On the sidewalk of a small strip mall I noticed a sandwich board sign in front of a liquor store. “Beer doesn’t ask silly questions. Beer understands”. Google “words of wisdom” and it’s highly unlikely that those words printed on that sign would ever come back in the search results.
Perhaps they should.
As someone who endured a rather intense 18 year “relationship” with beer, those words on the sign struck me deeper than I expected them to. Because I know them to be true. Beer was a loyal friend, very predictable, and always took me where I needed to go, unconditionally. Even if where I was going was detrimental to myself. It didn’t question or evaluate what I needed from the relationship. It had a purpose to serve and that’s exactly what it did.
There is something powerfully reaffirming when you feel understood. When you have nothing to justify nor defend. When you’re simply accepted as is. Familiarity provides an intoxicating comfort, even if what’s familiar is undermining your own emotional well being.
Growing beyond the familiar is quite uncomfortable. Alcohol made it easy for me to not have to deal with my own deeper issues, the things on some level I knew I needed to work through but I never had the courage or willingness to do. I decided to stay stuck in the familiar instead of embracing the uncertainty of growth.
Growth asks way too many questions.
In the hauntingly beautiful song “Hurt”, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails speaks of “the old familiar sting”, widely accepted as a reference to substance abuse, though others have interpreted this line to reflect any form of self-sabotage. The “old familiar sting” is the price of entry into a comfortable and predictable world we’ve come to accept as our own.
Drugs, alcohol, toxic relationships, thoughts of unworthiness, settling for less. Each one contains their own particular old familiar sting, a sting we willingly accept should we decide to continuously embrace them and their noxious promises. A familiar sting never burdens us with any of those “silly” questions about who we really are.
The sting simply understands.
Now over 25 years sober, my perspective of my relationship with alcohol has evolved greatly. I remember its loyalty, but I’ve also come to understand its indifference. If I was willing to let a familiar comfort destroy me it was more than willing to help me do so.
Discomfort has been at the foundation of everything I’ve grow into, of everything I’ve grown through. I’ve learned to be comfortable with the things that made me uncomfortable, to face what needed to be faced, regardless of the associated pain. I’ve learned to rely far less on the familiar because continuing to seek shelter in the familiar was keeping me in spaces I honestly never really wanted to be in but found myself there anyway.
Beer may not ask questions. But I now comfortably ask many soul searching questions of myself about myself. Of where I am, of who I am, of where I may be holding on to destructive beliefs and habits simply because they feel predictable and familiar.
The real safety is in creating the inner space for such conversations.
Photo by Srathicksha M on Unsplash
Peter Mis LivingHalfFull.com 