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Pooja Bhatt attends Alcoholics Anonymous

I don’t know what it was that made me tag along to the 49′TH anniversary of the Alcoholics Anonymous one sultry Sunday morning this May… My father was pleasantly surprised and the organizers delighted to have an additional ‘Bhatt’ to grace the occasion…I apologized for crashing their party… they smiled delightedly and tried to coerce me into giving a speech… I clamed up… what would I say at an occasion as important as this? I was aware that I was certainly no expert and could not pretend to educate a room full of doctors, intellectuals and most importantly, alcoholics on the topic or hope to inspire them to continue to stay off the wagon…I scanned my memory bank for facts, terms, a smart quote perhaps… nothing came forth…when I feigned ignorance and tried to be let off the hook I was firmly led up to the dais and asked to speak from my heart.

‘Come on Pooja, you’ve experienced my alcoholism so vividly and closely, you have a living reference point. Share your experiences. That’s what people want’ urged my father… so I took a deep breath and reluctantly agreed to go on. Everyone has their own take on alcoholism…Some view it as a medical malady, some see it as a psychological problem, while others view it as a social dysfunction or a moral weakness…A question that came up often that day was ‘How do you know if someone is an alcoholic? How do you define them?’…. Where is the line drawn between drinking socially or casually, albeit heavily and being classified as an alcoholic? How much alcohol is ‘too much’ alcohol? And how often does one need to drink to be termed an alcoholic? Weekly? Daily? But then lots of people who call themselves alcoholics are not daily drinkers. Instead they indulge on weekends, on special occasions, once a month, once a year or at any given time… My father put it in perspective by simply saying, ‘if you are truly an alcoholic, you know it…. you might deny it to the whole world and especially to yourself… but deep down inside, you know it’….

I grew up in a home with a father who was an alcoholic and saw my parent’s marriage crumble on account of it… A decade and a half later, I watched mutely as alcohol claimed a dear friend…She was 40 and an alcoholic who was totally in denial…one brilliant, blue skied morning, she had a massive stroke…we watched her slip away a day later in a grim hospital room, helpless… dazed with grief…and what did we do that night to fight our confusion and pain? We got together and mourned her death by numbing ourselves with a ‘drink’…. It gets worse… A few years later, I even readily got into a relationship with an alcoholic…my father warned me that I was heading for disaster but I chose to ignore him… I was foolish enough to believe that I could ‘rescue’ my alcoholic boyfriend somehow… but maybe it was me that needed rescuing…a fact that became painfully clear when I found myself a victim of domestic, ‘alcohol induced’ violence which destroyed my faith in love and ensured that gory details of my messy personal life were emblazoned across every newspaper in the country… jolted back to reality , I swore of toxic relationships and the occasional glass of wine… but then with time and life, something marvelous happened, my scars healed and I met the man I eventually went on to marry…Life was ablaze…I was ‘happy’ again… and foolish enough to drop my guard and do something that was anything but marvelous, I started drinking socially again… I guess I must have been suicidal because it’s a known fact that children of alcoholics are FOUR times more susceptible to becoming alcoholics themselves… and there I was chugging away at the champagne every time there was cause to celebrate or bury my failures…. Why and how could I do that? Especially after experiencing the disastrous consequences alcohol has had in my family and my life ever since I was a little girl…It was time to do something about it… it was time to finally STOP…

A famous author once wrote that words are not simply “a darkness pulled out of us.” Rather, they are an attempt to ‘pull out’ the darkness, expose it to light, let it burn away the veil that keeps us from reconciling with our parents, our families, our inner ghosts and erasing the carefully buried pain… I did all of the above on the dais that Sunday morning … but most importantly, I did the most essential thing of all… I put my hand up and pledged to be ‘responsible’…. The first and only step that ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ implores you to take….

The audience, generous beyond belief, rose to their feet…I was overwhelmed to say the least…but through my tears shone a clarity and strength unlike ever before… it was a spiritual feeling… and I vowed to never have another sip of alcohol again…. And I won’t… Not to enhance a win, numb a failure, celebrate the birth of a friends child or even my own, to relax, forget, remember or the countless other excuses we use to justify having a drink…

And as I walked back to my seat, still slightly shaky with emotion, I felt healed…liberated…free…That morning was one of the most cathartic experiences of my life…Not because I was able to speak bluntly about my fathers alcoholism and the tragic circumstances we sometimes lived through on account of it… but because I finally garnered the strength to recognize my ‘own’ weakness and took the responsibility of ripping it from my being forever and flinging it into the distant, dark area of a now forgotten time… a time I will be ‘ responsible’ enough, to never revisit again…

by Pooja Bhat, in her own words (exclusive to RadioSargam.com)

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