Chapter 11: The Drink Was Never Just A Drink

Alcohol has been a mixed blessing in my life. That is the plainest sentence I know how to write about it. 0

It has opened good experiences. It has softened social stiffness Mormonism helped produce. It has made some evenings warmer, some meals richer, some conversations easier, and some musical improvisations more honest and divine. It has also been present in some of the worst experiences of my life. That combination makes it impossible to treat alcohol as the simple freedom symbol many ex-Mormons want it to be. 0

I understand why the symbol exists. When coffee is suspicious, wine is forbidden, and a drink marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders, alcohol becomes more than alcohol. It becomes adulthood, normalcy, defiance, proof that the old authority no longer governs your body. There can be healing in taking back ordinary human choices. 0

But symbols distort. Once alcohol becomes a badge of liberation, it becomes harder to ask what it is doing. You are not just drinking. You are proving something to an absent authority. You are performing freedom for yourself. That is a bad condition for judgment, especially around a substance that works by loosening judgment. 0

Mormonism was immature about alcohol. It replaced discernment with prohibition, made abstinence a loyalty marker, and left many people with fear or rebellion. Neither is a mature relationship to a substance. The church did not teach people to evaluate context, motive, dependency, social pressure, loneliness, or family history. But it was not hallucinating when it treated alcohol as morally relevant. 0

Alcohol changes things. That is why people drink it. Sometimes it makes a dinner warmer or a guarded conversation easier. Sometimes it makes the worst available choice easier. No slogan can hold that. The church's slogan was too simple, and the ex-Mormon counter-slogan is often too simple too. 0

Sobriety is still the most important gateway to reality to become comfortable with. It is the state most attuned to survival, and survival is not a small good. A good life usually requires staying alive for a long time, remaining answerable to other people, remembering what happened, and noticing danger before it becomes dramatic. Sobriety is not merely the absence of pleasure. It is the ordinary instrument by which a person learns the world well enough to keep living in it. 0

But ordinary reality is not the only reality worth perceiving. There are levels of inebriation that can reveal warmth, musical courage, emotional honesty, the strangeness of familiar rooms, the beauty of other people when the usual defenses soften. Those revelations are not automatically fake because they arrive through a substance. They are not necessarily escape. Sometimes they are a different angle on reality. 0

The risk is that altered perception can feel like insight when it is only permission. It can disclose beauty and overstate it. It can loosen fear and responsibility. For many people, some risk may be worth taking in order to understand reality more fully. But it should be treated as risk, not proof of sophistication, rebellion, or healing. 0

This is where I return to adult freedom. Abstaining because Mormonism forbade alcohol and drinking because Mormonism forbade it both keep Mormonism at the center. The better question is harder: what kind of thing is this, and what does it do in my life? 0

Does it make me more present or less present? Does it help me receive pleasure cleanly, or smuggle pain past my own attention? What patterns appear around it? What do the people who love me experience when I drink? What do I become more likely to say, do, ignore, or excuse? These are adult questions because they do not have one universal answer. 0

Mormonism spared people from asking them by answering in advance. That protected some people from harm. It also left many unpracticed. When the old answer lost authority, they had to learn discernment late, sometimes with higher stakes than they understood. That is one quiet tragedy of overprotection: it can keep you safe long enough to delay the wisdom you will need when safety ends. 0

I wish I had inherited a moral framework that could say: this can be good, this can be dangerous, this affects people differently, this requires honesty, and this should not become identity. Instead I inherited taboo, passed through rebellion, and now want clarity. Clarity says something less satisfying and more useful: some Mormon warnings become more believable as you age, not because Mormonism was true, but because human nature is not fake. 0

Appetite is not fake. Regret is not fake. Pleasure is not fake either. The work is to tell the truth about all of it. 0