Mozart: Symphonia Concertante

I'm trying my hand at sobriety. It's five to ten in the evening, and I haven't had a drink yet which is fairly good going. If I was anywhere else this would leave an hour and five minutes before a drink became a practical impossibility, what with everywhere being shut. Here, though, I am graced- or cursed- with an all night off licence. Still, I am also blessed with laziness and do I really want a drink enough to venture out into the dark and get one? Right now, not. I went aspirational supermarket shopping today- defined as buying huge quantities of vegetables, determined that you are going to become healthy- so I am trying to get through the night on fruit tea and, well, fruit. Oranges- the thinking girl's smack. There's nothing like a good aspirational food shop to make girl feel like a new being. The only trouble then is remembering to eat the stuff and not ending up haunting cafes consuming coffee and cheese sandwhiches like they are the only things which will save you. Sometimes, I think they are.

I am determined to tackle drinking on my own. It is too humiliating, too secret, a thing to own, even to the people who are paid to know my dirty secrets. I review the things which I have learnt so far about myself and the reasons I do things. Cetain things are immediately eliminated. I don't drink because I have to; I'm not adicted in that sense. On the other hand, I don't have an off switch, so presented with some quantity of booze I will keep drinking until it has all gone away. I am like a hoover or a magic trick in that respect. I don't drink to make mysel feel better, because it doesn't make me feel better. It makes me feel palpably worse and spending three days out of five with a low level hangover is no way to live. In the main I think I drink because I get lonely and bored, and I don't know any other way to fill in the dark hours when the creepy crawlie thoughts come out. At least if one is drunk one is guarunteed some form of sleep, however disrupted or stupour like. So I combat it in the only way I know how- with a big pile of books. There is nothing reading can't solve. I have pap for instant immersion, the sort of book you can lose yourself in for hours until you turn the last page and realise you not only feel slightly sick but have also instantly fogotten the plot, meaning you have blanked a whole section of your life you will never get back again. Thinking about it, this sort of book is not unlike a good cheap bottle of blended scotch. Then I have the literary equivalent of an aspiration supermarket shop; the sort which will make me feel everso everso healthy and good about myself if only I can put aside all that tempting pap and immediate gratification. Finally, when things get dark and horrible and I run out of my own words for things I have the books which I believe, secretly and shamefully and in ever such an adolescent way, say what I would if only I knew how. Tonight it's pap. Desperate times call for desperate measures and I am determined to go for fourtyeight hours without a drink. Or at least twenty four. Let's not overstreach ourselves.

In this as in so many other things I wonder whether intellect is a blessing or a curse. I am still struggling to get round the idea that emotions are a useful and functional part of life. In group, they give us worksheets about this. Group is a funny sort of place, and it may or may not suprise anyone to learn that while the first rule of group might be don't self harm in the toilets, the second and third rules of group are never talk about group. That's right kids: Fightclub as a modern metaphor for therapy and the catastrophic theory of phsychic renewal. Discuss. Or don't. It's really up to you. Anyway, I wont talk about group because if they find out they will come round and break my legs. Or, more likely, this being a PD service, they will come round and cry a bit and threaten to break their own legs. Either way it will be a bit embarassing come monday. Without going into specifics, this week I had to challenge such "emotional myths" as: letting other people know that I am feeling bad is a weakness and painful emotions are not really important and should be ignored. I find myself struggling like the kid that can't get to grips with times tables. Everyone is very sympathetic as I sit there and mouth like a guppy, unable to think of a way of saying what I want, not even sure what it is that I want to say, except that every fibre of my mind is telling me that these things are true, and that I am strong for seeing the world that way. I glory in my mind, which can take me places. I don't need emotions. Emotions are for people who never learned self control, who never learned not to cry, who never learned to be comforter not comforted. Painful emotions are a waste of time. You can't make them go away, and they just hamper your progress as steely embodiment of Brain. Odd that I also learned in a childhood spent with horses that giving painkillers to a lame horse is a dangerous enterprise; if the leg doesn't hurt they keep walking on it and make the injury worse.

I know all these things in words. Often in group or in individual therapy I find myself losing track of what is going on, trying to see the theoretical basis for things, trying to make links, because it is so much easier that way. It deflects my attention from the fact that I am at a loss. So often giving an account of myself feels like joining the dots. I know how people are supposed to feel in certain situations, so I conclude that I must feel that way, and I start to describe it, and become so engrossed in my own rhetoric that I forget that I am not describing myself but a cypher for myself: a story which could be mine, but isn't.

I'd like this to be just the way things work. I'd like to be able to carry on this way indefinitely. I'd like for this system to work. It doesn't. In the new world order I am trying to construct for myself- using, it has to be said, my thinking brain, because that is the only bt of me which is reliably functioning- the intellect is a framing device. It has to have something to frame. Words, if we're going to be Wittgensteinian about this, and it's me doing the talking so we are going to Wittgensteinian about this, don't have meanings in and of themselves; they are clothing for pre-linguistic behaviours, pre-linguistic facts- for emotions and behaviouristic ways of expressing emotions. They, to use old Ludwig's own metaphor, "take root" in existant behaviours. If you don't have the behaviours to start with a quick wit and some kind of societal conditioning might allow you to use the words, but you'll never be quite sure you're using them right. Pure intellect is a frame for an empytiness, with the possible exception of mathematics, but have you ever stopped to wonder why mathematicians are so weird? Maybe if I'd been any good at maths I'd be weird but happy now, instead of both weird and miserable. As it is, numbers were never really my thing. So I am left trying to clothe something that isn't there- the opposite of the emporor's new clothes. Chronic boredom is a recognised symptom of BPD.

Which brings us neatly back to alcohol. Drinking and all the rest, sometimes it's a way of filling the space where your heart should be. If not that, it's a way of having something to talk about. Something to think about and worry about, to apply your mind to. A substance to structure. At least if I'm full of booze I know I'm not hollow.