Self-helpless: A Cynic's Search for Sanity

By Rebecca Davis

Everywhere Rebecca Davis looked, the world was in poor shape. And because she’d quit drinking, she no longer had the comfort blanket of alcohol to tamp down her anxiety. How did sober people stay sane?

In recent times, the self-help industry has exploded into a multi-billion dollar global industry – and along with it has come every imaginable type of therapy, healing or general woo-woo. In the past, Rebecca scoffed at this industry, mocking its reliance on half-baked science and the way it appears to prey on the mentally fragile.

But as she searched for a meaning of life that did not involve booze, she found it increasingly hard to rationalize her default scepticism. This shit really seems to work for some people, she reasoned. And it’s not like I have any particularly solid alternatives.

Rebecca lives in Cape Town, the undisputed epicentre of ‘alternative’ paths to peace and enlightenment in South Africa. She decided that over the course of a year, she would embark on a quest for personal wellness, spiritual enlightenment and good old-fashioned happiness. She was willing, within reason, to try anything. She would open herself to even the most outlandish contemporary fads in self-improvement.

What followed was a twelve-month immersion in the world of auras, chakras, hallucinogenic drugs, sweat lodges, sangomas, past lives and more.

And by the end of it? Maybe she would find some new ways of thinking and living. Or maybe she would emerge with her prejudices untouched. Either way, it would be a good story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770106031

Book preview

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For Haji

Who makes me happier than I ever thought possible

First published in 2018

by Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19

Northlands

2116

Johannesburg

South Africa

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-602-4

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-603-1

© Rebecca Davis 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The views and opinions expressed in the text that follows do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. The author is not advocating that the reader pursues any of the activities described in the pages that follow; this is an account of a personal journey of self-discovery.

Editing by Jane Bowman

Proofreading by Sally Hines

Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg

Cover design by publicide

Author photograph by Leila Dougan

Contents

In the Beginning

I Know Too Much and Not Enough

Fasts Should be Called Slows

Becoming Antisocial

Move it or Lose it

What Would Marie Kondo do?

A Cat with Seven Lives

Help Yourself: Because Nobody Else Will do it for You

Turning Japanese

Sweat is Negativity Leaving the Body

The Sound of Your Own Voice

Whatever Floats Your Boat

Don’t Mind Your Mind

Help, Please

A Best White Turns to the Ancestors

Clearing Your Stuffs

Reckoning with the Grim Reaper

And in the End?

Acknowledgements

In the Beginning

It all started with the giraffes.

‘Giraffes are becoming extinct,’ my friend Roy informed me a few months ago.

Roy specialises in keeping track of the most depressing developments in the world, which he then imparts to me with a kind of doleful glee. He’s like a one-man bad news service, dedicated to making sure I am aware of exactly what barbarous acts ISIS has lately committed, or precisely how dead the Great Barrier Reef is.

One sunny Friday afternoon, he recently WhatsApped me to say: ‘I am convinced that our generation is going to face hardships on a scale not seen since the time of our grandparents or great-grandparents.’

‘TGIF!!!’ I replied.

Naturally, Roy would be the one to tell me about the giraffes. When I receive one of his little textual doom-bombs, I always hope he’s mistaken. He never is.

There are now so few giraffes in the world that almost all of them could fit into FNB Stadium if they were human-sized. One giraffe specialist was quoted in a news report as saying: ‘It is timely that we stick our neck out for the giraffe before it is too late.’

The news about the giraffes hits me hard. The imminent extinction of other less majestic creatures has left me cold, so I admit this is an unjustifiably selective sadness. But I have always loved giraffes, though I have never been in a close personal relationship with one. Their flaws may become apparent on closer acquaintance. From a distance, though, giraffes seem pretty great.

I was once driving through the Eastern Cape when I saw a giraffe on the side of the road. It wasn’t hitch-hiking or anything; it was behind a wire fence that presumably housed a game farm. It’s quite a thing, to come upon a giraffe when you’re not expecting it. It lifted my spirits considerably.

I’ve only seen giraffes once since then; when I brought my Greek pal Cristina to a rather sad private game reserve outside Cape Town. The owner of the place took us for a game drive, which didn’t progress quite as we had hoped. We had assumed he would deliver a David Attenborough-style running patter of animal facts, but he chose to approach the subject from a different perspective.

‘Eland to your left,’ he said. ‘Cost me almost R40 000.’

‘White impala through the trees. R260 000.’

I wanted to remind him that we were not on an antelope trolley-dash, because I felt his handling of the topic was robbing the African veld of some mystique for Cristina.

But then we crested a hill, and below us, meandering slowly through the dusk, appeared two giraffes. I squealed so loudly I didn’t even hear how much he paid for them. Giraffes have that effect on you. They are magical, implausible creatures, and when we tell our grandchildren that they once existed they will assume we are lying.

It doesn’t make you feel great to know that giraffes are probably going to die out on our watch. I admit I haven’t taken any direct steps to prevent their extinction yet, but when the last one goes I will feel a heavy sense of personal shame.

What kind of assholes let giraffes cease to exist? Us.

It’s not just the giraffes that have me feeling uneasy of late. There’s also the water issue. At time of writing, my home of the Western Cape has been declared a disaster area due to the frantic pace at which we are running out of water. At time of writing, City of Cape Town officials have started to speak of ‘Day Zero’: the point at which there is simply no water left.

‘Day Zero’, I think we can all agree, is a term that has more than a faint whiff of the apocalypse about it.

Almost daily, even without Roy’s assistance, I now come across something new to add to my spiralling list of concerns. Just today, the New Yorker informed me that the world is running out of sand. Sand! The one thing you’d think we’d have loads of, in these water-depleted times!

Not so. I’ve never been very interested in sand, but I see now how foolish I’ve been.

Turns out we need sand to make everything from houses to cellphone screens, and soon there will be none left. There will be tons of desert sand, but that’s not the good stuff. You can’t use that for manufacturing purposes, or even to play Olympic-standard beach volleyball on. Practically the only thing desert sand is suitable for is filling tiny hourglasses to play 30 Seconds.

You need special sand for everything else cool and useful, and that’s what we’re running out of. Ask a geologist for further details; I’m too busy worrying about the big picture.

Because make no mistake: that big picture seems like a decidedly gloomy daubing at present. There’s a lot to keep you up at night, without even counting the myriad tiny injustices and hurts that come with simply being human. Little wonder that some corporates have started to offer ‘duvet days’, where employees can opt to spend a working day with the covers pulled over their heads when it all gets too much.

But if you don’t have the luxury of wallowing in a blanket fort for hours on end, what is to be done? How do we stay sane and happy in a world where being insane and unhappy often seems like a rational response to circumstances?

For years, I thought I had the solution.

◊

‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ agonised the poet Sylvia Plath.

As soon as I came of age legally I discovered what I thought was a perfectly satisfactory answer to that question. Yes. It’s called alcohol.

I started drinking alcohol when I was eighteen, and for the next sixteen years I pursued it with a passionate intensity. If you met me socially at any point during this period, chances are that I was drunk. Soz! For over a decade and a half, boozing was effectively my only hobby.

I’ve calculated that from the age of eighteen to 34, I have spent roughly 9 984 hours drinking: around twelve hours a week times sixteen years.

Malcolm Gladwell’s famous and wildly inaccurate thesis holds that it takes 10 000 hours’ practice to get really good at something. Let’s pretend for a second that this is true.

If I had dedicated those 9 984 hours to anything else, by now I would be a champion at it. I could have three PhDs, or be fluent in Mandarin, or hold Springbok colours in a sport that very few other people play.

The most frustrating part? Despite all that hard graft, I’m not even very good at drinking. I am not the type of person about whom people say respectfully: ‘She can really hold her liquor.’

In my head I am a charming, witty drunk, delivering priceless bons mots to a rapturous audience. The reality is less Oscar Wilde and more Girls Gone Wild.

I am that sloppy creature you see stumbling out of an Uber leaving all her possessions behind. I am the woman droopily lighting the wrong end of a cigarette in a no-smoking zone. I am the bore repeatedly slurring how much I love you, despite the fact that we met five minutes ago.

Most people will go their entire lives without experiencing a blackout: the state in which alcohol blocks the creation of memories in the brain.

I don’t mean to brag, but I have had literally hundreds. My friends used to refer to them as the ‘light leaving my body’. I was physically there, but nobody was home.

American addiction specialist Donal F. Sweeney describes blackout victims thus: ‘For the hours, sometimes days such persons are in a blackout, they have lost their consciousness of self, their awareness of who and where they are. They are lost in the truest sense of the world – lost to themselves, lost in space, lost in time.’

Blackouts are scary. Sweeney tells the story of a man in a blackout who ‘drove 12 miles to his home, parked on the street and went to bed, unaware that the headless body of his best friend was in the vehicle beside him’. I’d like to hope that I haven’t decapitated anyone in that state, but I couldn’t swear on it in a court of law.

I knew that my drinking was a problem for at least ten years out of that sixteen, but I didn’t do anything to fix it for a number of reasons.

One was that I was a binge drinker rather than the more classy alcoholic of popular culture. I didn’t drink every day. I didn’t hide alcohol around the house. I didn’t drink in the mornings, bar the odd Bloody Mary at brunch. I never smashed through a shower door like Meg Ryan in When a Man Loves a Woman.

I held down jobs and relationships. I was what they call ‘high functioning’, though I feel a bit embarrassed typing that because it makes me sound like I should have been stalking around in a power suit bellowing instructions into a flip-phone. I lived what appeared to be a normal life, except that around three times a week I drank until I couldn’t see.

I loved New Year’s Eve and weddings, because on those occasions other people drank the way I drank every week.

Sometimes I drank so much that my brain forgot how to make me walk, and I began to list weirdly to one side like a sinking ship, with my pelvis jutting forward. I am told that it was not a good look, though strangers treated me with compassion because they assumed I was seriously disabled.

Nothing significantly bad happened to me while I was drunk, thanks largely to extremely kind friends and partners. The worst I endured was some physical scrapes and questionable decisions. In hindsight, this is nothing short of miraculous, and has fostered a quiet conviction within me that I have been placed on this earth to carry out a special mission not yet revealed to me.

While supremely thankful for this astounding good fortune, it also unhelpfully enabled me to carry on down the Amy Winehouse lifestyle programme far past the point of sanity.

The popular narrative around alcoholism leads us to believe that you seek help after you hit rock bottom, and that rock bottom is pretty dramatic: losing your house, getting arrested, alienating everyone you love. Until that happens, bottoms up!

In a moment of particular anxiety about my drinking, I attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a friend three years ago. It had the opposite of the intended effect. We left in high spirits.

‘We have nothing to worry about!’ I hissed with delight as we exited the church hall. ‘Those people are so much worse than us!’

We had listened to a succession of horrifying alcoholic war stories, culminating in details like ‘… and that’s when I woke up cable-tied to a gurney in Groote Schuur’.

I found it all comfortingly unrelatable. I felt like a nun by comparison.

At other points, though, I knew I was lying to myself. At one stage I obsessively consumed addiction memoirs, and much in them hit home. After finishing Koren Zailckas’s Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, in fact, I tossed the book aside with contempt.

Amateur! I thought, with a kind of perverse pride. I’ve done all of that and a lot worse.

I was a big fan of ‘Are you an Alcoholic?’ online quizzes, too. In retrospect, I see now that the best way to tell if you have a drinking problem is if you are routinely googling ‘Do I have a drinking problem?’

By definition, the answer is ‘Afraid so’.

Normal people, from what I understand, do not spend the periods between drinking binges seeking absolution from the Internet.

But the main reason why I delayed facing up to my drinking problem was simple.

Alcohol is magic. It works as an alchemy turning boredom into play. Ordinary nights become madcap adventures.

Sip by sip, it smothers your agonising about dwindling giraffe numbers with a sense of warm well-being about your place in the world.

It gives you the confidence to talk to anyone. In a drunken haze, I have buttonholed Constitutional Court judges, pop stars and politicians, and ear-fucked them senseless. I’m sure the experience was less rewarding for them, but that’s not the point. Like many heavy drinkers, I am naturally shy and quite introverted. Alcohol turned me into a social superhero.

I wish more addiction literature would be honest about this. Yes, alcohol is a devastating toxin that ruins – and takes – lives. But it is also very fun. Life is hard, and alcohol can make it more bearable, offering a brief escape from your endlessly disappointing self.

One of my favourite writers, Charlie Brooker, once penned a column in which he explained that he lived a sober lifestyle because ‘I don’t want to get out of my head: that’s where I live’.

I remember putting down the newspaper – it was the olden days – and thinking about that for a long time.

What a clean, orderly house your mind must be not to ever want to leave it, I mused.

I imagined a pristine white space with scented candles and tasteful flowers. Then I pictured my own mind-house: a crazy witch’s den in disarray, junk spilling from every corner, food left out to mould. Who could blame me for wanting the occasional break from that?

For a while I attempted to regulate my drinking, hoping to hit upon the ‘moderation’ I’d heard so much about.

Alcohol guidelines made me hoot with derision. Fourteen units a week? That was my pre-game warm-up. Nonetheless, I tried.

I experimented with restricting myself to three drinks at a time, but soon learnt the wisdom of James Thurber’s maxim: ‘One martini is all right. Two