LogFAQs > #951640481

Whenever I'm being spoken over nowadays - it's him speaking over me. Aspects of his personality annoy the fuck out of me, like when he sings the same chorus or lyric from a song over and over all day, every day, for weeks. I never liked it when he would like touch my shoulder or anything - I didn't like when anyone would touch me because of the bullying I went through, but well into adulthood, I didn't want my best friend touching me. I'm so touch-starved, but between being touch-starved and hugging my friend, I'd rather be touch-starved. I shrugged off facetious comments because it was the nature of our friendship for me to cop a joke from time to time - I only recently started replying in kind, and I think my comfort in being nasty like that is affecting my relationships with others.

These are aspects of his personality that people like him for. That people respond positively to. Where I'm the outlier. They aren't negative aspects necessarily. But I hate them.

And having gotten sober, and subsequently had to cope with the effects of sobriety, I came to the conclusion that I hadn't liked my friend for a long time. For all that he had done for me over the years, for all the things he had done for me to help me fit in and feel included, I couldn't get past his faults. Being around this guy was like being nails on a chalkboard, and I think I've known for years. Being drunk helped me cope with the aspects of his personality I couldn't stand.

He means well, and I believe he's meant well most of the time we've been friends. There have been times where he's been spiteful and made joke after joke about the same shitty thing at my expense, but there have been times where I've been a real fucking menace and he took care of me when I was too drunk and belligerent to take care of myself. But I can't keep being friends with someone out of obligation, because it's the status quo and because it makes him feel better.

I think what really kicked this off was remembering all the times someone had asked me "why do you let him treat you like that? Why don't you get him back for it?" And the thing is, I didn't want to be mean back. I didn't want to make jokes about his high-strung mother - who he would explicitly make uncomfortable for his own amusement, and because he knew it made me squirm when he would be shitty towards her. I didn't want to make jokes about his alcoholic father. But I learned to indulge in it, and now I feel gross about it.

I didn't get him back for the longest time because my self-worth was tied to how people reacted to me. If he makes a joke about fucking my mother and people laugh, that's a positive reaction despite being sick of that fucking joke about him becoming my stepfather for the 50th time. When he would harp on something I said and turn it into a running joke, it's positive attention despite how bad it feels. If I speak up about it, I'm just gonna come across as a tightass and people will double down on it. And the fact is that because I was bullied during school, because I went through a decade of feeling like shit, I didn't want to make anyone else feel as bad as I ever did.

That's not to say that my mean streak was directly tied to how I was treated by my best friend. I got way meaner about certain people. I was a backstabber, if the person was disliked by our wider group. I was two-faced if it was entertaining. And I really fucking regret that.

I wanted people to like me, and the only time I felt loose and casual enough to feel comfortable in my own skin was when I was drunk. So when I began to grow out of how my best friend treated me, I would drink more to thicken my skin and deal with it. And then it got bad enough that I would confront him about it and he'd apologize and make a conscious effort to not go there. But the fact that he made that accommodation made me feel even worse, especially when I noticed him stopping himself from doing something that bothered me. And that's just the shit that was hurtful, that was reasonable to ask him to stop. I couldn't stand his constant fucking singing by the end, and that's just a casual innocuous habit that makes him happy y'know.

I only came to this conclusion once I had stopped drinking. Being around him while I've been sober has been so fucking uncomfortable. I clench my jaw and I want to be as far away from him as possible. He recently rested a hand in my shoulder in a good faith sort of way, and I shifted my entire body to get away from him. I have this primal revulsion to being around him, because I realise how unhappy I feel when I spend time around him.

Things didn't used to be like this. My feelings towards my best friend changed over time - and they should, because people change as they grow up and mature. But I was maintaining a status quo by drinking, and the only way I've been able to cope with sobriety is by spending the least amount of time with him as humanely possible.

The connecting thread throughout my stint with alcoholism has been comfort. I feel comfortable around my friends, and drinking loosened me up and made me more receptive to being around people. Then, as they came to know me, I began to feel a disconnect between our personalities - and the best way to bridge that gap and maintain a sense of goodwill with them was to drink. Then I became dependant on alcohol during a time of crisis and stress - I severely disliked who I was when I wasn't inebriated, and I had no choice but to live with the hellish reality of once-in-a-lifetime bushfires and a global pandemic, so I made a conscious choice to get blackout drunk as often as I could during a time where social norms were degrading. And then I drank my way into a health problem.

It is very easy to lose your sense of self and neglect your own personal growth due to alcohol. You want to feel comfortable, safe and loved, but you don't develop enough as a person to find those things in your day to day life - you get a taste of how that feels when you're really vibing on your alcohol of choice, but it's fleeting and it comes with a physical, financial and metaphorical cost.

We all need comfort, and we all need to cut loose sometimes. It can be hard to find release without something to take the edge off. But you're right about it being easy to slip into alcoholism, because when you've spent your entire life feeling alienated and downcast and you find something that helps you talk to people and make real connections slightly outside of your usual wheelhouse, it feels like a fucking godsend. It makes you re-evaluate whether you deserved to get bullied for reasons outside of your comprehension, and the answer tends to be "no, I didn't, because I'm fucking awesome". But that's the alcohol talking - you're the same person as always the next morning, and the next morning after your next drink. And I think we all know it's the alcohol talking. I don't know anyone who drank themselves into loving themselves.

To move forward, we need to feel like we're fucking awesome when we're not drinking. And the process of getting to that place is a lot of hard work, compassion and personal understanding, whereas it might be a bottle of gin away to feel like that for a night. I'm getting there after three months sober - and sobriety only clicked after 2 months of sobriety, to the day almost. But it's still a process I'm going through. To be honest, I'm going through a rough patch at the moment.

But yeah. Alcoholism is very easy to slip into

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I know that you think you're not good for anything, the world makes you feel so small
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