it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there.
as someone who didn't consume a single drop of alcohol for twelve years and then just recently ... well a year ago ... or is it two? ... in wagga wagga new south wales of all places, fell off the wagon, i was moved by this fragment ❊ from an interview with robin williams, the actor, who killed himself in 2014 when he was 63.
“I was in a small town where it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there, and then I thought: drinking. I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help.”
It was 2004. Williams was in Yukon Province making The Big White with Holly Hunter and Woody Harrelson. He'd given up drugs and alcohol in 1983.
“I felt alone and afraid. It was that thing of working so much, and going, ‘Fuck, maybe that will help. And it was the worst thing in the world… You feel warm, and kind of wonderful. And the next thing you know, it’s a problem, and you’re isolated.”
whether i was ever a true alcoholic, and what it means to be a true alcoholic, i don't know but i drank every day and if i didn't consume a sufficient amount of alcohol for whatever reason i became very unhappy and i frequently drank far more than a sufficient amount and did and said stupid things which i regretted later or couldn't remember.
what alcohol and drugs do, at least for some people, is they temporarily silence the superego and allow the id to express itself. this is sometimes necessary but it's dangerous : there is a reason why the psyche evolved in the way that it did.
i miss robin williams and i miss philip seymour hoffman but i only knew them on the screen. i also miss a whole bunch of other people i knew personally that bumped themselves off.
i miss them because i know the inside of the black hole they were in and when you are inside that black hole you are so completely and utterly in despair about your inability to get out of it even though you got out of it before (remember?!) but now you are inside a different black hole. the one that opens up when you're 60 or 47 and your relationship ends and you'd put absolutely everything you had left into it and you're alone and you're fucked.
do you know what it means to put absolutely everything you have into something? but there is more where that came from, right?
there is always more. yeah until there isn't. do you know what it means to put absolutely everything you have left into something?
as the man said, it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there.
fuck it. let's have glass of wine.
❊ i found it here.