Fear of Writer’s Disease

The other day I noticed that many of my favorite writers were victims of the dreaded writer’s disease. People old before their times emerging periodically to pound out some prose before slipping back into the comfort of the bottle. Or punching out drunken babble submitted to, and cleaned up by, sympathetic editors. Now that I dare to consider myself a writer, and see on the horizon a time when writing will be my sole occupation, I worry and wonder what my relationship with intoxicants will be.

This is not idle chatter. I have had my experience with an overactive taste for tequila. During college, and for a short period afterwards, I disappeared into drink on a daily basis. However, at that time I had no direction in life. I was not yet a writer. I was completely alone and self-loathed. My relationship with the woman who later became my wife broke that cycle, but it wasn’t the last.

During my years of doing standup comedy I was always reliant on my liquid courage, beer being my drink of choice. Then I stopped doing comedy, so I stopped drinking beer. I’m such a creature of habit. I’ve always been better at avoiding temptation than resisting it. I’ve stopped drinking simply because I’m not going to places where beer is readily available, and was often free.

So we’ve established that I drink when I’m lonely or in bars. Such a cliché. Therefore all I have to do to not become a drunk is to stay out of bars and stick close to my wife. But what if? I’m a writer, my world revolves around what if. The fact is that I’m not really afraid of drinking. I’m afraid of loneliness, of which, drinking is a side-effect. The mere notion of having to deal with life without my wife terrifies me. I am such a coward.