After almost 20 years with a drinking problem, Baal Caulfield* explains how he handled life after alcohol.

Read parts one and two of Baal Caulfield’s story of giving up alcohol.

Trying to keep occupied without booze can be an extremely difficult task. You see, unlike heroin or meth, my drug of choice was legal, socially acceptable and everywhere. It’s in every supermarket, most cafes and restaurants, people’s houses, corner liquor stores, nearly everywhere I go my addiction is being served, and people are downing it with gusto. No one’s jerking it into their veins down at a public toilet in private (as far as I’m aware), it’s all out in the open. Recently, I was in Vegas and there were drunks staggering up and down the street with cocktails at all hours. Losing $300 USD at the blackjack table without a whisky in hand loses its appeal fairly quickly, I can assure you. So what can you expect life to be without that crutch and how do you manage it? 

You’ll need something else to keep your hands occupied

The number of times, particularly in the early days, I reached down to grab the beer that wasn’t there are too numerous to count. I’d be watching a movie and without thinking, I’d grasp at thin air where my beer would’ve been. I’d get momentarily confused and start looking around wildly, getting ready to accuse no one else in the room of stealing my beer. It was weird and unnerving.

It’s like when you stop smoking, you need something else to do with your hands. I fooled around trying to learn how to flick cards into a hat (failed), tried juggling (also failed), writing (moderately successful) and perfecting tossing my keys in the air, bouncing them against my inner elbow fold and catching them in my other hand (Grandmaster status).

I started chain smoking for a while which helped, but then I quit smoking and I was at a loss. It was then I discovered non-alcoholic beer. It actually tastes rather good and for a time, I was downing eight Clausthalers a night. With the advent of Heineken Zero, I’ve eased off a little and generally limit myself to two or three a night because I was bingeing on non-alcoholic beers like they were real beers which brings me to my second point…

You need something else to binge on

First, it was zero % beers, then smokes, followed by candy. Then I started getting fat so I eased off the ingestibles and tried to find something else to binge on, and that something else was music. I can’t play an instrument and I can passably DJ (although I haven’t owned the right equipment to pursue this for some years now). However, I love music. Outside of the written word, music is my favourite medium of entertainment.

For sure, some music reminds me of those wasted times. Listening to Iron Maiden reminds me of seeing them play Mount Smart stadium and for reasons not entirely clear to me, I hit a guy in the head with a foot-long of cactus I’d smuggled into the concert (again for unclear reasons). Or listening to ear-splitting techno from the likes of Drumcell or the eponymous Jeff Mills: Live in the Liquid Room album reminds me of sweaty, seedy mornings at Wellington’s Tatou or Studio 9 nightclubs. The Cure or Nine Inch Nails remind me of walking on the beach with a beer and shouting at seagulls.

The musical world has many associations with those fucked up years. But listening to music, actually listening to it, became my hobby. I got such a rich experience from the music I loved that I could avoid the occasional cravings and bury myself in a world of tones, chords and 4 x 4 beats. Suddenly, DJ Shadow became deeper and more personal to me. Dire Straits reminded me of my dad and my early years in primary school. Dark and twisted mixes from Audio Injection took on new meaning. Everything became the soundtrack to my mood. Which brings me to my next point…

Your mood needs to be paid attention to

I have rapid mood swings. I can go from happy-go-lucky to brooding anger within minutes. Even the slightest perceived inconvenience can ruin not just my day, but that of anyone with me: people not walking down the sidewalk properly (I’ve always felt the footpath should be split into three lanes – a fast lane, a slow lane and a pain in the ass lane), someone taking 30 items into the express lane at the supermarket, that sort of thing.

Alcohol gave me a modulating effect. My personality changed a little when drunk, but it made me feel fairly static and I knew how it would affect me every time. But I began sinking into depression and getting mad at myself for the position I let myself get into and how it affected other people. It was doing me no good so I started attending cognitive behavioural therapy. I learnt to be kinder to myself. I’m far from perfect and we all have aspects of our personalities that make us crazy, that affect those around us, that cause you to swear in the street under your breath for no apparent reason other than because ‘I feel shitty about myself’.

But that’s okay. You can take responsibility for your actions and put yourself through your own form of penance, but at the end of the day, you need to forgive yourself if you’re to ever move on and grow as a person. Hell, for the better part of the last 20 years, I’ve been cross at myself for every failure I’ve experienced. Some of it I take responsibility for, some of it is just unavoidable bad luck, but at every turn, I blamed myself and created a feedback loop where things just got worse and worse – and it never ended. But by learning from my mistakes instead of brooding on them, life got better, I was able to gain more insight into myself. This helped me with my relationships which was good because…

People are there to help

I’m lucky. I have really good friends and an amazing girlfriend. I’ve been supported during some of my worst times and I know when I pick up the phone and call for help, it’s there. That’s not to say they’ll always be there – it takes work on my part, but I know who my friends are. I’ve had people drop everything and drive seven hours to come and make sure I’m okay.

I desperately don’t want to let any of these people down. They were there for me so I need to listen to their advice and make sure if they need me I’ll be there too. Throughout this whole journey, I’ve made mistakes and screwed up royally. But at the end of the day, the changes I needed to make were already inside me. I had some damn good people around me to help me see that. It’s still a hard road I’m on but it gets easier over time. I’m slowly piecing together a different direction I want to take without reverting to alcohol as a solution. It’ll take time and there’ll be more bumps in the road. However, there’s support out there not just for me, but for everyone who asks. You just need to pick yourself up and reach out. Not just to others, but also to yourself.

*Baal Caulfield is a pseudonym

The thought leaders of the late 2010s subject themselves to a regimen of terrible eating and self-imposed abeyance. The funniest part is that half the time, so do I.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is a man under pressure. His company’s profit streak conceals an ongoing net drop in its real users. He’s facing renewed criticism for his social media platform’s failure to offer a suitable response to combat right-wing extremism beyond “we’re a great big marketplace of ideas”. He’s hounded in his very place of work, unable to use his own creation to simply tweet non sequiturs from the loo. Worse, he’s probably bayingly hungry in a sluggish, aching kind of way all the time  On a podcast with last month with a high profile anti-vaxxer and fitness guru, he revealed a fasting routine that outstripped most Buddhist traditions: a single meal during weekdays, a fast for the whole weekend.

A life sentence of work without the punctuation that gives it meaning, then . No Friday falafel after work, no picnics somewhere close to water if it’s getting warm, no solemn and low-key comedown dinner you throw together before you head back into the work week. Dorsey looks slimmer and more wiry than most 42 year olds I’ve met. He also looks like he’s wearing the toll of the asceticism  – dull hair, bags under his eyes, a face receding under cheekbones that you can tell weren’t meant to be that prominent. Most adult men who end up looking like this through circumstance would kill for the assurance of regular meals and comfort. We’re not conditioned to expect the opposite.

Dorsey is in fine company here. The late Steve Jobs was an increasingly aggressive faster who identified the nexus between eating, not eating and control early on. Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of the Apple founder notes that when he was young, “he learned that he could induce euphoria and ecstasy by fasting”. Even as oncologists and nutritionists urged him to eat high-protein meals, his widow recalls how he would come to the table and stare sullenly at a full plate.

Speaking to Joe Rogan last July on yet another podcast, Jordan Peterson celebrated the perceived benefits of his all-meat diet (“I’m stronger, I can swim better, my gum disease is gone”). His descriptions of any attempt to slacken or not stay the course, for example by drinking some juice, sound like Ignatius J. Reilly’s litany of medical complaints: “[The apple cider] took me out for a month…it was awful. It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom…. I didn’t sleep at all for 24 days.”

Sickness, failing health and death are very real, and no group has exclusive dibs on them. The same applies to the most serious forms of disordered eating and its associated patterns of thought  –  men can and do experience debilitating diseases like anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. But we’re not talking about that, really, because more than ever, it seems we’re alive to the quotidian details of the weird tricks of successful men. They’re suffering in paradise and making a very loud virtue of it.

And although the mentality underpinning that virtue is chronic and destructive, discussing it in those terms can feel too serious, too dramatic. As an illustration, if you say something like “women exist in a relentless panopticon of physical assessment where the intergenerational and peer impact of eating disorders is all-permeating, traumatic and sometimes fatal” it’s a bit purple, but it doesn’t seem wrong. Going as hard to set out the exact societal condition of a bunch of dudes down the gym feels excessive. A lot of the time, men’s body issues are at once systemic, compromising, undignified, and totally absurd.

Take a look at your boys. They’re eating hypothetical caveman diets to achieve the spry, trim and tweedy look of a sharp-minded professor/investor. Or lurking half-seen in the permanent twenty-something dungeon man caves, pallid biceps in between drums of protein powder. Or having a Wiki-level crack at Buddhism in second year after a student bender flame-out, and doing a snap fast to show (girls? the lads? themselves?) that they can, until the whites of their eyes look like they’re about to fall like snooker balls down the ramp into their heads.

The greatest tension comes in those social circles where caring about your appearance must not be seen to matter. Does your city have critical mass of flannel-and-beer band dudes? If you’re reading this early in the week and late at night, those dudes are out running when they are less likely to be seen doing so, even if it’s freezing and they could have done it hours earlier by daylight. This is stone cold fact. I’ve been in the pack.

Trying to describe this all appropriately is difficult. On the one hand it’s obviously insanely funny. On the other hand, people are temporary or permanently leading lives that can seem like a form of self-imposed unhappiness and that’s tragic. But then again, most of our experiences as men need to kept in very tight perspective, given the overall blessed state these little rituals take place in.

There’s plenty of lines I can draw to separate me and most of my male friends from Dorsey, Peterson, et al. The techbro proselytising is hollow and blinkered – Jobs was by all accounts a personal and professional tyrant; Peterson kind of seems like he’s just pivoting his creepy biological determinism to force-feeding himself disgusting amounts of meat. These people are corny at best and my fundamental political enemies at worst, and I think my ‘active boys’ chat DMs exhibit a very subsistence-level pride in knowing We Are Not Them. But ultimately, I’m not above the same micro-pathologies myself. I police my own body – not with brutality, but with the pedantic, sad force of a traffic cop handing out infringements.

Here is a bunch of things I have done to keep myself at, or to move toward, some imagined physical standard:

• Skipping lunch for several days on end in high school after my mum pointed at Anthony Kiedis dancing shirtless during the ‘Round the World‘ video and announced “That’s what your torso will look like when you’re grown up”.
• Doing a 100-push-ups-a-day routine for a week before a 14th birthday party at the Kaipara’s beloved and decrepit Parakai pools and was too sore and stuff to actually swim.
• Foregoing food until arduous things like an essay or a chore were done, or feeling like a failure.
• Foregoing food until nice things like reading a chapter of a good book were done, or feeling like a failure!
• Overeating upon doing this until I absolutely feel queasy.
• Ridiculous habit of power walking everywhere to make up for doing the above, which I’ve had to consciously moderate into a less quasi-military march.
• Constantly clenching my abdominal muscles to hide a gut, or worse, my perception of a gut, and retaining a weird and sore robotic posture as a result.
• Press-ups with a bunch of books in my backpack, before skipping a meal, before going out to drink.
• To this day, a restless, fidgety anxiety if I’ve skipped an exercise routine I’d previously committed to, in order to do something pleasant and social or even just marginally fucking easy on myself.
•  Trying to eat around others surreptitiously, generally springing for the sad desk lunch despite being otherwise reasonably outgoing.

A huge disclaimer around all the above is that I should note that I have led and still lead an extremely fortunate and comfortable life with a very kind family. I’ve just tended to take a few minor steps of my own to remove the shine.

Body dysmorphia, a mental disorder which various Western studies say is experienced by between 1% and 2% of the male population, is probably under-reported and under-diagnosed. Part of this is simply because a lot of men are terrible at looking after themselves, delaying medical appointments out of stoicism, and delaying various hygiene and lifestyle essentials out of being too afraid to ask. Part of it is that a decent-sized cluster of men who have won by our society’s terms and standards wear forms of self-imposed control, restraint and endurance as a medal of honour. Part of it is men like me on the (relatively) harmless end of the spectrum who play it all down, perhaps not unreasonably  –  the public account of dysmorphia is one of dangerous and desperate steps (starvation, steroids, countless cosmetic surgery procedures) and not of mildly embarrassing compulsion. The stigma doesn’t leave place for anyone who is ‘neurotic’ in the lay sense.

Where it cuts through to my sense of self, though, is realising that in some essential physical and psychological ways, I’m not above Dorsey, Jobs, Peterson et al. I’m unlikely to ever get an opportunity to speak to the benefits of a diet on some crypto-fash podcast, but I’m likely to continue to police and punish my own wants, and make myself do physical or material work when I’m too tired, too sick, or can (rightly!) just feel a bit lazy. This isn’t just about putting our bodies through it in some physical sense, but also about the intangible qualities of achievement, success, austerity and self-reliance (and the guilt in not meeting the mark of any of these) – values that I and most other boys have been fed from year dot.

I feel like in theory, I get all of this. I have set myself a few articles of faith in terms of how I see the world:  that capitalism as we know it in the 21st century is corrosive to the soul; that feeling like you should be working or productive all the time is a self-defeating lie that form of capitalism has fed us; that rewarding ourselves with rest and indulgence is not a straightforward failure of nerve; that we can be intrinsically loved and of worth despite our level of ability or appearance. But if I can’t observe these starting with myself, it’s all just lip service. I’m a semi-willing and less successful participant in the same carnival of self-interest, solipsism, protein and abeyance.

It’s been a recent and useful epiphany. I’ve tried to shake things up as a result. I’ll crack a beer on my lounge floor immediately after a set of weights rather than fret about what it achieved, something that I’m assuming the barrelly and beloved Anthony Kiedis himself would be proud of. I ride my new bike, which wasn’t built for speed, slower and via more scenic routes. If I run, I implement very basic and pleasing tasks as part of it :  to go somewhere cool and get a photo and then go back, to absolutely foul up a gentrifying record store on the return trek with the grime of my forearms, and maybe buy something, maybe not.

In an age of constant hagiography and oversharing, we’ve learnt that plenty of those who seek to control us (as their subjects, their customers, their taxonomies) start with themselves. If I want no part in doing that, I’ll try to start with the same.