50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

The entire world has been forced into giving up a lot of things that they never thought they’d have to give up — it’s been like some gigantic Lenten sacrifice, with hundreds of millions of people receiving this strange insight into the essential experience of the recovering addict.

They have been presented with a new version of the world, which is lacking some of the vital ingredients of their old world.

People who were suddenly faced with the problem of the pubs being closed, have been given an instant lesson in what it is like for the troubled drinker who is trying to stay away from his beloved lounge bar.

Indeed some have discovered that they themselves are troubled drinkers because they have been finding it almost impossible to function in a pub-less regime.

But it has been that generalised sense of dislocation, that constant feeling of having to cope with unfamiliar experiences, that has brought the multitudes towards an understanding of what the recovering addict has always known — that you have no idea how much you are attached to your old routines, until you are called upon to figure out some other way of living.

There is an analogy too, in the way that we now have this heightened awareness of the damage we can do to others, just by being in the same place at the same time, doing what we do — likewise a lot of people who are trying to give up their poison, start to realise that they are not, in fact, the centre of the universe, around whom all things revolve, but are instead a part of something that is greater than themselves.

In the most optimistic reading of it, such a transformation in your daily existence will make you some kind of a better person, in the fullness of time.

Yet for the majority of people dealing with these changes, there is also one major difference between them and the person trying to get started on the old 12-step programme — with the restrictions of Covid-19, at some point it is envisaged that you will return to what you were doing before it all started. Whereas the person who is seriously trying to tackle their addiction, is aware that there will be no going back to the way things used to be.

There may be something better, there may even be something worse, but it will never be the same again — not if they’re doing it right, anyway.

So while the majority who will eventually return to ‘normal’, are roughly in a similar situation to someone who gives up the drink for Dry January, stretching into Dry February and Dry March, there will be some whose lives are fundamentally changed by the pandemic — and it is they who have most in common with the person embarking on a programme of ‘recovery’.

They have to set aside their fear that it will be all too difficult, they have to see it somehow as an opportunity to do something better with their lives, rather than getting caught up in the sadness of what has happened to them — which, unlike the addict, is something for which they are entirely blameless.

Yes, for many people this has just been a kind of a lifestyle change. But for others it will be more permanent — and the only way to approach such a daunting vision of eternity, is one day at a time.

It has become a simplistic cliche, and yet it is also a deeply subtle concept, which has enabled many damaged individuals to return to sanity — there is only today, there is no such thing as tomorrow.

After what has happened in the last few months, to be thinking otherwise seems more foolish than ever.

“There may be something better, or worse, but it will never be the same again”