Lessons on Abolition from Alcoholism
Free liquor is the best liquor, I used to tell myself. I prefer tequila, gin, and bourbon in that order, but I’d drink the foulest of flavored vodkas if available at no cost. On this particular night, I disliked the flavor of the scotch in my glass, which had been abandoned here as an accidental housewarming gift. Not only did the taste fail to satiate me, so did the inebriation I sought. I expected the shame and physical ailment to wait until morning like usual, but for as-yet unknown reasons, I encountered the despair at night like an unwelcome Santa. I was drinking to cure my hangover from the night before and because I had no work the next day (the justifications enjoy a deep bench, but this was convincing compared to the third-string hitter, “no one tells me what to do.”) Alone on my couch, watching a movie whilst oblivious to the plot, I comforted myself with discomfort.
Ordinarily my intense anti-waste ethic precludes me from discarding any food or drink, often provoking me to eat beyond the point of feeling full. That conviction subsided the next morning when I perceived the remaining scotch in my kitchen as poison that belonged to the drain. As I poured, I commemorated this as the first time I ever wasted alcohol. I recounted how I’d undergone dry Januarys in years passed, but how February 1st always proved an occasion to catch up. I knew better this time not to set a deadline.
I had to try on sobriety for size. Initially I told only my close friends and family, and characterized it as a break from drinking with unspecified duration. I then experimented with the descriptor “sober”; embarrassingly, I switched my Bumble profile setting from “heavy drinker” to “sober” to observe how that affected my sparse admirers. I studied others’ experiences of addiction, resisting the impulse to distance myself from the stereotypical drunkard who forgets his kids’ birthday parties and can’t hold down a job. It turns out, this caricature’s relationship to alcohol mimicked my own more than I care to admit. It wasn’t until I’d had some clear-eyed distance from my last drink that I came to perceive and accept the truth: I’m an alcoholic. I’m in recovery.
Kicking the bottle improved everything. I was reborn. Every day for weeks, I woke up grateful that I didn’t drink the night before. I could think more clearly. I was more likely to exercise because I didn’t feel like shit, which invited its own benefits like serotonin. I moved through the world with confidence, like I’d lost thirty pounds when it was probably closer to three (fat is not bad, but god knows internalized fatphobia tends to linger). The truest truth: I was just so proud of myself. I patted myself on the back and secretly craved praise from others for my achievement, as the attention-seeking instagram post celebrating my soberversary attests.
After a few months, the confidence subsided. I noticed my gut drooping over my belt again. I avoided my reflection. I began to notice that lonely feeling, that sensation of incompleteness, of “not-enoughness.” Sitting alone on my couch after the kids went to sleep felt like compulsory cuddling with an estranged family member. I reached for the glass that once ferried alcohol only to find seltzer water and my wounded inner child.
In a certain sense, sobriety muted my friendships, especially the ones in which getting drunk together had been a principal activity. Some of my friends reduced their consumption around me, which served to truncate our evenings and reduce the silliness of our hangouts. When others continued to drink in my presence, my sober gaze was disconcerting for both of us, and I observed a modicum of judgmentalism bubble up in my body, a paternalistic pity, which I sure disdain. I realized I had conflated alcohol with fun and mourned the loss of both.
Eliminating alcohol ejected me from a destructive route, but my addiction was never about the substance itself (there’s a joke in here somewhere about it being the spirit, not the spirit.) The same impulse to consume thoughtlessly now shows up with Wheat Thins and kombucha. It’s not that I want more crackers and gut-health-juice, I want More itself. “What is addiction,” the author of Recovery Dharma asks, “but the consistent and nagging feeling of ‘not enough?’ What is addiction other than being constantly unsatisfied?” These feelings revealed that there’s a part of my being with which I’m uncomfortable. Unmended wounds in my soul need treatment. I have lived a profoundly privileged life, but the moments of unlove cut deep. I also suffer from the same traumas affecting all of us living under racialized capitalism, the lies of white supremacy and patriarchy chief among them. I have learned that alcohol was a coping mechanism distracting from my need to confront my trauma, not the injury itself.
Where I used to shelve liquor, I now display plants.
o o o
The wounds festering on America’s corpus are innumerable, but all of them, arguably, trace their roots to the origin story of this particular nation-state: the theft and rape of the land of Indigenous people and the genocide of Native people themselves; and the inherently exploitative economics of chattel slavery, a system that did not actually dehumanize enslaved Africans, as Derecka Purnell points out, but rather relied on their uniquely human labor compensated with torment rather than wages. No doubt the legacy of slavery and genocide principally traumatizes Black and Indigenous people today. But this history also corrodes our collective body, our society itself.
In A Dream in Our Name, Aria Florant also describes the ongoing effects of slavery as an untreated wound, invoking Malcolm X’s analogy: “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less healed the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.” (p. 8) Reparations for slavery, which is the context of Florant’s writing, includes seeing the knife, naming who did the stabbing, removing it completely, repairing the wound, and committing never to inflict such harm again. The back is Black people’s but also America’s. We all suffer and can find no healing so long as the dagger remains. And that weapon sinks deeper not just because we have yet to achieve federal reparations but because enslavement never truly ceased - it proliferated in more palatable but no less sinister incarnations.
In my imperfect analogy, alcoholism is carcerality, by which I mean the infrastructure of laws, corporations, public institutions, and cultural norms that comprise the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC) and its cousin systems of confinement and punishment, but also the ethos of these systems. The PIC is most identifiable in its manifestations in the prison industry and policing, but is interrelated with militarism, immigration enforcement, and the family regulation system (aka child welfare), all of which are predictable byproducts of racialized capitalism reared by enslavement. Carcerality can also show up in seemingly benign institutions when they operate to control and inflict violence upon the bodies and lives of poor people and Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, including schools, homeless shelters, and churches. If a system imprisons, it is a prison.
The logic of prisons reflects our compulsion to treat our collective wounds with poison, like gin was never good medicine for my depression despite its delightful accompaniment with tonic and lime. Let’s be honest: it feels good to punish. When Derek Chauvin was convicted, a corner of me celebrated. I chuckled when Donald Trump was taken into custody, generating a mug shot for the history books. I get the impulse, just like I understand that blacking out at the karaoke bar is fun in the moment even though it damages me in the near term and long. But the glee I feel does not represent my best self. I do not identify with this part of me. More importantly, Chauvin’s conviction does nothing to prevent police violence against Black people - in fact, it provides strategic cover for the carceral state to continue as-is under the illusion that accountability exists. Trump’s many lawsuits only galvanize his base such that he is likely to win in 2024. Punishment’s hangover is never worth it.
If cinema is any representation of our cultural values, we sure revere revenge. We celebrate getting the “bad guy,” a mythical figure nonexistent in real-life humanity. And while most people understandably struggle with any sense of loss of control, we collectively weaponize that timidity on a massive scale, exacting control over any bodies we can. It is easier to lock away a person who has inflicted harm rather than to attend to the circumstances that led to their actions in the first place. When we remove perpetrators of sexual assault from society, we punish their violation of a shifty social contract with the state, not with the survivor. The process renders the desires and healing of the one who experienced the assault irrelevant. The consequences of imprisonment that often include more sexual violence bears no consideration. Incarceration fails to prevent or ameliorate the harms of violence but it seems a better option to the state when compared to engendering actual safety and peace within communities because the latter would mean we acknowledge Malcolm X’s knife, the shame of which we cannot bear.
When we dismantle the Prison-Industrial Complex, the conditions that upheld it won’t automatically share its demise. Cultivating real safety and preventing harm in our society will require us to radically alter how we relate to one another. Sappy, yes, but it means taking love seriously, actualizing Dr. King’s beloved community. It means managing our egos and reexamining our self-interest in order to care for one another. It means disrupting our relationships to property and power. It will mean demolishing “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” as bell hooks put it.
Rehearsing the beloved community must precede or at least coexist with dismantling carcerality, as indeed I had invested dozens of hours and thousands of dollars into therapy before I sipped my last cocktail. We abolitionists, therefore, are “practicing new worlds,” conjuring the conditions that would reveal how the PIC is so obsolete by fostering better ways of relating to one another and meeting our needs. Abolition includes experimentation outside the carceral system to prevent and address harm even as we work to reduce the power and influence of policing and prisons. We aren’t waiting for the PIC to decay: we’re burning it while tending saplings of a new humanity in the meantime, a tree that will eventually shelter us all.
But let us not be confused. The core of my alcoholism is not alcohol itself, but it was still a threat to my life. The real work may be nurturing my inner child and connecting to myself, but I still had to stop drinking because it was killing me, and by extension, the people I care for. So, too, must we acknowledge that the Prison-Industrial Complex is a toxin we will scarcely survive even if we haven’t yet ushered in the beloved community. And this is quite literal: at the moment of this writing, 1,082 people have been killed by police in 2023 alone (I cite a figure inclusive of all police killings, of armed and unarmed people alike, yet still an undercount, because I lament all murder). People incarcerated in state prisons are dying at alarming rates. The military, its own industrial complex, is unambiguously dedicated to warfare and execution. Small wonder that Mariame Kaba refers to such systems as “death-making institutions.” Metaphor and symbol come easy to me, and the deadliness of the PIC is philosophical, but it is also embodied. Countless people are slaughtered by carcerality. We cannot add to any system that propagates such violence.
o o o
Spend time in recovery circles and you may encounter the axiom “the opposite of addiction is connection.” This comports with my experience. I attend recovery group meetings at a local Buddhist meditation center and often sit and say nothing. Simply existing in the presence of people who carry similar struggles and stories is balm. The connection is palpable irrespective of whether I know anyone’s name, have anyone’s phone number. And sometimes I do need a friend: I reach for my phone to check in with a loved one in the same gesture I once deployed to reach for tequila.
But more importantly, I am learning to prioritize the connection to myself. I greet my inner critics with compassion. If I don’t, I’m coming to see, I will struggle to cherish the mutuality between everyone in my community, the reciprocity I yearn for in relating to all with whom I share space. We are not necessarily addicted to policing or prisons; we are addicted to vengeance, punishment, and domination. And so, liberation will take a reckoning with these compulsions and the courage to relate to each other with vulnerability and love. It will take nurturing the space between us.
The opposite of addiction is connection; so, too, might be the opposite of carcerality.
