Those familiar with self-annihilation, those who dance a dosey-doe with death through liver-rot or lung-tar, risk-sex or fast-car, junk-crave or cliff-dive, debt-drown or drink-drive, know where “rock-bottom” is. The story told that confirms the end of the road. The snap of the rubber band inside. The moment when you wake up and you know it’s got to stop, you’ve got to wise up. When you’ve lost everything. When what you’ve been doing to yourself, in spite of yourself, to spite yourself, all those years, finally reaches harvest time, and sickly-sweet rotten fruit lies everywhere. Family destroyed, career down the pan, bailiffs at the door, the wan smile of a doctor passing judgment, the piss-stinking butt-strewn holding cell. Ruin. It’s the “bad end” that we have both dreaded and invited. Ruin becomes us.
Those in Alcoholics Anonymous speak of this rock bottom in knowing terms. It is the moment when they turn the corner, when they let God in, when they begin again, are reborn. It’s often uplifting to hear that there can be a future after such horrors, that there is life after such ego-death. But, for many people who haven’t scraped the bottom of the barrel in such a way, it can be alienating to go to an AA meeting with a nagging doubt that you’re drinking too much, only to find yourself listening to tale after tale of gory catastrophe. Such extremes of life experience, told with blistering candour, don’t necessarily have anything to do with learning about sensible drinking, how to have a few drink-free days a week and how not to get rat-arsed at the weekends. But they do have something to do with a particular way of living, a pattern of pitting oneself continually against adversity. A perverse test of survivability. Perverse, because there is a peculiar pleasure involved in recounting such tales of woe to a sympathetic audience – they are modern equivalents of the ancient hero myths, and when narrated they serve to remind us of the universality of the struggles we can face in life, the timelessness of life’s brutality, the unfathomable complexity of the psyche. The recovery movement is, however, only one way of trying to understand this pattern. Spiritual traditions the world over recognise this cycle of becoming, of renewal, as something sacred. But, unlike the 12-step movement, they don’t see such crises as being manifestations of a disease.
To those whose lives bumble along quite nicely, thank you, those who know no such peaks or troughs in life’s seismograph, who’ve never woken up wondering whether to bother carrying on or not, this won’t make any sense. But then I doubt if you’d be reading this in the first place. There is a curious notion that people, in the main, live dull, humdrum lives, and they are salaciously exposed to drama and difficulty by the likes of rock and roll or the telly or the internet or books. It’s a very Judeo-Christian, Garden of Eden stance. If we keep our fingers in our ears and hum loudly enough and avoid impure thoughts we’ll have a quiet life without too much upset. I don’t know anyone like that. I know people who put a lot of effort into keeping up appearances and covering over the cracks with a sophisticated facade. I know people who fill their lives up with bringing up children and trying to make a living, and they simply don’t have the time to pick at the loose thread and pull. Distraction is often the most successful way to neutralise this kamikaze pattern – get busy, it will pass soon. And, before you know it, you’re dead.
Sometimes I think that being sent back to square one in life, when we have to pick ourselves up and start again from scratch, is an important human need. As in the 70s comedy series, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, when the main character loses the plot and fakes his own death so he can begin again, a different man. The tragedy/comedy of the story is that his new life is just as fraught with the absurd as his old one. But for most people this sort of life-change can’t be attempted, or even acknowledged, because we’ve got commitments, responsibilities, loads of stuff.
I’m lucky. I’m shedding what little material stuff I have, and giving myself another start. This bootboy is re-booting, pressing the power button, flushing out my cache, and hoping the next chapter of my life is different. I’m willing it to be different. The 20-hole Doc Martens with fancy laces and the leather jeans and the combat trousers and the paraphernalia of a forty-something gay man from the London scene are being stored away. I can’t see myself wanting to dig them out again, for their energy, their power, their fun, comes from image and projection and anonymity. And I’ve had enough of all that to last a lifetime. The London years have been difficult and rewarding and strengthening. And, at times, harrowing. And not without pleasure, especially with work in the last few years. And I’ve learned so much here. Mostly, I’ve learned to have confidence in myself. That’s a wonderful thing.
Rock bottom is not disaster – it is a beginning. The harder the wall, the better the bounce.