your unshakable political opinion? Haven’t you ever been so wrong about something that you were subsequently compelled to consider, as a matter of urgency, what else you might be mistaken about?
In a global civilisation dogged by political and religious tribalism, occasionally asking ourselves where we may be mistaken becomes a radical political act. Isn’t it a bit convenient that we, the ‘good guys’, always find ourselves not only on the right side of history but also on the right side of every argument on the right side of history? In an infinite universe, on a planet that has existed for billions of years, the chances of us being right about everything are slim, surely? That would be a bit of a coincidence, would it not? It’s ludicrous when you really think about it. How could a person reasonably entertain such a yarn while believing themselves to be informed? You can’t claim to have thought about anything at all if your own absurd nature doesn’t cross your mind at least once a day. There’s arguably more virtue in admitting you’re mistaken and correcting your course, than there is in stubbornly believing you haven’t been wrong since you were a teenager.
