One Friday back in October, I taught three classes in row -two of them hot. I came home after all of that, and sat down on the couch with a splash of wine in a glass. I took maybe two or three sips of the wine and woke up forty-five minutes later flat on my back with my laptop on my chest and no idea how I got there.
After that I think I may have had a drink at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but something about it didn’t quite sit right, and I soon found myself in a category that in a million years I never thought I would see: I became one of those people who doesn’t drink. This will probably come as a surprise to people who knew me in college. I was REALLY good at drinking. Although much of college is a little foggy, I have crystal clear memories of sitting on a table at the Phyrst, finishing my second pitcher of lager, and thinking, “I’m bored. Let’s do some shots.” And standing in a kitchen at a party after three or four vodka tonics chased by half a dozen college-sized lemon drops, and being thoroughly lucid through a discussion about Hemingway with a cute guitarist with great biceps (and who, a quick googling reveals, is still playing in State College, and still has great biceps). Anyway, vodka was good for that, those lucid drunks.
I definitely was not of legal drinking age in this picture, but wasn't I cute? I wish I still had that hat. I do still have that pillowcase.
My joke with myself is that I hit my lifetime alcohol quota in my twenties. Of course there is a huge difference between college drinking and occasionally having an adult beverage as an actual adult, and my alcohol use tapered to almost nothing once I hit my thirties. I never really made a conscious decision to stop drinking, nor do I think anyone else should stop drinking if it is enjoyable for them. What happened was that the act of drinking, for my body and soul, no longer felt authentic.
Which brings me to the theme for the day: authenticity. I’ve had the alcohol thing in the blog queue for a while, because there are still times when it feels a little weird to face a situation without a drink in my hand, even if that one drink was going to be in my hand over the course of an entire evening, until it was all melted into water. I just couldn’t quite figure out how to write about it until it dawned on me that it was an issue of authenticity.
What got me thinking about authenticity in the first place is reading The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida. He captures something I have until now had trouble articulating: the idea that once we have accepted that women and men are equally capable of worldly things, it is vital to live in ways that are authentically masculine and authentically feminine, and that to do otherwise diminishes, well, everything in life. (And of course, it’s a given that the majority of people are at their core either mostly masculine or mostly feminine, whatever their body parts). It’s a fast read and very general. I am not sure if I buy all of it, but then, it’s for men, and I am not one of those. However, the parts that emphatically state that women are to be worshiped for the divine gifts they bring to men, that I buy.
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