Authors: Amy Liptrot
Most of Orkney is formed from Caithness flagstone, grey sedimentary rock, locally called slate, dating back to the Devonian period 400 million years ago. It breaks in flat segments good for dyke-building. Some areas – in Hoy and Eday – are Orkney sandstone, the red stone that built St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.
When sea levels stabilised after the last ice age, the islands of Orkney looked much as they do today but lacked detail. Over thousands of years, the sea has sculpted the coastline. On the more sheltered shorelines there is a gentle landscape but the exposed
westerly coasts take the full force of waves that have travelled across the Atlantic, creating sea stacks and towering cliffs such as those at St John’s Head on Hoy, standing straight up 365 metres above the sea.
This pattern is shown in miniature on Papay, with slanted rock formations and severe geos on the Atlantic side (like those on the west-facing Outrun) and gentler bays on the east. It alarms me to realise that each of the islands is getting gradually smaller, eaten away by the sea.
On geological maps of Orkney, a division runs through Papay, through the area of Rose Cottage, splitting the North Hill, and during my time on the island I search for the fault line although I am not sure what it will look like.
I am questioning why I became an alcoholic. Perhaps I was born that way, physically. In AA meetings I’d heard people repeat the theory that alcoholics’ bodies process alcohol unusually, that we have a build-up or overproduction of acetone, which the body uses to break down alcohol: we are allergic to the thing we crave. It’s an appealingly easy explanation, no longer used by most medical professionals.
Alternatively, although as far as I know there have been no other alcoholics in my family, I could have a genetic tendency. I could blame mental illness: I’ve read that all types of anxiety disorder are more common in children of manic depressives. Or it could be something that happened. Adverse childhood
experiences are linked to an increased risk of addiction. I could blame distressing experiences – my parents’ divorce or adolescent heartbreaks. But I was irritated when pressed by counsellors to look to my childhood. Despite growing up with manic depression, I was always loved, I wasn’t abused and didn’t feel traumatised. I thought this was too easy – absolving myself of responsibility, putting blame on my parents, who did their best. I generally thought it was simply a habit that had got out of control: over years of systematic drinking I had worn my brakes down, like the action of waves on rock, so much that they could never be repaired.
I take a walk on the hill on a day when a south-east wind is whipping energetic waves around Fowl Craig. I sit to watch the sea and think about Dad. I’ve been finding him difficult lately. Although he’s not seen a shrink in fifteen years or taken medication in ten, he’s been slightly agitated, erratic and excitable in recent weeks, behaving in the way that makes people who’ve known him for a long time fear he’s heading for a manic episode.
When I was a teenager, shortly before the last time he was sectioned, Dad gave me a blank cheque to go into town to buy something – a cordless phone, I think – which was fun but undercut with worry because I knew by then that reckless spending was a symptom of mania. There is a thin line between being impulsive and being dangerous. Grandiose thoughts and irresponsibility with money are exciting until they aren’t.
Now, he’s discovered Facebook, a great thing for isolated farmers but some of the stuff he posts – flirting with women, provocative statements to usually shy Orcadian farmers – embarrasses me. He’s frustrated when other people don’t comment or laugh. The Royal College of Physicians describes the beginning stage of mania as ‘an extreme sense of well-being, optimism and energy’ characterised by ‘grandiose thoughts and behaviour’ and a tendency to be ‘irritated with other people who don’t share optimistic outlook’. In this buoyant, gregarious state he finds other people uptight.
However, I am sympathetic. As a wave breaks, sending clumps of foam jolting in my direction, it strikes me that I know how he feels
because I used to feel like that when I was drinking
. Symptoms of mania are similar to drunkenness: feeling high and optimistic, racing thoughts, impaired judgement and impulsiveness, acting recklessly. At the beginning it can be fun – making communications and plans, being confident and saying cheeky things that get a reaction. I would be the person pulling the unwilling onto the dance-floor, arguing with a bouncer to let me into a club, telling my boyfriend that I’d not done anything wrong, I was just trying to have fun, push the boundaries, really live.
Something occurs to me that I’ve never thought of before: perhaps my drinking was in part an attempt to attain the manic states I’d experienced through my father. It seems so simple and, unlike many other explanations I’d been offered for my drinking, makes sense. The idea that I’m not mentally ill but was pursuing my own mania fits what I was searching for with alcohol and how I tried to make myself feel. In a way, my drunkenness was
an attempt to emulate and even impress, although I didn’t succeed, my dad: I was wild and free and alive.
In drinking I’d chase a vision for how people could relate more openly, wanting to reach the edges and taste extremes. But I wilfully ignored complaints and problems. For other people, the sober and the sane, this behaviour is annoying. They feel uncomfortable around you and unsure how you’re going to act. You can’t be dancing all the time.
Each binge-drinking session is a manic-depressive cycle in miniature. The excitement and elation tip over into uncontrollable dangerous behaviour. The next day’s hangover is the inevitable depressive period that follows. Coming back some time later, you survey the damage and eroded relationships and make apologies and promises to control it better next time, lost in self-pity and self-obsession.
I stand up, alert, from my stone seat: I’ve made a breakthrough – stirred by the energy of the sea and the wind – in understanding my own behaviour. I didn’t find it in a therapist’s office, or by conscientiously working through the programme, or talking to Dee, but outdoors, watching the waves. I’ve been reading about fluid dynamics and the mathematical criteria for a wave breaking, when the wave height is more than one-seventh of the wavelength. There are different types of breaking waves – spilling, plunging, collapsing, surging – but although they collapse in different manners, there is only so much height any wave can sustain before it comes crashing down.
* * *
I should have known my drinking was doomed when I began to experience ‘freezes’ or mini seizures, coming earlier and earlier into a binge session.
It began with a tension in the wrists, a warning. Then my elbows would freeze and I lifted my drink with stiff arms, like a robot. No matter how I felt, I
had
to lift my drink. I stubbed my cigarette with difficulty. Then I couldn’t talk or swallow and was drooling. I had to bounce on my tiptoes and literally bash my body against a wall to smash the tension away, or I’d be stuck in a hunched shape, falling off my chair onto the carpet in the same seated stance. I tried to drag myself onto the sofa. This again. And I knew with certainty that I was trapped, bound irresistibly to the substance that hurt me and the shameful routine of drinking alone.
The freezes also happened when I was out among people, and I would pull my body stiff-legged to the bathroom where I locked the door with a clenched fist and bounced until I was loose enough to rejoin the party, as if freezing and drooling but continuing to drink were normal. I knew it was a warning but for a long time my only aim was to make it go away so I could make it happen again.
Since then, I have read about alcoholic neuropathy – nerve damage caused by alcohol and vitamin deficiency – but at the time, although I kept on drinking, I knew that drinking was beginning to damage my brain. The American writer David Foster Wallace, an addict, described the irony of substance addiction: that it ‘suggests itself as solution to its own problem’. Willingly inducing these seizures was insane but I felt trapped.
* * *
On the hill, I found something that I thought could be the fault line, a faint rocky ridge – but in many ways it doesn’t matter what the cause was or where the fault line started. What matters is that I recognise the problem, which AA neatly summarises in Step One’s description of powerlessness and unmanageability. Then I need to be willing (Steps Two and Three) to deal with the symptoms and move into living a sober life (Steps Four to Twelve). Elimination of my drinking was just a beginning – it tackled the physical side – made sure I avoided the craving that began once I started drinking. My body detoxified and recovered a long time ago now but the emotional side – the obsession – is still there.
Step Two says we ‘came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity’. Dee asks me, before our next session, to consider if I believe that there is a power greater than myself.
Reluctantly, I think about the forces that I have experienced living on the islands: the wind and the sea. I think of erosion and corrosion. The power of corrosion is a huge problem in Orkney, and on tiny Papay even more so, due to the sea salt, which blows across the island and can be scraped from windows after storms. Anything metal, such as cars and bikes, will quickly rust.
I think of the power of animal instinct, guiding the corncrakes to Africa and me to my lover’s house, dead drunk, late at night. I think about entropy, the concept behind the inevitable decline from order to disorder. On the beach I find fragments of glass-ware, an ashtray perhaps, that have been in the sea so long they’ve become half pebble.
Despite my discomfort that the question might push me into the dubious areas of spirituality that I find hard to grasp, I decide that I can accept the existence of some ‘powers greater than myself’ – not God, just the things I’ve always known, the forces I’ve grown up with, strong enough to smash up ships and carve islands.
The 12 Step Programme says that, in order to recover, alcoholics have to change and we need to have what some call a ‘spiritual experience’ and what is also described as ‘huge emotional displacements and rearrangements’. I think of the way the sea can change the land. These shifts – movements of sand and rock – are usually gradual but sometimes sudden and monumental. The morning after easterly gales and high tides, there is a step down to the beach that had not been there before. The sea has taken away tonnes of sand overnight. It may be washed up on another part of the shoreline or taken out to the ocean bed, forming new layers of rock that, when Papay is long gone, may become new islands.
After centuries of gradual erosion, one day, geologically in the very near future, the Stack o’ Roo will fall into the sea, felled by the same processes that shaped it. But as erosion proceeds, new sea arches will be carved from the cliffs, which in turn become stacks, which are eventually undermined. The island is always getting smaller, the cliff being carved ever more intricately. Life is getting sadder but more interesting – all the injuries and hurts, like scars in the coastline, continually worn away.
* * *
On my winter walks in the mornings, and during nights in the cottage trembling in the weather, old ideas about who I am, how I got like this and where I need to be are shifting. Personalities are formed by persistent, repeated actions, by learned patterns of behaviour and subtle approvals. Parents unconsciously influence their children to be some version of themselves.
I’m thinking longer term, in geological time, doing just what I can each day and not putting it off because it won’t be brilliant. I’m not going for quick excitement or instant gratification but thinking about other people’s feelings and the consequences.
One shift that I allow myself is to admit that I do miss the brief hours of intoxication and that it is a shame I can’t toast someone’s special occasion with champagne, share a bottle of wine with a man or enjoy a cold pint after work. I’m allowed to feel loss. But these losses are very small compared to the ability to keep a job or a relationship or some kind of sustainable stable state of mind. In any case, I have learned to model the process forward to what would happen if I did drink: chaos followed by depression.
Drinking alcoholically is an incomplete remedy, a repeated mistake, a journey that never reaches its destination. Whatever ease or high it did promise I could no longer reach: it ran away from me, always just over the horizon, like Hether Blether. It was never enough, until I couldn’t take it any more.
I hear that Europe and America are gradually getting further apart, as lava bubbles up into the gap between the tectonic plates in Iceland. I see geology not just on a large but on a small scale in how sand grades itself. Different beaches in Orkney have
different-sized pebbles; some areas are formed of whole shells, some broken fragments, others just tiny grains of sand. There’s a cove at the north-east of the island where the sand is mostly made up of iron from a shipwreck. I find fossils of raindrops from two billion years ago, souvenirs from a time when the sun was further away from the earth.
In grandiose moments, high on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology. My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night. A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates. When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart. Lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there’s an earthquake. The islands’ headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers. My lovers are tectonic plates and stone cathedrals.
23
TRIDUANA
I DON’T GO TO THE SOUTH
of the island often – without a car in the winter, getting to the shop is usually far enough – but today I visit the Loch of Tredwell for the first time. I leave my bike when the going gets too boggy and proceed on foot through the tufty ‘links’, the sandy land that connects the sea, the bay and the loch. This is a different habitat again from the exposed heath of the North Hill – marshy, with semi-submerged gates and fence posts, a watery half-land.