Dry January and the Dream of Reinvention
Givng up alcohol for January is yet another attempt to find a 'new you'
Trying to find a buddy to have a beer with in January is a depressing prospect, because nobody is drinking beer because it’s ‘dry January’ and on the endless merry go round of re-invention, this moment has come round again.
Meanwhile, I check my emails and there’s a flyer from the ‘How To’ Academy for a day course ,‘How To Change Your Life’, also in January. Elsewhere in my newspaper a new diet will transform you bodily self image, increase your life expectancy and boost your libido.
I admire people who believe they can change ( and there’s a lot of them - unsurprisingly since we are told repeatedly, falsely, that we can be ‘whoever we want to be’) More than change: re-invent themselves to the point where they are no longer the slob they’ve always been and are instead brand new and minty fresh, their spirits refreshed, their bodies replenished and attractive.
I used to be one of them. God knows how many diets I’ve tried in my life in attempt to find a new body shape to replace my globular, truncated frame. They work of course - for a couple of weeks, before your inner thermostat, having slowed your metabolism down to cope with the lack of calories, ensures that you return to your previous weight. Your body - or at least my body - will stay at that weight, however little or much is eaten, until it decides, every ten years or so, that its time for another step up the fat ladder.
I gave up coffee. It made me feel terrible so I started again. I started running. I stopped again, quite quickly. It hurt. I tried yoga, but I found it impossibly hard to stand on one leg. The only truly reliable route to reinvention I have found is splurging on new clothes, but that is very transitory and expensive - and, I suppose, shallow.
It’s not only via my body and appearance I’ve tried to be a new me. Once, believing myself to be possessed by insufficiently virtuous thoughts, I decided I was going to be ‘good’. I remember, determined to be more saintly, taking a homeless person into my house and offering them a cup of tea and a chat. How did it feel? Awkward. I certainly didn’t get any glowing sense of virtue of it, and I think the poor lady felt degraded in some way. Of course being good is not meant to make you feel good ( or is it?) but it may also produce unpredictable outcomes - like giving a different homeless person money for a sandwich which they then go and use to feed their gambling or drug addiction which makes things worse for them. Being good isn’t easy - that’s why it’s called ‘being good’.
I was around the middle of my life when I realised that I was never going to be thin or virtuous. But I still thought I might be ‘spiritual.’ I threw myself into the study of Zen. I meditated and focused on the ‘now’. Again, like dieting, it worked - for a while. I felt calm and elevated. Then I had a bit of a crisis and it all returned to the default - just an ordinary joe, struggling with all the shit we all have to struggle with and mostly failing to rise above it.
Does this lead me to the depressing conclusion that change is impossible for most of us. No - definitely not. But as a story teacher , I am aware in depicting fictional human beings that in order to portray them convincingly as protagonists, while they have to change, they must do so very slowly, subtly and unpredictably.
Change is rarely something you consciously institute. It usually happens to you, and, as a rule, you resist it with every fibre of your being. Because although we like the fantasy of change, we actually fear the reality. Change, even positive change, is frightening. One of the problems, for instance , that domestic abuse victims face is that to change their situation, even though their situation is horrific, scares them. So they cling to the suffering that is familiar. Change is diving into the dark and you don’t know what is concealed on the other side.
Have I changed in my life, then, or am I still the same young fool I always was, only now dressed in wrinkles and a sagging belly? In all honesty, it’s hard to say. Many of the flaws I suffered as a young man remain in place - oversensitivity, emotional overwhelm, a quick temper, a tendency to speak out of turn, a short attention span, unattractive levels of competitiveness- despite all my efforts to defeat them.
However change has unquestionably happened - more in the sense that I understand why I am who I am, rather than hoping to be someone different. Diagnoses of ADHD and clinical depression explain a lot of my mentality to me. Medication has changed my mood patterns and subsequent behaviour. In other words, there is an underlying comprehension of what was once incomprehensible, and that leads to a certain equanimity in the face of the stubbornly unshifting nature of body and soul. I feel pretty tranquil most of the time, which once was certainly not the case. Depression has more or less disappeared. I am happy being on my own, whereas once it used to terrrify me. And the unattached and unidentifiable guilt that used to torment me perpetually is now confined to the occasional episode, usually involving my children and the painful consequences of two divorces.
The positive parts of my personality have also endured - my curiosity, mainly, about human nature, my desire to create, my restless search for ‘answers’ to impossible questions. These have never ebbed, and I hope they stay with me till the last.
I have changed - a bit - in the last 50 years, and in some ways quite profoundly. But the essentials of ‘me’ remain in place, for all the struggles of my willpower. If anything has changed me at all for the better it has not been been choices or acts of will, but episodes of loss and suffering, which - as much of literature shows us - has the inevitable effect of increasing our humility and eroding our human Pride.
So who am I now, as opposed to who I was? Is there a ‘new me’ after all? I don’t know. My 18 year old self would be very surprised that I meditate twice a day. They would be even more amazed at my lack of interest in drugs or sex. If they could enter my 68 year old head, they would probably find it an unexciting but relatively peaceful place, and nowhere near as terrified of mortality and failure and women than my teenage self would have been.
Many psychologists believe there is no essential ‘you’, only a shifting pattern of tendencies, behaviours and orientations but I don’t agree. I am still ‘me’, mysteriously and somehow essentially at my core, the same person, whatever has happened at the different levels of being. Through all the changes, something persists, standing at the root of all the decisions and motivations. That is ‘me’. I’m still here, bloody but uncowed, different but the same and as confused and fascinated as I ever was.
That’s the way it looks at the moment, anyway. Then again, who knows? Things could change.
Things change Tim. Quite how and why is a personal story that unfolds in the rear view mirror of the life you're driving. That is if and when when you get the chance to review how the outturn of living in and for today and letting tomorrow take of itself has panned out.
You'll be interested to see just how changed all The Dry Januaryistas of your acquaintance are when you run across them during February.
Interesting read. Thanks. Cheers 🍻
Thanks Tim. Honest and helpful. All the best, John.