I’m writing this on a St. Patricks Day evening, thinking about the other local expats gathering now at one of the two main pubs below my apartment here in China. All of them I have always thought of as going to these places on this particular day with happy hearts and fun times on the brain. But now I know at least a few of them wish they were not spending another St. Paddy’s Day like this, as they have been trying to to stop drinking, but how can they, this is what we do here in this foreign city as foreigners leaning on each other in these cultural oasis times, and well, you gotta drink it all up don’t you, it’s what expats do. A few will abstain and have Cokes or Sprites or whatever, but these few unhappy drinkers only wish they could do that.
That has been me as one of the unhappy drinkers for a while having been seriously trying to stop for over a year and three months now. Not too successfully, but definitely seriously working on it. No AA meetings to go to, or any kind of support groups around in English, so it’s been though books and videos and podcasts trying to find help. On this St. Patrick’s Day I decided to stay home and start writing about it, though that is not easy.
So I am starting this blog to track my journey but to also perhaps be a voice that helps another fellow expat somewhere in the world who really wants to stop, but can’t shake that part of their expat identity off. I’ll be talking about that identity, about my experiences and those that I know of. For it is I think a peculiar set of people who find themselves abroad by choice, perhaps like me for many years. We are like those once living on the oceans in sailing ships, staying in or visiting many ports of call, never belong anywhere but to the Sea. For us we only belong to the Overseas. And it’s hard, and it’s rough, and it’s exotic, and it’s endlessly interesting, but its is stressful, and lonely for many, even in their expat marriages. And drinking always helps until it doesn’t anymore.
So I’ll be keeping it anonymous, but anyone who knows me will be able to piece together who I am from the details, for in all the details I will be open and honest, nothing made up in the way of yarn spinning here.
The first country I moved to was Korea, and I hit that country drinking moderately, but, as anyone knows who has lived there, hard drinking is their national pastime, so I fit myself right in soon enough. And ever since then, 27 years ago, it has been a constant, drinking, with a couple of years abstaining for certain definite reasons. It is time to bring it to an end, that part of my life, to become a permanently Ex-Drinking Ex-Pat.
My history shows it’s never going to be so simple a thing as that, and try as I might I slip back into it. But that is what this will be about. I am better now than I was, but not as good as I will be, more and more. And when will I be able to claim that status, adding that second Ex to my identity fully and forever?
Well, I would argue I could do so from a year and three months ago. For apart from a drinker being “one who drinks” isn’t a drinker one who accepts his own drinking, as in it being a good thing, adding some value to their lives in some way, and there are no thoughts that it needs to be cut out? Once you cross from that to, “no it is now a problem and it has to stop”, you are no longer a true drinker are you? You go to the watering hole reluctantly, unwillingly even, wishing to stay away, but you are addicted to the substance, so you keep drinking, and are in that sense a drinker, but also in the other sense an ex-drinker. For the process of stopping drinking is just that- a process, for nearly everyone but those rare, and sometimes unverifiable stories of “Yep, I decided I needed to stop and never took another drink again.” It happens, but I doubt it does very often, and likely not to the vast the majority of drinkers who eventually stop drinking- eventually being the key word.
Being a process as I mentioned it never begins until you start being that- an ex-wholehearted-drinker. But of course, the goal is to be alcohol free, and it that sense when will I be able to say I am truly an ExPat-ExDrinker? I’ve gone as much as one month, two months, several weeks this last year at various times, so how long until I can say I am free? A point to wonder about, I don’t accept most of what others say about ‘you’ll always be an alcoholic’ at one extreme and ‘oh, you’ll never even think about drinking again’ at the other extreme. I have to work it out for myself.