Confessions of a drunk. Every bottle is a story.

11 min readMay 26, 2021

Let me contextualize this picture. This is not a picture that attempts to glorify or romanticize alcoholism. The accumulation and the configuration of these bottles began solely as a flippant act to boast how much alcohol I could consume, to outdrink my friends, and prove to them that my capacity outmatched theirs by order of a magnitude that was impressive. I was proud of this fact, very vociferously so. I could binge drink for the entire week and could still function and socialize without the typical effects that entail heavy drinking. Listening to Radiohead for hours, on the other hand, enabled this feeling, not to say that Radiohead encourages one to drink or wallow in self-pity. On the contrary, coupling my binges with Radiohead helped me cope with whatever I was trying to accomplish. I drank until I entered a state of oblivion. Fortunately, I would only realize later how damaging this entire process could have turned out was it not for Radiohead’s consistent emotional support. One could even argue that Radiohead was the perfect antidote to whatever it was forcing me to engage in such a manner, an anti-dote because it kept the inevitable dangerous ramifications at bay. The copious amount of alcohol I was consuming would have otherwise pushed me to the brink of depression, or much worse, self-induced depression. Pairing both alcohol and Radiohead brewed the perfect cocktail of a sustainable hedonistic life that did not seem to affect my otherwise ‘stable practical life’.Or at least, I thought or believed so. I gradually realized that this ‘frivolous’ act was not as flippant as I thought or consciously believed it to be.

Despite my fervent convictions and feigning normalcy, there was a perpetual feeling at the back of my head that something was awry that I made sure never emerged into my conscious thoughts or actions, much like the perfect form of repression that our minds indulge in when it is trying to defend itself against what is lurking at the darkest corners of our psyche.

However, something truly revelatory happened during this entire process, revelatory not in the same vein as an epiphany, since this was an incremental awakening. I gradually realized that the people around me did not find this reckless conduct as ‘cool’ or ‘romantic’ as I had presumed they did. They just were just not allowed to articulate their concerns or if they did I had made sure I shut them off by spewing some faux-philosophical rationalizations. These rationalizations belonged to the category of the speakers who are thoroughly trained in pedantic discourses, rigorously trained to conjure up justifications whenever their core (faux)philosophy is threatened with earnest emotional concerns which sound maudlin and cliched to them. Easy to be invalidated and retorted, these emotional concerns could be shrugged off as an attack on my personal freedom or my bodily autonomy, those two ghastly concerns that no one dares to contend with in our age of individualistic dogmatism. But these rationalizations have a tendency to make people around you sick of you, and their tolerance which was hitherto compartmentalized leaks into their consciousness, and leak it did, as the undetectable and unsuspecting gas leaks in our kitchens. All it takes is a spark, yo. Very unlike the spark that we associate with innovative ideas or, and very much like the spark that wreaks havoc by incinerating everything that one holds dear to oneself.

I started realizing that I had become entitled to my friend’s tolerance and goodwill.I became greedy and squandered all the surplus benevolence that I had acquired throughout the years with them.I employ this analogy because we have developed a romantic sensibility that prohibits us from quantifying the parameters of our relationships. This sensibility reinforces the belief that one can demand unconditionally and unreasonably from our close ones since we don’t want to sully our fundamental definition of love by constraining them in quantifiable terms. This belief might be useful in the age of extreme materialism which manifests in the commodification of all our relationship dynamics, but its ugly side goes unacknowledged. The ugly side turns us into entitled and demanding people who insist that they be accorded rights to other people’s love, attention and care simply by the virtue of existing in other people’s lives for enough time. Consequently, the person on the receiving end of this abhorrent philosophy is burdened with enough guilt to ‘ensure that their friend’s mental well-being is maintained’. It then becomes morally repugnant under this logic to claim that someone cannot be saved, even at the cost of someone’s own well-being. This philosophical framework does not even factor in the fact that some oppressions are worse than other forms of oppression. I have enough anecdotes in my memory that would serve to corroborate my point but I believe it is sufficient to highlight one instance that is considered contentious and controversial (unreasonably so). How do we formulate a framework for a scenario or a dynamic where one party belongs to a lower caste or a minority or an oppressed group that is under attack by the unmitigated powers of the state and the other to an obverse group? Is it in the former’s interest to expend all the emotional and psychological energies to save the latter? I am not claiming that it is possible to construct hierarchies between these groups in terms of the ‘suffering’ parameter. I am just skeptical enough to believe that any rhetoric that contrives a fixed binary between these two groups would be flawed in its intent and ineffectual in its application. It is a moral debate that I don’t have straightforward answers to, especially the ones that are peddled by the ‘everyone deserved to be saved equally’ camp. I am not even going to contend with the malevolent forces that allow certain people to play victims despite belonging to a power dynamic that is lopsided and disproportionate in every aspect. ( Read: Leftist men sliding into DMs of random women with the malicious intents exploiting the narrative of mental health, or UC folks crying foul when they are caught red-handed perpetrating the most reprehensible casteist beliefs)

Anyway, not to get too political since that was not the intent of this write-up. It was an extremely disconcerting realization that my friends have merely tolerated me due to their love or concern for me, that they would rather have me quit, mind you, none of them ever enabled my damaging habits. They were trapped. I had trapped them. Does not matter if it were inadvertent. Was it inadvertent? We need to consistently subject our habits to rigorous scrutiny lest they become damaging for others. I am of the belief now that it should be our utmost ethical and moral to constantly evaluate our patterns of behavior and not rely on the argument that we never intended to cause harm. Generally speaking no one in their own head intended to cause harm, our brains have a very convoluted mechanism to render our own mistakes seemingly unintentional. My friends were trapped into that guilt that we all exploit against the people we love the most — the unapologetic outsourcing of our pain and well-being since we need constant affirmation from our friends that they love or care about us. Individual accountability and personal responsibility can easily be transferred to others. My friends were also being protective, believing perhaps that I am aware of the damage that my ‘coping mechanisms that I was inflicting myself to. How could they possibly know that I myself was blindly unaware and/or willfully ignorant of my own misadventures? That does not absolve me of the damage that I brought upon my relationships, it would be disingenuous to victimize myself when I had deftly assumed the role of the perpetrator. ( One strange manifestation of this is that under the garb of practicing friendship rituals that I would completely burden my friends with the responsibility of my drunken whims; I would expect them to entertain all my shenanigans like cleaning up after me, procuring liquor for me, devoting time and energy to my ramblings and other kinds of demands, I mean that’s what true friends do, right? To bear all kinds of shit because their friend is hurting or unstable)

We all have a penchant for pushing our relationships to the extent of unalterable limits, under the guise of ‘testing’ their patience and their love for us. And if they fail we can always fall back into our philosophical rationalizations, or dismiss their love as ‘insufficient’ This entitlement engenders a counterintuitive paradox: that you begin to unreasonably demand more from the others, so unreasonable that your ‘tests’ ultimately end up reinforcing your self-sabotaging habits. This paradox has cloaked another paradox under it, that the more loving your friends, the more you will make them suffer ( because the more loving they tend to be the more forceful their threshold), and the more you will make them suffer the more you push them away which is the ultimate self-sabotage.

This realization only dawns upon us when we become cognisant of the subtle ways our friends would repel themselves once their elastic threshold breaks. (Not even the most selflessly loving person has enough to give to a self-absorbed person who demands persistently; and it is a testament to someone’s concern towards you that they have this critical point, people with inelastic thresholds are by default indifferent about you). This regression of friends is so imperceptible that neither of the parties is aware of it, I was anyway too drunk to take notice. But once you realize that a friend is tactfully ignoring or snubbing you your entire being becomes sensitive to every such act. The festered flesh starts to reek and the retrospective vision renders the wounds visibly in their most prominent form. It is a state of utmost disappointment and disdain towards oneself, the inability to reconcile that you were not infuriating but damaging to you people around takes over you, how could it be possible that my closest friends were not accepting of my ‘cool’ and ‘interesting’ lifestyle? I am glad that however late this realization might have been it wasn’t as late to render my relationships irredeemable.

This is not an apology note to my friends or others whom I might have troubled during my self-absorbed spree. I don’t believe in expiating sins despite my longtime fascination with Raksolnikov’s reforms.I firmly belong to the camp that takes great offense to that reductive interpretation that Raskolnikov reformed or achieved some form of salvation in embracing the Christian morality. Neither do I have any secular framework that I can lean back to for making sense of this process. I only write this to remind myself that I cannot, hell, I should not, and I don’t have the right to pull others down under the guise of rationalized coping mechanisms or defense mechanisms. My friends should not be held responsible or accountable for my mental well-being, at least not beyond the reasonable expectations that friends already seemed to burden themselves with. My whims cannot be disguised as ‘tests’, and no one has to be subjected to these fallacious tests to determine the resilience of a friendship. I have no right to demand or expect any arduous saving grace from anyone before working on my issues myself. Or much better, deal with the issues that I know would not fare well for my friends on my own, there is much appeal and merit to stoicism if it does not devolve into self-isolation.

I also write this to memorialize the other things I learned during this (mis)adventure. During the course of collecting these, I had become obsessed with arranging the bottles in whatever permutations and combinations that fancied my mind. This fixation on configuration dispelled my preconceived beliefs that people who collect (or hoard) obscure paraphernalia are merely pretending to be interested in doing so, and their fascination merely serves a purpose of ‘signaling’. I quickly become a hoarder myself, and in no time I began randomly visiting my collection to move bottles around, take pictures of it, and send it to random people, and not because I was ‘showing off’ (probably there was a bit of that as well, but only equivalent to how a ticket collector shows off their collection). I don’t have the exact idea about why I did that, but I was definitely proud of my collection, proud probably because I had taken fastidious care of it, conscientiously preserving every memory that was associated with each and every bottle. I made sure I tried all the varieties of liquor, within my budget, that is. I took trips to the best Wine & Beer shops just to relish the fact that I would get to choose the bottle of my liking, of my own taste, a taste that I had individually developed, a taste that I can proudly call my own.

And every bottle does have a memory and a story attached to it, some bad, some good, some so extraordinary that I can pinpoint the bottle and recall the minutest of details of that occasion, despite how inebriated groggy state I must have been. I tasted the best of wines, which previously I had considered either too ‘feminine’ or inadequately potent for my liking. It just so turns out that I get tipsier on wines since they hit me slowly.

I tasted international native liquors and unheard of high-end cocktails (the perks of the first salary), the physical artifacts of which I have not been able to preserve, although they are abundantly stored in my digital repository.

This would not be a philosophized harangue if I don’t mention the most significant thing I learned: that in contriving a personality around alcohol I actually developed a personality that does not revolve around alcohol. I don’t mean to quit at all, merely stop drinking for the sake of drinking. I wish to drink responsibly, not in the typical manner, instead of in being cognizant and conscious of the effects that drinking has on other people that surround me. Someone very close and important to me has taught me to drink in order to make an occasion eventful, to cherish the privilege that I get to drink at all, that I get to drink with friends whom I want to drink with.

You could say that I am a wine drinker rather than a whiskey gulper. (whatever associations the latter is loaded within our culture)

I don’t know how much this analogy stands true since I am not claiming that whiskey drinkers don’t appreciate the taste or wine drinkers cultivate a certain kind of superior taste.

Also, I would be glad if this collection does not constitute a collection of an alcoholic to some, that would make me feel much better about myself. That means I got out earlier than I think I did.

LOOK AT THAT CHHOTU PORTRAIT OF BABASAHEB IN THE FRAME.